Installing Live Writer behind a ISA firewall

I like Live Writer a lot but it is very hard to install when you are behind Microsoft’s ISA firewall. I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out what ports I needed to open in the firewall so that the Live Writer install program would install. All of my attempts ended with the “Try Later” message. I finally gave up and added the computer temporarily to my Linux firewall rule to complete the install.

Then I set about writing this post. When I opened the post properties to add some keywords, the keywords field was not there. Hmm.. The Live Writer version on my laptop works has the keywords field so I was befuddled. After a little searching I found this post, Add Tags To WordPress 2.3 Posts From Windows Live Writer 2008. I am running the latest version of WordPress so I was not surprised to see that I already had the code changes. I was missing the wlwmanifest.xml file. After downloading the zip file, uploading it to the “wp-includes” directory, and then updating my weblog style, I was back in business.