Donkblog : Windows Live Writer

Broken theme in Windows Live Writer? You can fix it!

Brandon Turner — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 02:03:36 GMT

One of the nice things about Windows Live Writer is that lets you edit your blog in the same style your readers will actually see. However, often times, Windows Live Writer cannot detect a blog theme or it incorrectly detects a user’s theme. These problems can make users angry, and rightfully so.

If you have fallen victim to this problem, I have good news for you!

I have created a tiny application to help you create a theme file for Writer.

Download the Windows Live Writer Theme Fixer

Step 1: Open the ThemeFixer.exe and select the blog you want to fix in the top left corner.

Step 2: Navigate to a single blog post on your blog by clicking a link or entering a URL in the textbox and clicking ‘navigate’.

Step 3: Click ‘pick title’ and hover your mouse over the title of your blog post. When you see the element selected, click on it.

Step 4: Click ‘pick body’ and hover over the body of your post, make sure all of your post is highlighted. Your post title might also be in the selected range, that is fine.

Step 5: Click ‘save’ button and wait while it downloads all the html and images for your template.

If you still have problems after using this application, you can click the ‘Open template folder’ button where you can edit the HTML file yourself.

Windows Live Writer Tip #11 – Insert Image from Web on Windows 7

Brandon Turner — Wed, 20 May 2009 20:14:22 GMT

During the very late stages of development for the last version of Windows Live Writer we found a bug on our 'Insert from Web Image' dialog. Specifically there was a bug that prevented users from inserting images that that were part of libraries. This forced us to make the decision to go back to the standard OpenFileDialog instead of using the hacked up open file dialog we with the tabs which was in all the previous versions of Windows Live Writer.

This of course resulted in no more user interface to allow people to insert images that are already on the internet somewhere. At the time, Joe Cheng and I rationalized that this was fine, we thought that very few people knew where this dialog was anyways, and the power users that did know where it was could use the HTML source view to add in the image tag. This turned out not to be true at all! Shortly after we released Windows Live Writer 2009 we started seeing blogs, tweets, and forum posts asking where the tab on the open dialog had gone for insert an image from the web.

Well, I am here today to tell you there is a simple solution to your problem which should ease the pain until we are able to add the dialog back.

Simply copy the image from any browser:

Then paste it directly into the editor, Windows Live Writer will automatically convert it to the correct HTML for you, as seen below:

Windows Live Clubhouse Tags: Writer, how-to, clubhouse

Windows Live Writer Tips #10 – Keyboard Shortcuts

Brandon Turner — Wed, 20 May 2009 19:53:45 GMT

Sometimes, you can be just in the groove when typing your blog entry, and the last thing you want to do is disrupt your flow by having to use your mouse to do something. Fortunately, Writer has a lot of keyboard shortcuts that make this really easy to avoid. Below is a list of some of the main keyboard shortcuts (I’m omitting formatting shortcuts like CTRL+B for turning on bold text, etc).

Views

Edit window	F11
Preview window	F12
Source window	Shift+F11
Toggle theme usage	CTRL+F11

Editing

Paste Special	CTRL+Shift+V
Insert Hyperlink	CTRL+K
Insert Picture	CTRL+L
New Page	CTRL+G
Hide/Display Post Properties	F2
Redo an Undo	CTRL+Y

Miscellaneous

Publish Post	CTRL+Shift+P
Edit/Set Categories	CTRL+Shift+C

Tip by Scott Lovegrove.

Windows Live Clubhouse Tags: Writer, how-to, clubhouse

Windows Live Writer Tip #9 – Quickly Inserting Videos

Brandon Turner — Tue, 05 May 2009 01:25:54 GMT

So you’ve found a great video on YouTube (or SoapBox) and you want to share that video with your readers. We all know about the option that’s there in Live Writer under the insert section on the right hand side, which will give you the familiar screen:

You take your YouTube link, paste it in there and see your preview and then insert it into your blog. Well, there’s actually a quicker way of doing this. Much quicker. You have your YouTube link, so just go ahead and paste it straight into the Live Writer editor. This will automatically embed the video into your blog.

