by Geeks on Tour: A while ago, in my personal blog I wrote about discovering Windows Live Writer. It is a program, freely downloadable from Microsoft, which allows you to compose blog entries offline. It works with several blogging systems, including the 2 I use – Blogger and WordPress. After you compose your blog post, it will take care of uploading it to the web, including the pictures.
Last week, we had some trouble with our Internet connection and I wanted to write a blog post, so I dusted off Live Writer and gave it another shot. It’s really an amazing little program! I’m using it now, even when my Internet connection is working fine. In a couple of my recent personal blog posts, I have maps as part of the blog post, and the maps don’t come from my normal Google Maps. They’re from Virtual Earth, Microsoft’s competitor to Google Earth. That’s because I used Live Writer to insert the map. Since Live Writer is by Microsoft, it uses Microsoft’s maps.
Live Writer makes it just SOO easy to insert a map. It’s also waayy easy to insert a link, and the links automatically open in a new window! If you’ve been using Blogger, you know that making a link open in a new window is a painful process there. If you hate how Blogger adds new photos to the top of your post, you’ll love how Live Writer adds them at your cursor position. AND, you can even set it up to so that your photos get uploaded to your own hosted webspace (FTP) rather than Blogger’s servers!
Maybe the best part is that, since you’re writing the post on your computer and letting Live Writer upload it to Blogger, you have an automatic backup. The drafts are all on your computer. If something happened to your blog, these drafts could be re-uploaded.
Give it a try and let me know what you think. It’s a free download at the link above. The first thing is to set up your blog by clicking on the Blog menu and ‘Add blog account…’
From then on it’s pretty much like writing your post on Blogger. Give the post a title, type the text, use the ‘insert’ options at the right to add pictures, links, maps, etc. When you’re done, click ‘Publish’ in the upper left corner.
For all our videos on using Blogger to make a blog – it’s EASY, really, really easy! – see:
Blogging Tutorials page
And to see *lots* of RVers blogs – many of whom learned how from our tutorials – go to our Blog listings page. If you have a blog, you can list it there too.
Chris Guld, www.geeksontour.com
Computer Education for Travelers
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Chris Guld
Daniel,
I don’t know why the pictures wouldn’t show. You can check that they are properly showing in LiveWriter and try uploading again. Or you can go to blogger and manually upload the missing ones.
Daniel
Using Windows Live Writer and then “publish” to my Blogspot,it works fine except not all pictures are shown on the blogspot.
How can I fix it?
Thanks
Chris Guld
Answer:
No. Not automatically. You need to open the post with Live Writer and click Publish.
Daniel
Question:
I am in a remote place with no Internet and I write a blog on Live Writer, will it upload automatically it to my blogger as soon as I get on line?
Thanks
Daniel
Till now Blogged only when I was online, I am going to try this Windows Live Writer NOW