A Blogger Beta Live Writer Issue Workaround

Those guys at the Live Writer team really rock!. After posting a thank you last night for their kind comment here, I got another blog comment to tell me about a work around for the problem. The workaround was first posted to http://jtbworld.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-live-writer and is nearly correct but with a bit of common sense works fine! At least most of the time.

The base problem appears to be in the registry keys used by WLW is not correctly set to point to the new blogger beta. The posted workaround asks you to edit a registry key and change two references from www.blogger.com to beta.blogger.com. The key you are asked to navigate to is shown in the workaround post as HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Windows Live Writer\Weblogs\2e27accf-425c-4996-9c2d-a075aad9307a. The last part of this key is a GUID, which would appear to be unique for each blog. I have two blogger beta blogs located under the keys HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Windows Live Writer\Weblogs\0eacb7a7-5f1f-46e1-b434-95075a39fb30 and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Windows Live Writer\Weblogs\d11d04f4-ccb5-425c-98c7-272687d024d0.

The instructions should show the key(s) to edit as HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Windows Live Writer\Weblogs\[BLOG_ID] (where BLOG_ID is a GUID), as noted in the above post's comments! The remaining instructions work to the extent that they allow me to post to my blogs. After some testing, this post is written by WLW and if you can read it, has been posted properly.

There are two small issues with this workaround. First it does not fully resolve the issue with the web log update. If you click "View/Update Weblog Style...", WLW creates a temporary post in your blog and updates the style in WLW. This works, except that the temporary post is not deleted (although you can delete it manually).

Secondly, I am occasionally getting an exception error when trying to post. Here's the exception stack I just got when I tried to post this:

System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.GetResponse()
at
WindowsLive.Writer.BlogClient.Clients.XmlRestRequestHelper.GetXmlResponse(HttpWebRequest request)
at WindowsLive.Writer.BlogClient.Clients.XmlRestRequestHelper.Send(String method, String uri, HttpRequestFilter filter, String contentType, XmlDocument doc)
at WindowsLive.Writer.BlogClient.Clients.AtomClient.EditPost(String blogId, BlogPost post, Boolean publish)
at WindowsLive.Writer.BlogClient.Blog.EditPost(BlogPost post, Boolean publish)
at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.UpdateWeblogAsyncOperation.DoWork()
at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.AsyncOperation.InternalStart()
at System.Runtime.Remoting.Messaging.StackBuilderSink._PrivateProcessMessage(IntPtr md, Object[] args, Object server, Int32 methodPtr, Boolean fExecuteInContext, Object[]& outArgs)

So I'm back to posting with WLW again and all is mostly well. Thanks to Joe Cheng and the team for the work around even if it's not fully working.

I love this product - and the team sure are proactive. Like I said yesterday, the folks running the MCT web sites could take a lesson here!

Technorati tags: Windows Live Writer, Blogger Beta