Configuring Windows Live Writer(Beta) for a .Text blog

Jeff Schroeder — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 21:26:00 GMT

There are so many choices when it comes to blogging these days, blogs to use and desktop applications to write to your blog. Most of them comes down to resources available and personal preference. We use .Text so that makes the first part an easy choice. No to find the desktop app to make things a little bit easier, I looked at BlogJet, w.bloggar and then found out about Windows Live Writer(Beta). Each of these programs have their own unique things that make special but they are all pretty similar to each other. I opted to take a look at using Windows Live Writer because it seemed pretty easy to use and has all the features that I seem to need, inserting pictures into my blog and being able to format text. I can also insert tags, hyperlinks and even a Windows Live Map. So I went about trying to setup my new toy and was disappointed that it didn't support my .Text blog. I tried to figure out the setup and gave up on it and starting looking at BlogJet and w.bloggar. Both BlogJet and w.bloggar seem very similar and both have built-in support for .Text blogs. So I looked at my trial of BlogJet and played with it for a little bit. Then I looked at the setup for w.bloggar and then it hit me...something looks familiar here. I saw the MetablogAPI setting in Windows Live Writer earlier, so I went back to it and tried the connection string from w.bloggar for .Text. Guess what...it worked! So now I'm using it and I wanted to share the setup with you so you can give it a try with .Text or figure out how to use it with the blog of your choice.

You're going to start out by Adding a Weblog Account. You'll then be asked whether you want to use a Windows Live Spaces account or Another weblog service. Select Another weblog service as shown in the image below and click next.

Enter your weblog homepage URL, this is going to be http://yourhostname.com/yourblogfolder/. Then you'll enter your blog username and password and click next.

Now select the type of weblog that you are using, which for this setup will be Custom (Metaweblog API) and then enter your remote posting URL for your weblog. This is the special part that makes it work...if you don't have the right connection it doesn't work and this was the hard part to figure out. Enter http://yourhostname.com/yourblogfolder/services/metablogapi.aspx and click next. Then you'll get a confirmation page and click finish to complete the setup. But you're not done yet....see below for setting up your FTP connection.

Now you need to setup your FTP settings so you can publish images and files to your webserver since .Text doesn't allow you to upload directly to the weblog. Select Upload image to an FTP server and click next.

Enter your FTP settings. There is one thing to note about the FTP settings...most likely your FTP Server is on a domain and is a different username and password than your actual blog account. Your blog account is in a Asp.Net Membership database and you're using forms authentication to authenticate. So here is the setup info. Click next when you're done.

FTP hostname: yourhostname.com

Username: Domain\Username

Password: yourpassword

Publish images into this folder: /yourfoldername

URL of the image publishing folder: http://yourhostname.com/downloads/yourfolder

Click Update Style Template so you pick-up your settings from your blog. Click next and then you'll get another confirmation page. Click Finish and you're done. Congratulations!!!...Windows Live Writer is now setup and ready for your to use.

You can download Windows Live Writer(Beta) from the Windows Live website as well as an SDK for it and there are a few plug-ins available for use with it as well. If you don't see what you need...then you can always create your own plug-in with the SDK. Here is the link.

http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/

Happy Blogging!