I’ve started using Microsoft Windows Live Writer 2011 to author my blog posts, and I love it so far. In fact, one of the best features of it is that it’ll automatically detect the blog theme and keep a copy of it stored so you can see what your post looks like. Normally I don’t need to care too much about formatting, but when I’m including a graphic it’s really handy to be able to resize it quickly to the full width of the column. The native image sizing in WordPress is a real crapshoot sometimes.
One problem with letting Live Writer detect your theme is that it posts a temporary article, usually with the title of “Temporary Post Used For Theme Detection (0123a1bc-d3ad-b33f-ba5eba11b3da-b4beb3ad-adb0771ed-ec70b1a57)” (or something like it). The real problem is that it gets into your RSS feed, which I don’t like.
There are a couple of quick things you can do in WordPress to help mitigate this, right before Live Writer does the post:
- Disable the FeedBurner plugin if you use it. I have Feedburner set to notify services of my posts and it’s incredibly good at that, which works against me here.
- Disable any plugins or systems that automatically post things to Twitter, Facebook, etc.
- Delete the contents of Settings->Writing->Update Services.
If you open a new browser window you can cut the Update Services URLs out (Ctrl-X), save the changes, let Live Writer do its thing, then paste them right back in, save the changes, and go re-enable your plugins.
Of course, you can always use .htaccess, firewall, or other access control rules to block the feed briefly, but that is left to an exercise for the reader.
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LW messed up my comp – to be precise, sharing of files with my linux laptop (something to do with Live Sign-in Assistant or something) Stupid MS