GTD Wannabe

Getting Windows Live Writer to Work with Blogger Beta

Hello all. You may have noticed a couple of test posts. Good news – I’m not able to get Windows Live Writer to work properly with the new Blogger Beta. Yay. Why, you may ask? Well, for one thing, I like the feel of WLW, better than the web form approach of Blogger. And, I can get WLW to save drafts, say every few minutes, so I don’t completely lose a post, like I’ve done in the past. And best of all, I now have it hooked into my Geocities account, so I can upload images directly :)

Windows Live Writer Update

According to the Windows Live Spaces blog post, the new build (145) of WLW supposedly works with Blogger Beta right out of the box. Unfortunately, I had no joy. Even when trying to log in with my new Blogger Beta login (i.e., my gtdwannabe gmail address), I couldn’t get it to connect. So, I did some searching. Here’s what I found.

Beating WLW into Submission

The Whateverblog has a post called Blogger Beta workaround, which is actually deprecated now. According to even that author, the problem is fixed. But, since my problem wasn’t fixed, I tried out his solution, and it still works. His instructions are pretty good; basically, you have to remember that the URLs should be http://beta.blogger.com… and make sure to use your blog ID. I had no trouble using his instructions and setting up a new weblog account in WLW.

Here are a couple of screenshots, showing how my dialog windows looked while setting up my blog:

Conclusion

So now, I can draft my posts (or some of them, that use images), in WLW, and be able to have them automatically saved to my hard drive, as well as upload images too. It’s all very nice. The only fly in the ointment that I notice is that the style shown in WLW is not exactly the style on my blog (e.g., font shape, size, etc.). But really, that is a minor inconvenience.