Windows Live Writer: How to Change the Default Theme Appearance [editing with no theme]

Windows Live Writer has the ability to allow users to see their blog as it'd be posted as they are composing, but what if you were having problems with that; what if you didn't want to see the theme, or if your theme preview wasn't working correctly?

The standard editor for Windows Live Writer; editing with no theme means there's no fancy theme background, no fancy fonts and the width of the composition area.

Forget the graphics of creating a post. What most bloggers need is to roughly see the fonts, the links, images and at the width the post is going to be published. And this applies to any of the Blogging services [Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress, Etc.] that Windows Live Writer supports.

Windows Live Writer: Working with the Default and Theme Templates

At times it's hard to explain the issues of why Windows Live Writer can't display a theme correctly. It's multifaceted, but it can be explained with a little effort.

The support forums for Windows Live Writer ask these questions from time to time and it's good to have an example to draw from. In this post I provide the location of the default theme in Windows Live Writer and the location of where the dynamic themes are stored.

Depending on what the sore spot is, the average person should be able to read this and then make some small adjustments, or just create a BASIC theme for themselves.

Windows Live Writer 2012: Exploring the Registry Entries

Windows Live Writer is one of the most popular off-line blog editors the bloggers use. Blog authors love the ease-of-use and the ability to copy and paste images directly into a post and then be able to keep those off-line for reference and do lots of other stuff.

I've noticed over the past couple of years people are always asking about changing this setting or changing that setting, and it really just requires people to jump into the Windows registry, by the Windows Live Writer entry and start making a few changes.

Some people are nervous about getting into the Windows registry but in actuality there's no harm in simply viewing the Windows registry. I've gone into my Windows registry and poked around and take a bunch of screenshots of the settings for Windows Live Writer so people can see what it's settings look like before they start poking around.

Windows Live Writer: How to Add Images/Pictures to a Post

The other day the question came up in the Windows Live Writer support forum about adding an image to a post. Adding a post to Windows Live Writer is very simple and easy; it's one of the key points of Windows Live Writer that makes it so favored to use.

Windows Live Writer is a fantastic offline blogging tool with a WYSIWYG editor. It interfaces with just about any blog service [Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress, etc.] If you're a blogger you'll find this tool incredibly helpful- and it's refreshingly free from Microsoft.

But for the point of adding images to Windows Live Writer, I thought I would do a quick post on it.

Windows Live Writer 2012: Fast and Easy Image Editing with the Sharper Photo Plug-in

When you're working on a post in Windows Live Writer it's important not to be slowed down by having to mess with a bunch of arduous graphic programs to try to point out highlight and draw attention to certain features and functions.

Windows Live Writer has some basic functions as far as editing goes, but if you really want to get detailed with image markup, resizing and adjusting the quality of the images that are being inserted, and ultimately posted to your blog, being able to edit those images quickly is going to be almost invaluable.

So while Windows Live Writer does have some basic image editing options it actually works better if you have the option to edit the image, while you're in the composition phase, using your own choice graphic editor.

Windows Live Writer 2012: How To Return The Plug-in Sidebar

If you were among the many that were using Windows Live Writer 2009, you probably remember having a plug-in bar on the right hand side of the composition window; having direct access to the plug-ins that you have installed for Windows Live Writer. When Windows Live Writer got updated with the new user interface, Microsoft removed the sidebar. A completely asinine thing to do, considering how useful the sidebar was. Additionally, it left a ton of free/open space in the composition window that's holistically wasted.

One of the very first things that popped up in the Windows Live Writer support forums with the redesign of the GUI, was a request to reinstate the sidebar. Of course Microsoft never answered and the loyal users that use Windows Live Writer on a regular basis have been left in the dark ever since.

But you really have to have respect for those independent developers out there that recognize that something is wrong, but it can be fixed with some additional code. Enter JoseNet.

Auto-link Plug-in: SEO Smart Links [free]

I added a new plug-in to my website the other day called SEO Smart Links to help me with linking to external resources. During the composition phase of an article you sometimes miss an opportunity to insert a hyper-link to a resource. Windows Live Writer has an auto-link feature, but the truth is, it's better to make the change on the server so all the previous posts get the update too. You can't do that with Windows Live Writer.

Windows Live Writer 2012: How To Add 500 Top Domain Names To Your Auto-link LinkGlossary.XML [easy]

I was thinking the other day that I keep running across all these new domains that I've never heard of, and I have to keep putting in the new links into Windows Live Writer because I want to build a link to them in the future and utilizing the auto linking function in Windows Live Writer is actually very convenient.

I was able to go out to a website and grab a listing of the top 500 websites in the world. I grabbed only the name of the website and the URL to link to that website, and then I wrote a script to convert the names of those websites and the URLs to the matching XML of the Windows Live Writer linkglossary.XML that uses for the auto linking.

The result is that I now have a listing of top 500 websites in the world, auto linking into Windows Live Writer, and hopefully I won't have to and very many more auto linking entries.

But for your convenience, I want to add that information here; you can add it to your own linkglossary.XML in Windows Live Writer, if you want to.

Windows Live Writer 2012: Continuing To Use An App That Microsoft Has Forgotten

I continue to be a little bit disappointed with Microsoft's progress on any development with Windows Live Writer.  It seems that Microsoft has all but forgotten about Windows Live Writer.  there hasn't been any updates to Windows Live Writer in quite some time in the program still lacks the basic ability for a find and replace function.

Having to come to the realization that Windows Live Writer may actually be a dead product to Microsoft, you have to start thinking about what application you're going to move to next.  Such a concept is fairly depressing because Windows Live Writer has been such a well received application in the blogging community.  It makes the overall blogging process so much easier,  if for nothing more than being able to drag-and-drop images into the blog posts and to be able to see generally, what the blog post is going to look like before it's actually published.

The future of Windows Live Writer and blogger - no more free storage?

The other day, a person contacted my website and they were inquiring about being able to upload images to blogger using Windows Live Writer; they were having a problem.

I knew that Windows Live Writer was compatible with blogger, even the latest version, but there are some nuances to using Windows Live Writer with blogger. Blogger uses Picasa web to store the images that people upload for their blogs. And in order to use that type of storage Windows Live Writer has to create a folder inside Picasa web called 'Windows Live Writer' so when you upload your posts to blogger, and you had images, those images are placed into the Windows Live Writer folder in Picasa web.

The person that I was exchanging communications with was saying that they had checked everything and everything should be fine, but Picasa web was telling them that they were over the limit; that was another issue. In the course of trying to help them though, I found some other articles that were kind of disturbing. I really haven't got a response yet from my question about this to Google, but I'm kind of hoping that they'll get back with me soon.