Don’t have the actual YouTube link, but have the embed code? Not a problem, same principle applies, just paste it into the editor.

Tip by Scott Lovegrove.

Windows Live Clubhouse Tags: Writer, how-to, clubhouse

Windows Live Writer Tips #8 – Add Features to Live Writer Using Plug-ins

Brandon Turner — Fri, 01 May 2009 20:26:56 GMT

Like a lot of programs, there are always some things that Live Writer doesn’t do that you’d like it to do. However, Live Writer has it’s own way of allowing other developers to create those missing features and bits of functionality, and create plug-ins that you can install and then use from within Live Writer.

To browse some of the plug-ins that are available, click on on the bottom right of the Live Writer window, this will take you to http://gallery.live.com/default.aspx?pl=8:

From here there are a plethora of plug-ins you can download that will really enhance your Live Writer experience.

To find the most popular Windows Live Writer plugins go to: http://gallery.live.com/results.aspx?bt=9&pl=8&st=5

Tip by Scott Lovegrove.

Windows Live Clubhouse Tags: writer, clubhouse, how-to

Windows Live Writer Tips #7 – Blog This

Brandon Turner — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 03:09:45 GMT

Sometimes you can be on a webpage and think, this is great, I’d like to blog about this. Well, if you’re using Internet Explorer then when Windows Live Writer is installed, a new button appears on the toolbar . Clicking this button will load up Live Writer, with some details already populated, including the post title and a link back to the page you were on. Or if there’s a particular part of the webpage you wanted to blog about, you can highlight that part and then press Blog This and your post in Writer will have that section quoted all ready for you to do your own additions to the post.

Now this feature isn’t just limited to Internet Explorer users. There is a FireFox extension that does the same thing, which can be got from the Windows Live Gallery. This has the same feature set as the Internet Explorer one.

Bonus Tip

You can customize how the Blog This feature works in Writer. Go to Tools | Options | Blog This

In the examples above (clicking Blog This alone, or highlighting a part of the webpage first), then the settings you would want to change for that are Link and HTML respectively. If we take the HTML one as an example, you can see how you change the behavior:

Tip by Scott Lovegrove.

Windows Live Clubhouse Tags: clubhouse, writer, how-to

Windows Live Writer Tip #6 – Inserting Quotes

Brandon Turner — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 01:16:29 GMT

Today starts a mini series within the Windows Live Writer Tip series where the tips are written by Scott Lovegrove. Scott is a Windows Live MVP as well as the creator of many plugins you can find on his blog.

As a blogger, you will sometimes find yourself wanting to quote someone, whether another blogger, or from another website. There are two very simple ways of doing this.

Type (or paste) your quote into your blog entry and press the block quote button
Type (or paste) your quote into your blog entry and press the TAB key on your keyboard. To undo a quote, press Shift+TAB. Using this method means you don’t even need to break your stride as you’re writing your blog post.

Windows Live Clubhouse Tags: clubhouse, how-to, writer

Windows Live Writer Tip #4 – © and ® Characters

Brandon Turner — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:08:23 GMT

From inside of Windows Live Writer you can easily add a copyright or registered symbol using typographic replacement.

To insert a © type a (c) ~~and then press space~~.

To insert a ® type a (r) ~~and then press space~~.

If you actually want to type those exact characters you can hit backspace after it does the replacement and it will convert it back to parenthesis version.

This feature doesn't include the trademarked symbol unfortunately.

Update: You do not need to press space. Thank you vasudev

Why doesn’t Windows Live Writer have ‘find and replace’?

Brandon Turner — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 00:22:09 GMT

One of the most requested features of Windows Live Writer is ‘find and replace’. This is the ability to quickly change one string to another string in a document. Its found in the most complex programs like Visual Studio and Microsoft Word as well as the most simple programs like Notepad(as seen below).

So why doesn't a fully functional blog editing client like Windows Live Writer have this feature?

