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.

Technorati Tags: live writer,Microsoft,FireFox 3

Code Formatter for Windows Live Writer

As noted in a blog post yesterday, I’ve setup a PowerShell script blog. Sadly, the code formatting I was doing manually stunk and was hard to do anyway! So off to Google to discover Steve Dunns - Code Formatter for Windows Live Writer.

This is an excellent addin and works very nicely. It’s doubly cool that it supports PowerShell.

Technorati Tags: Live Writer,PowerShell,code formatting

FireFox Live Writer Trials and Tribulations

With FireFox 3, the old Live Writer add-on no longer works, as I noted last Sunday. I especially liked the way this add-on added an icon to the FireFox tool bar. It's a shame, but as written the add-on does not work.

I've since found another tool, Live WriterFox, but it's not quite as nice. But works - well mainly. Oddly, using it to reference my blog, as I did for this post, does not bring up Live Writer.

Today, I got a comment on my Sunday post from the Live Writer Team that pointed to a potential fix. However, this fix does not seem to work - I do not have the file Joe's post refers to. I'm running the LiveWriter latest CTP on Windows Server X64.

More clues gratefully received!

Technorati Tags: Live WriterFox,Live Writer,Blog this for FireFox,blog

Live Writerfox for FireFox V3

In a recent blog article, I noted that the Live Writer "Blog This" add-on did not work with FireFox 3. This is the add-on from the Live Writer team that put a little icon up in the tool bar.

Over on the Coding Day blog, I see this post:   FireFox Addon (Extension) for Windows Live Writer - Live Writerfox. I looked at it and saw it was dated from 2006. But reading the comments, I see Can has updated his add-on to work with FF3. It's not the same as the one I wanted, but it works great and I've used it already - like to write this blog entry.

Neat – and thanks!

Technorati Tags: Firefox 3,Live Writer,Live WriterFox

Windows Live Writer Technical Preview Available for Download

Those nice folks from the Live Writer team have released a technical preview (i.e. a beta) which you can now download. This new build has a bunch of new features, as described on the Writer Zone blog.

I'm downloading this now!

Technorati tags: writer, live writer, microsoft

Live Writer on X64 - A Solution

I posted earlier about not being able to install Live Writer to my X64 Server 2008 system. Well, a bit of digging and I discovered a simple solution to running Live Writer on X64/Server - just copy the working directory from another system and run it directly from your hard drive. The only downside is a completely 'empty' install - you need to re-add plug-ins, setup options, re-configure ping servers, etc.

But it works!

:-)

Technorati Tags: Liver Writer,X64 Support

Windows Live Writer - No Server or X64 Support?

I just love Microsoft's Live Writer freebie blog posting tool. I post to this and my GK blog using pretty much only Live Writer. I have it on all machines!

My home testing network had been upgraded to run Windows Server 2008 (X64), with several additional servers. Several of my test workstations now run Server X64, using the "Server as a workstation" mods Ohad (a MS Program Manager) has published. 

These rock! My main workstation is a dual-proc quad core Xeon 3ghz powered system with 8gb of ram running a modded x64 Server installation. I really love the functionality, particularly running DFS.

However, today I hit a roadblock - Live Writer won't install. I get and error about it not being supported on Server or XP X64. Grrr... What's more annoying - the installation is an .exe, and ot an .MSI that I could use ORCA to hack out the check on OS version.

Full support would be nice (on an unsupported basis if necessary). But failing that, please Live Writer Team, can you give us a hack?

How about a switch -IreallyKnowWhatIAmDoing to the install? PLEASE? Pretty Please?? Pretty please with whipped cream, gum drops on top and a cherry???

 

Technorati tags: Live Writer, . x64 Support

Windows Live Writer: Out of Beta

As noted over on the Windows Live Writer blog: Windows Live Writer is out of Beta! I've been using this tool for a while as my principal blogging tool. It rocks!

Technorati Tags: Windows Live Writer

Updated Live Writer

Microsoft's Windows Live Writer blogging tool has now reached Beta 3 stage. As a free blogging too, I find it excellent - and now even better. The latest release, which you can download from Microsoft's webs site.

There are many improvements in Beta 3. These include:

• Publish XHTML-style markup

• Use Writer in 28 additional languages

• Print your posts

• Justify-align a post's text

• Better image handling (in particular fewer blurry images)

• Resolved installation issues from the last release

• Plus Many other bug fixes and enhancements

 

Get it now!

[LATER]

Unfortunately, as one reader has pointed out in a comment to this blog entry, it appears that the latest beta of Live Writer does not work on x64 systems which is a pretty significant omission. Thanks to Chris Randall for pointing this out - I missed it since I am still mainly using i386 systems.

 

Technorati tags: Live Writer, Not supported on x64

Live Writer Beta 2 Ships

Microsoft has just released an updated beta, dubbed Beta 2, of it's Live Writer blogging tool. I use Live Writer pretty much exclusively for this blog. The biggest feature, for me at least, is in the inline spell checking.

Get the beta and learn more over at the Writer Zone

 

Technorati tags: Windows Live Writer

Counting Live Writer Users

I use Windows Live Writer as my principal blogging tool. It has a neat feature which detects your blog's look and feel - it's style.  LW then emulates that style as you are using LW to create or edit a blog post. This is a neat feature that I personally like a lot.

