Saturday, August 30, 2008

Live Writer “Blog This” add-on still not working in FireFox v3 – but there is a solution!

Some time ago, I blogged about the neat “blog this” addition to FireFox not working in FireFox 3. You can see information from Microsoft about this add-on here. Well, it’s a couple of months later, and the add-on still seems to not be working. The add-on installs fine, but when you look at the add-ons dialog (tools/add-ons), it states this add-on is not compatible with FireFox 3.0.1 in my case).

Looking at the reviews on the MS Live Writer web site, I’m not the only person with difficulties using this add-on (although you will have to select ‘all reviews to see the ones critical of this not working with FireFox 3). Please MS – fix this???

Having said that, there is a work around is supposed to enable the add-on.

  1. Download the Blog This installer from the MS site.
  2. Close FireFox 3.
  3. Run the Blog This installer.
  4. Without starting FireFox, open the following file in Notepad: C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Live\Writer\BlogThis\Mozilla Firefox\install.rdf
  5. Change <em:maxVersion>3.0</em:maxVersion> to <em:maxVersion>3.0+</em:maxVersion>.
  6. Start Firefox.
  7. If you still don’t see the new icon, click on View>Toolbars>Customize. from the "Customize Toolbars window, drag Blog-This icon out to to the menu bar in FireFox. Hey Presto.

Note that in step 4, the location is in the X86 branch since my workstation is a tricked-out Windows Server 2008 X64 and I’m running the Life Writer Technical Preview. You may need to look in different folders for install.rdf if you are running on a different platform. Sadly this work around is broken too and does not work on either my x86 or x64 boxes.

Please MS – fix this!!!

[later]
Some good news - there’s another 3rd party add-on, Live WriterFox that DOES work and I’ve installed it on all my systems. Get it from
here.

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