Its all about trade offs. Every feature takes a certain amount of time create and test before it can be included into a product. And in the case of Windows Live Writer, which uses Internet Explorer to create the WYSIWYG editor, there was already a free way to get find by itself. Internet Explorer provides find functionality to applications that host mshtml through IDM_FIND. So the decision came down to whether or not the team should replace the find functionality IE gives for free with our own version that does find and replace. I wasn’t on the Windows Live Writer team when this decision came up, as I’m sure it was many moons ago, so I can’t speak about any details of that conversation. However, I can tell you, that through Twitter, blog posts, and our forums we have heard a lot of customers tell us that we made the wrong decision; enough that we are going to revisit the decision for our future releases.

Thank you to everyone that gave their feedback on this issue and others! It is greatly appreciated and gives us a greater idea of our users' needs.

Windows Live Writer Tip #2 – Force Category Refresh

Brandon Turner — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 05:14:09 GMT

It is possible the categories on your blog can get out of sync with your blog. This will most likely happen if you use a different blogging client then Windows Live Writer, WLW on a different computer, or post through the admin control panel. In these cases, WLW might not pick up the new categories. You can force it to sync the categories by clicking the ‘refresh’ button, in the category control. It is the button with the two arrows.

Courier New hates me! - Font 'Courier New' does not support style 'Regular'

Brandon Turner — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:44:55 GMT

In the past month there have been 3 reports from users that Windows Live Writer will not start up. After looking in the Windows Live Writer log file, the following exception was seen:

An unexpected error has occurred within the application.
System.ArgumentException: Font 'Courier New' does not support style 'Regular'.
   at System.Drawing.Font.CreateNativeFont()
   at System.Drawing.Font.Initialize(...)
   at System.Drawing.Font.Initialize(...)
   at System.Drawing.Font..ctor(...)

These reports have come on both Windows Vista and Windows 7. Even after checking that the Courier New font file was still there, still signed by Microsoft, and the file size was the same as another computer… there was something wrong with the font. Even double clicking it produced a window which shows the font correctly:

Replacing the font files from another computer has fixed the problem all 3 times. Simply copy the C:\Windows\Fonts\cour.ttf from another computer to the broken machine.

Email me at bturner [at] microsoft [dot] com if you are still having problems even after replacing the file.

Only Microsoft can make something so simple this complex.

Brandon Turner — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 19:00:48 GMT

By the end of reading this post you will either think:

Wow, Microsoft really wants a great experience for their users.

Wow, Microsoft just can’t make anything as simple as it really is.

I really hope that you think the former, but it appears that some people already think the later, especially when it fails them.

As you might have guessed from the link, the exact feature I am talking about is ‘Insert Video’ from Windows Live Writer. From first glance, this should be one of the most straight forward features for a blogging client. You simply need to insert an embed into the blog post, and publish to the blogging service. However, Windows Live Writer has to bend to the will of three different set of constraints.

The 3 areas of the most influence are:

The content needs to appear in the WYSIWYG editor correctly, and needs to be editable as all other content. This means it need to be selectable and have a sidebar, delete-able, drag-able, and resizable.
Different blog services strip certain elements from the blog post body when they come in through XML-RPC. This often boils down to services removing embeds and/or JavaScript.
Different video services have unique problems, which we will go into more later.

Long Upload/Processing Times

Most blog posts are written in less then 15 minutes. Though with both Soapbox and Youtube, the amount of time it takes to upload a video and for a service to process it is much longer. Youtube in it’s public documentation says that a video might take a long long time to process, and in some cases might be as little as an hour. That just doesn’t fit in a blogger's current workflow. While a video is being uploaded to a video service, you cannot close the window. WLW will let you close the application once it has moved into the processing phase (after upload), but it won’t let you publish the blog post. This means that you can write a blog post, embed a video from your hard drive and be all ready to publish, but you can’t, because the video service isn't ready for you to embed the video. A new time constraint has just been placed on the user, even worse, the user might not understand this constraint and place the blame on WLW.