LW achieves this by creating a simple testing post on your blog, then deleting it. The only problem with this is that some blog posting tools pick up that test post immediately, as described in a post by Josh. When Josh posted his entry in the summer, there  were a mere 860 its - but today Technorati lists 9592!  

At first sight, this may appear to be a low number of users. But in order to have been picked up, either your blog is be hosted on an "when it's updated, we'll ping someone..." type site or you have configured LW to ping some blogging service. So I suspect that it vastly undercounts the number of LW users, but it's certainly fun to watch. From the look of the stats as I was creating this post, the hits keep rolling in!

 

Technorati tags: Live Writer, Windows Live Writer, blog, blogging tools, Technorati

Live Writer Bug(s) Fixed!

In earlier posts to this blog, I highlighted some issues with Windows Live Writer and Google's Blogger Beta. I am delighted to say the issues seem resolved with a new build of Windows Live Writer, which I'm using to create and submit this post.

Thanks to the Live Writer team!

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

Microsoft Live Writer - What A Great Team!

Earlier today, I posted a comment on the Live Writer site. As noted in an earlier post here, Live Writer was broken by the latest Blogger Beta update. Just after the 10:00 News, I got a comment to this blog from the dev lead Charlie Teague apologising for the problem. Yes, they're aware of the issue and they're working on a fix and will get it out as fast as they can. I can't possibly ask more than that (although I would like a working Live Writer!).

Now this is good service. Other teams at MS should take notice. Particularly the team that runs the MCT sites.

Blogger Beta Breaks Live Writer

I'm a real fan of Windows Live Writer a free blogging tool from Microsoft. I have been using this tool extensively since it was launched for both my personal blog and my corporate blog. You can download this tool at the Live Writer web site.

However, the latest version of Live Writer does not work with Google's new Blogger Beta which hosts my blogs). As described in a post in the Live Writer Blog: style detection fails and none of the posts you publish actually show up on the blog. A new build of Live Writer (the one noted in the above paragrah) has not solved the problem - in fact things seem worse. So if you are using the new Google blogging beta, you may want to hold off downloading Live Writer until the team issue a fix. Please fix this Microsoft - and issue an updated build. Please??

New Version of Live Writer

Microsoft has just released an updated version of their Live Writer blogging tool. I liked the older beta, but the new one is even better. Some key changes:

• Tagging support
• Support for Blogger Beta
• Categories are sorted by name and support scrolling, plus improved support for reading categories from your blog
• Improved startup performance
• Paste is enabled for Title region and TAB/SHIFT+TAB navigation between title and body supported
• Insert hyperlink added to context menu when text is selected
• Title attribute in Insert Link dialog
• Custom date support for Community Server
• Improved keyboard shortcuts for switching views
• Change spell-check shortcut key to F7
• Add ‘png’ to insert image dialog file type filter
• More robust image posting to Live Spaces
• Improved style detection for blogs 
• Fixed issues with pasting URLs and links
• Remember last window size and position when opening a new post
• Open post dialog retrieves more than 25 old posts

An altogether highly useful set of improvements. Well done!

Technorati tags: Live Writer, Blog, Tools, Microsoft

More Live Writer Plugins

In a recent blog post, I wrote about an open source project Cyclone. Cyclone is a set of plugins for Microsoft's Windows Live Writer. Googling this morning, I discovered two web site/blog dedicated to plugins. The first is http://wlwplugins.com, and the second is http://blogging2007.blogspot.com.

I'm off there now to get more!

 

Technorati Tags: Live Writer - Free - plugin

Cyclone - Plug-Ins for Windows Live Writer

In an earlier blog post, I discussed the Windows Live Writer blogging tool. There's a project up on the Codeplex site, called Cyclone, which has a bunch of plug-ins for Live writer.

The plug-ins include:

• Windows Media Player Currently Playing (by Laurent Kempé)
• Code Syntax Highlighter (by Alexey Raga)
• Paste Clipboard as Html (by Bryant Likes)
• Rhapsody Currently Playing (by Justin Braun)
• Multiple Tags Plugin (by Peder Borg Poulsen)
• Smart Link Inserter (by Dmitry Maksimov)

Nice add-ons for this cool tool!

Technorati: livewriter, windows, microsoft

Windows Live Writer - Blogging Tool (part 2)

Well, I've just downloaded the beta of Windows Life Writer, and this is my first post with it. It works well - complete with a spelling checker. A neat feature is that WLW downloads the blog style sheet, thus real WYSIWYG!

The WLW tool is simple and easy to use and passes the Ronseal test (It does what it says on the tin).

WLW also lets you insert a map into a blog posting. Unfortunately, WLW can not upload the map to Blogger.

Microsoft's New Blogging Tool Windows Live Writer

In a post on the Writer Zone (the WIndows Live Writer Team blog, the team introduce a beta of Windows Live Writer. WLW is a desktop application that makes it easy to compose better blog articles. The interesting thing is that this new tool also works with existing blog services. I'll be trying this out once the MSI gets downloaded!