Skip to main content

Windows Live Writer Tips & Tricks

Windows Live Writer is a brilliant blog authoring tool [detailed review] with a WYSIWYG Rich text editor and support for plugins. And here are two excellent features hidden in the Live Writer Preferences window that are very useful but you may not have explored them yet:

Automatic Blog Ping via Windows Live Writer
Every time you publish a post on your blog using Windows Live Writer, the software can send a ping XML-RPC signal to ping servers like weblogs.com, blo.gs, ping-o-matic or any custom ping service.

Select Tools->Preferences->Ping Servers. Type the list of ping servers that you would want Live Writer to inform when you create a new post for your blog.



Write your own HTML Snippets for Blog It
Windows Live Toolbar has a "Blog This" button that lets you compose a new post from your current HTML webpage. Pushing the "blog it" opens the selected text and images including the source URL inside Live Writer preserving all the formatting and layout details. This is a great feature for quick blogging but there's more to it.

Windows Live Writer also lets you customize this HTML information that it receives from the IE Window when the blogger presses the Blog It button. For instance, you want to add a disclaimer text or your HTML signature to every item that you blog using the BlogThis button. Or say you are blogging a photograph and want the original image link to open in a new window rather than in the same window.

Select Tools->Preferences->Blog This. Now select Link, Image or Snippet from the Content box and click "Customize HTML". You will see a text box prepopulated with some code which is very easy to understand and there are even hints at the bottom. You can either write your own HTML template code, append the existing code logic or simply delete the entire text which won't fill-in (or credit) the original story in your blog post.

Popular posts from this blog

How to Download Contacts from Facebook To Outlook Address Book

Facebook users are not too pleased with the "walled garden" approach of Facebook. The reason is simple - while you can easily import your Outlook address book and GMail contacts into Facebook, the reverse path is closed. There's no "official" way to export your Facebook friends email addresses or contact phone numbers out as a CSV file so that you can sync the contacts data with Outlook, GMail or your BlackBerry. Some third-party Facebook hacks like "Facebook Sync" (for Mac) and "Facebook Downloader" (for Windows) did allow you to download your Facebook friends' names, emails, mobile phone number and profile photo to the desktop but they were quickly removed for violation of Facebook Terms of Use. How to Download Contacts from Facebook There are still some options to take Friends data outside the walls of Facebook wall. Facebook offers the Takeout option allowing you to download all Facebook data locally to the disk (include

PhishTank Detects Phishing Websites by Digg Style Voting

OpenDNS, a free service that helps anyone surf the Internet faster with a simple DNS tweak , will announce PhishTank today. PhishTank is a free public database of phishing URLs where anyone can submit their phishes via email or through the website. The submissions are verified by the other community members who then vote for the suspected site. This is such a neat idea as sites can be categorized just based on user feedback without even having to manually verify each and every submission. PhishTank employs the "feedback loop" mechanism where users will be kept updated with the status' of the phish they submit either via email alerts or a personal RSS feed . Naturally, once the PhishTank databases grows, other sites can harness the data using open APIs which will remain free. OpenDNS would also use this data to improve their existing phishing detection algorithms which are already very impressive and efficient. PhishTank | PhishTank Blog [Thanks Allison] Related: Google

Digital Inspiration

Digital Inspiration is a popular tech blog by  Amit Agarwal . Our popular Google Scripts include  Gmail Mail Merge  (send personalized emails with Gmail ),  Document Studio (generate PDFs from Google Forms ) and   File Upload Forms ( receive files  in Google Drive). Also see  Reverse Image Mobile Search , Online Speech Recognition and Website Screenshots , the most useful websites on the Internet.