Not All Videos Are Embeddable

Not all videos can be inserted through WLW with the Insert Video feature. There are two reasons that a video can’t be inserted.

First, sometimes URLs do not contain the video ID that would be needed to generate an embed code. This will be discussed later in the post.

The second reason WLW can’t insert the video is because the video is protected against embedding. Soapbox and Yahoo! both have videos covered by copyright which don’t let the user embed them in their personal sites. So when a user pastes the video URL into WLW, they don’t get converted into embed.

Adaptive HTML

Some blog services let all video services through, while others don’t. This means WLW has to make a judgment call about how it will present the video. WLW will pick one of three different routes for each blog post with a video.

If a blog service is very conservative about what they let through, WLW will try to take a snapshot of the video player and embed it as an image that is linked to the video on the video service.
If the blog service lets JavaScript through, but no objects/embeds, then WLW will put a placeholder for the video using the above technique and try to replace the placeholder with the actual embed using JavaScript’s onLoad event.
And finally, if the service lets the embed through it will just drop in the video’s actual embed, which is what the user probably wants.

Even with this set of rules, there are some exceptions still. For example Wordpress.com has a way to add Youtube video to the post using a microformat instead of the embed for secuirty reason. Keeping up with all these rules is quite a task which is a burden on blogging clients.

All these restrictions make it hard for WLW to give the user a truly WYSIWYG view, depending on the service you are pointing at, what comes out might be different on different bog services even though it is the same post within WLW.

Snapshot

As mentioned above, sometimes WLW will try to replace your video with a snapshot of the video. This sounds great, but it turns out that it is harder then it seems. Taking a snapshot involves WLW embedding the video into a simple html document, and then opening it in a browser in the background. When it thinks the video has finished loading it turns the webpage in the browser into an image and snips out the video player from the snapshot. Sounds simple right? Turns out, predicting when a video is loaded is a difficult task. We implemented rules to try and decided if the video was done loading by comparing pixels of the snapshot repeatedly to see if they changed, or looking for at a certain region to see if it is a color we know might be the background color(for example, the older Youtube player was always gray).

So what kind of problems do you run into with this? Video services change their players. When Youtube changed their player to have a black background, that triggered a lot of false positives, and people ended up with snapshots of a loading player on their blog; this is what happened to Paul in the link I had above.

Cannot Convert URL to Embed

One of the features of Writer is that if you paste in a URL to a video then we convert it to the embed code for the video. This is easy to do for services like Youtube where the video ID is in the URL, simply parse out the video id and drop it into the the embed code. We support about 15 video services. As it turns out, with pretty URLs, a lot of services have a URL like the following:

www.example.com/Title-Of-Video

There is no way to turn the URL into an embed code because the the URL doesn't have the ID in it. This left ~4 services in the dark for this feature. If they just would have done something like:

www.example.com/452345/Title-Of-Video

We would be able to convert the URL to an embed for our users. Its unfortunate not everyone does this.

Embeds in the Editor

Embed/object codes in the WYSIWYG editor are troublesome. If you just insert these into your post in their raw format they aren’t very user friendly. Since the editor itself acts like a browser, clicking the video will usually start to play the video, and there is no way to delete it from your post without switching to source view. This is the reason that WLW originally swaps the video out for a snapshot of the video while in the editor. This lets the user resize, align, and caption the video straight from the editor. But this isn’t how it will be shown the user’s blog in the event we publish the embed code; and if the snapshotting failed the user will see a broken video while editing with no idea what will happen when they publish.

Embed Code Reformat

WLW has to have a standard format embed for each video service. When a URL or embed code comes in, we must convert it to the smart content, as mentioned above (in Cannot Convert URL to Embed). We need to know where to replace the width and height in the embed code when the user resizes the video. Unfortunately this means any customization of an embed code will be lost when we reformat it. For example, if there is a param that lets the user customize the background color of the player; it will be lost when we generate the embed code. Hopefully in the future we can identify regular expressions to just change the embed code instead of replacing the whole thing to leave the user’s customizations in tact.

