Windows Live Writer–making blogging easy

A friend of mine just relocated to Costa Rica and is starting a blog using WordPress. I use WordPress for this blog and a co-worker told me about Windows Live Writer. You can download the application here. I dreaded using any pictures or videos in my blog due to having to upload them individually through my WordPress admin interface and then insert them into my blog post. Windows Live Writer allows you to insert the pictures within your blog post and uploads them to your blog seamlessly.

Live writer can interface with many of the popular blogging applications such as WordPress and Blogger. I use WordPress so I will select that option.

All you need to know to configure the publishing settings is your blog URL address and your admin username/password combination.

Once you have entered your login credentials for you blog, you are ready to click next to continue the initial configuration. Since Live Writer could not automatically detect my settings, I needed to update the <blogname> portion of the URL to reflect my blog name. This is a newly created blog that is not publicly accessible which was the cause of this additional step.

I choose not to download the blog theme. That is a personal choice. If you want the theme downloaded, click Yes on this dialog box.

Since I am writing this post while configuring my new blog settings, I deselected Switch to this blog now and Finished the configuration.

You are now ready to start blogging. All posts are created within Windows Live Writer application and then either Published or draft published using the menu. Pictures can be pasted directly into the editor and the publish process takes care of uploading and linking when the post is published.

You can also set categories, tags, or a post date within the ribbon that are added to your post when it is published. If you write multiple blog post in a given day, you may not want all to go “Live” at the same time, so you can set the post date which will publish the blog on that date.

I hope you find this post helpful since Windows Live Writer is the best thing to come around for publishing blog posts – at least in my humble opinion.

Terri is a Microsoft MVP (ASP .NET/IIS), an MCSA: Windows Server 2012, and a Support Specialist at OrcsWeb, a hosted server company providing managed hosting solutions