Windows Live Movie Maker 2011: [free app] Remove Recent Projects

Windows Live Movie Maker is a free offering from Microsoft that offers novice and average users the ability to edit video and from there, be able to share/publish it to Facebook, YouTube, eMail, DVD and even custom resolutions. It's a basic editor with very simplified interface, and it's part of the Windows Live Essentials Suite of applications.

And from time to time, in the Windows Live Movie Maker support forum, the question is resented on how to remove the Recent Projects history.

The quick answer is that you can't; not within the application. But the information can be removed because it's being stored in the registry. This requires some dumpster dving in to the Windows registry…

2012: Windows Live Writer Top 10 Plug-ins - Most Useful

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.

A large number of bloggers use Windows and use Windows Live Writer to post to their blogs from virtually anywhere. Windows Live Writer is considered the bar at which all other offline blog editors are judged.

One of the things that makes Windows Live Writer so popular is the ability to edit and compose your articles in a WYSIWYG editor. So as you are composing, what you are looking at is exactly how it's going to look one the information has been published. But another reason is the fact that the application has the ability to extend it's abilities to do other things not natively covered; allowing outside developers to generate plug-ins that'll enrich the overall experience and functionality of Windows Live Writer.

I have compiled a list of uber-useful plug-ins that are the most common and suggested plug-ins from the Windows Live Writer support forum from this year 2011 [and going on to 2012].

Here they are…

Blogger has seemingly changed it's API without telling anyone; or it's just broke.

I was reportng on one problem when I found two others. The Google blogger support forums are teaming with reports of people having problems with not being able to post to BLOGGER using outside applications like Zoundry Raven or Windows Live Writer.

There's a small range of problems right now; they're not being able to publish, not being able to pull old posts to edit them and the problem with the SLUG not being created properly. The problems are for sure a result of something that Google changed recently with the Blogger handling of remote posting applications; or basically, mucking with the base API that allows outside applications to post articles to BLOGGER.

The forums have been busy with reports for a couple of days and yet I've seen no responses from Google Blogger support over the issue; which isn't encouraging. You would really expect to see more participation from Google on issues of this nature.

Notice: Blogger is creating the wrong SLUG for Blogs

This started like last week [or more]. People using Windows Live Writer and blogger may have noticed this; mainly because Windows Live Writer is the de facto standard for offline blogging.

Basically, the problem is that when people compose blogs and then submit them to their respective blogs to be posted, the SLUG or URL they uses is typically composed of the words use in the title of the blog post. and as of recently, this hasn't been happening with blogger.

Blogger is taking the first sentence of the blog, not the title, and creating the default SLUG or URL for the post. it's really nothing more than irritation, but it should get some notice because it doesn't create a very efficient SEO tagged blog post.

Zemanta still problems with it's plug-in with Windows Live Writer 2011

I reported a problem way back with Zemanta and the plug-in for Windows Live Writer; it was the one where Zemanta's plug-in would crash Windows Live Writer at right about 460+ - 500 words. I got their attention and then I was able to get one of their developers to remote in to my machine and they were able to see the problem in action.

Later Zemanta released another version of the plug with a fix; but it was only a slight fix… the bug was still there; only in a different spot.

Now, the plug-in has recently gotten worse; it crashes if you even so much as hover over the related articles listing…

I contacted them again and I sent them a screenshot, but sometimes videos work a lot better.