Windows Live Writer 7 (Posting / Editing)

This is the next post in my series on Microsoft Live Writer.  This post will talk about the basics of posting and similar functions.  While these are basic functions its great to know comprehensively just how to use the program.  To use the most basics of Live Writer, you only need to use the bar at the top left and to write your post in the main box.

Posting

The way to put your blog post up on your website is simple.  As soon as it is ready hit the publish button.

Opening previous posts

To open a post you have already made press the open button.  On some platforms, such as Wordpress the option to make pages is possible.  These pages can be opened and editted from here also.

 

Once you click the open button it brings up another dialog, with two main panes – one on the right for the posts, the left pane showing where you are looking.  The first option in this navigation pane is your Drafts (see below); the second is your recent posts; following this whichever blogs you have signed up to.  More on that in the next post.  In short find where is your post you want to open is – is it a draft, did you post on your blog already?  If so select your blog on the left and scroll down on the right to open the right post.  As you can see below you can also delete any of your posts – note this will take it down from your blog.

 

Saving Draft Copies

If you’re not quite ready with your post and want to work on it at another time save it as a draft, the same way you would to an email.  The save draft button will do just that.  If you click the button normally it saves the post to your computer but if you click on the down arrow you can select to save the draft to your blog.  This will mean it will be available on your blog, stored, but not viewable by the public.

As a small aside don’t forget saved drafts appear on the right task pane above your recent posts.  This is handy and can act as a check list so you can work through your drafts and finish them quickly.

New Post

While I wasn’t originally going to mention this but to make a new post, for example if you have opened an older post to edit or read through and then decide to post again etc. simply click the final button on that bar.  New.

Live Writer 5 (Interlude for Complaints)

Unfortunately a bug has arisen with my copy of Live Writer. Quite a while ago, this is why I have not been finishing the series of articles off. To this end I emailed Microsoft and got an initial incredibly speedy response. On April 28th. The further information I emailed and I have yet to hear back. I must say I am not impressed and thought it important that during a series of articles on this product, important to say the type of feedback you can expect. It is important to note that bugs, and faults such as the one I encountered happen in every program. Live Writer does not regularly fail on me and is quite stable.

Postscript:

As you can read from one of the comments below Microsoft did notice and once I sent them the Program’s log file it was escalated to a specialist and a reply achieved within another day. Very prompt service to be fair, at that point. And the solution suggested worked fine. Two small things to point out though.

It was a moderately technical solution, which is ok for a lot of people but with the easy of use of Live Writer a lot of non-technical users use the program. But I was told in the email that they are working on this bug currently and if I couldn’t to uninstall the program and gave clear instructions on how to do that. Which comes to the second point their help for uninstalling the program online is actually wrong, at time of writing, my next article today will let you know how to do it yourself if you need to.