So What Did We Do About All This?

In the newest release of WLW we tried to address a few of these problems. WLW can’t fix all the problems, it has no control over the blog or video services. But, we took the following steps to improve the experience:

Videos inside the editor are all now in their true embed. We add an additional parameter to them so mshtml handles them a bit better then normal embed/object codes inside the WYSIWYG editor. Then we surround them with our own div that has special properties using CSS selectors so the user can resize, select, and drag the objects.
Snapshots are now read directly from the WYSIWYG editor so that it is true WYSIWYG. This brought us away from background browser snapshotting and what I liked to called snapshot hell.

I hope everyone is enjoying Windows Live Wave 3 Betas!

Zemanta – Well That's a Fun Little Tool

Brandon Turner — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:15:16 GMT

Image via Wikipedia

Zemanta recently released a new plugin for Windows Live Writer. It opens it own sidebar and finds relevant media for your post based on the text you have entered so far. Zemanta really seems to be trying to please their customers which is great to see in any company. It should fit into any bloggers work flow because they have a Windows Live Writer, Firefox, and Internet Explorer plugin.

They still aren’t there yet with perfectly relevant images. I couldn't even find an image of the Zemanta Windows Live Writer plugin. :(

Plain text just doesn’t cut it sometimes – Windows Live Writer

Brandon Turner — Thu, 22 May 2008 18:14:33 GMT

In the past month I have seen a few blogs discuss that Windows Live Writer sends credentials to the blog service via plain text across HTTP. This is most certainly true, but it doesn't need to be!

WLW uses RSD to find the endpoints for atom/metaweblog when it detects the configuration for your blog.

For example if Scoble(sorry I had to pick on someone) wanted to setup WLW for his blog:
http://scobleizer.com/

WLW would first download the homepage and look for a link with a type of "application+rsd/xml", and then follow that link. In Scoble's case it would point to:
http://scobleizer.com/xmlrpc.php?rsd

Once WLW examines the RSD file to find out where it should send it API calls it finds out that it should send them to:
http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php

Now as you can see this is a HTTP url and not a HTTPS url. This means when WLW makes a metaweblog call it will send it via HTTP and pass his username and password as plain text. If you want to fix this you need to make sure you have HTTPS setup for your blog and need to change your RSD file to point to a HTTPS address.

The real outrage here isn't that WLW uses HTTP for its API calls. The real outrage is that most blogging services allow HTTP access to the login page and their RSD documents point to HTTP urls.

For more information about this problem you might want to read what Chris Blankenship say about this.

Donkblog : Windows Live Writer

Broken theme in Windows Live Writer? You can fix it!

If you have fallen victim to this problem, I have good news for you!

Windows Live Writer Tip #11 – Insert Image from Web on Windows 7

Windows Live Writer Tips #10 – Keyboard Shortcuts

Windows Live Writer Tip #9 – Quickly Inserting Videos

Windows Live Writer Tips #8 – Add Features to Live Writer Using Plug-ins

Windows Live Writer Tips #7 – Blog This

Windows Live Writer Tip #6 – Inserting Quotes

Windows Live Writer Tip #4 – © and ® Characters

Update: You do not need to press space. Thank you vasudev

Why doesn’t Windows Live Writer have ‘find and replace’?

Windows Live Writer Tip #2 – Force Category Refresh

Courier New hates me! - Font 'Courier New' does not support style 'Regular'

Only Microsoft can make something so simple this complex.

Long Upload/Processing Times

Not All Videos Are Embeddable

Adaptive HTML

Snapshot

Cannot Convert URL to Embed

Embeds in the Editor

Embed Code Reformat

So What Did We Do About All This?

Zemanta – Well That's a Fun Little Tool

Related articles by Zemanta

They still aren’t there yet with perfectly relevant images. I couldn't even find an image of the Zemanta Windows Live Writer plugin. :(

Plain text just doesn’t cut it sometimes – Windows Live Writer