Writer Zone: Technical Preview: Now Available for Download

One of my favorite tools has been updated. It alludes to the possibility of integrating Writer with a couple of services and technologies I have been looking at integrating, Flickr and Lightbox. I was almost motivated enough to try my hand at writing a plugin a while back. The most obvious change is that the interface has been revamped. I have looked but I cannot find how Lightbox gets integrated. The Insert Picture dialog has a web interface. I will check out the web interface to Flickr shortly.

Writer Zone: Technical Preview: Now Available for Download

.htaccess changes can break LiveWriter

Recently I changed some of my sites to not use the "www" on the front of the URL. It was a little tricky but I got it working right. The first part is to change WordPress to use shorter URL. The second part of the change was to modify the .htaccess file. I found that  the post, Comprehensive URL Canonicalization via htaccess for WordPress-Powered Sites, helped me the most. I checked it in a browser and everything looked fine. Much later I tried to write a post in LiveWriter and it did not work. It gave me the following error message.

blogger.getUsersBlogs method received from the weblog server was invalid

After a little debugging I figured out I could get rid of the problem if I refreshed my account settings for the web sites with the new .htaccess file. I guess LiveWriter is picky about the web site URL.

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.