This article explains the technique and procedure for doing so. Here is an image of a sidebar with multiple features, a map, some images and text with hyperlinks. Things that are easily inserted with Live Writer into posts. It works just as easily for use with the WordPress sidebar Text Widget. There are a few peculiarities that have to be carefully observed.

WordPress Text Widgets are used for arbitrary text or HTML. It is the HTML handling that makes them so powerful as most anything can be shown.

Live Writer can be used in its normal graphical interface, wysiwyg (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) to set up the HTML code.

Most sidebars are on the order of 250 pixels wide, it will help if you know the exact size of your sidebar. In Live Writer ignore the margins as they will be for your main area and not the sidebar. Since material in the sidebar will look best when centered, that is what you should use in preparation.

The main caution concerns images. They must be sourced from the web. Since you will not publish this post, Live Writer will not upload the images. So you need to upload all images manually before you set up the sidebar HTML.

Prepare your images

Prepare your images in the exact size that you want them to appear and upload them to the WordPress Media Library. This is a drag-and-drop procedure so it is quite fast and straightforward.

Obtain the file URL for each image. Be sure to get the file URL and not the permalink. See the illustrations below. It might help to just copy the ULRs and paste them into Notepad so they are handy when you are ready to use them.

Create the sidebar HTML

Open Live Writer to a blank post – you can name the post anything, but something like “sidebar 1” might be descriptive enough. You will not upload this post, only save it on the local PC.

Enter the text normally, center the text. When you need an image use Insert > From the web … Enter the image file URL.

Continue and build your sidebar.

Note in the illustration above that the social media icons are not centered. If you want images beside each other set the Alignment to Left. Space them with the right or left margin setting so that the sum of the margins and image horizontal dimensions adds up to the width of the sidebar.

Inserting a map

Things get a little tricky when you insert a map. Live Writer lets you size the map image so you can fit it to the sidebar. However, that image is locally generated and stored. It is not uploaded to WordPress, since you will not publish this working post. So you must do a screen capture, clip out the map image, upload it to the WordPress Media Library just like any other image. But, and this is important, you can’t change the generated code to reference that image. Live Writer will overwrite it on every operation. You will need to make the change later.

When you are finished with the setup, click the Source tab (lower left). Select all the source text and copy it. You can store it on Notepad – a good place to make the correction for any map image.

In the illustration here the code is selected in the Source view of Live Writer on the right and inserted into the Text Widget in the WordPress dashboard on the left. If you have no corrections to make to the code this is the quick and easy way. If you need to make a correction for a map image here are some additional notes.

Making the image reference correction for a map

Live Writer will generate an image of the map. The reference in the code needs to be changed to a file URL from the Library.

Find the reference in the code. Look for the section that contains the words “map picture”. Find the text <img src=. Replace everything in the quotes that follow with the file URL. In the illustration the reference generated by Live Writer is partially highlighted. It begins with a dollar sign, $.

Once the correction is made just save the Widget text and take a look at your blog.

Hope all goes well for you!

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

It used to be that spammers just tried to comment with long lists of links to junk sites. The machinery of the blog providers has pretty much eliminated those spam comments. Flattering comments with just one or two links are easy to spot. Here are some (edited) examples:

This submit actually made my day. You can’t imagine just how much time I had spent for this info! Thank you! my blog … [link to junk site]

Hey very nice blog! My blog: … [link to junk site]

I do not even know hоw I endеd up hеrе, but I thоught this post was greаt. I don’t know who you are but certainly you are going to a famous blogger if you aren’t already Cheers! my blog post … [link to junk site]

Hey There. That is an extremely neatly written article. I will make sure to bookmark it and return to read extra of your useful info. Thanks for the post. I will certainly return. my web site: … [link to junk site]

Well, you are not likely to fall for these. As much as we all like praise, these overly-flowery comments are not likely to get approved and published as comments. Do not approve a flattering comment that is not truly responsive to the post on which it is submitted.

Some spammers have started to automatically include your post title in their comment in hopes of getting it approved as a comment. Here is one:

Thanks for finally talking about > “Long Shadows” < Liked it! my page … [link to junk site]

Even parasites are not totally stupid, so the latest trick is to not include any links. The default settings on most blogs require comment approval before publishing unless the comment writer was previously approved. And therein lies a potential for getting tons of unexpected spam comments to get through. The spammer just needs to get one comment approved and it is open sailing thereafter. Don’t let that happen to you! Here is an obvious one from that class:

Just desire to say your article is as astounding. The clearness to your
publish is simply spectacular and i can suppose you’re knowledgeable in this subject. Well with your permission let me to grab your RSS feed to keep updated with impending post. Thank you one million and please continue the rewarding work.

But some may be quite short and easily mistaken for actual praise. You don’t want to reject a real reader of your blog, so the best strategy is to set your blog to require approval of all comments by you.

In WordPress the setting is under Settings – Discussion as shown in this illustration:

Blogger settings are under Settings – Posts and comments

Consider letting anyone comment, but require approval for all comments. Enjoy the occasional flattery, they may be worth a chuckle, but make sure that they do not result in a headache!

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

The WordPress theme and custom header used with this blog is a good example. Here is how the Live Writer editor window looks with the freshly downloaded theme (Blog Account tab > Update theme).

The post title entry box is partially obscured by the header image as is part of the main text area. This is particularly troublesome when the image is the same color as the text – you can’t read your own writing!

Here is another example, this time the background image in the actual blog is overlaid with a semitransparent text area. Live Write is confused by this and it shows the background in its full glory. Seeing the entered text is difficult.

If you are bothered by such a situation, here is my work-around solution.

When the blog theme is downloaded from the blog site the header and background images are placed along with other material into a folder named “blogtemplates”. The trick is to modify these images so they will not be bothersome when used by Live Writer. My solution is to just draw a white or light gray box in the appropriate location. With that done the Live Writer window looks like this:

Now the Live Writer edit window is completely useful and preparing a post is fast, easy, and convenient. The modified local image files will not affect the blog, you see these images only in Live Writer.

Now for the details.

The first step is to locate the folder “blogtemplates”. The easiest way is to open Windows Explorer (File Explorer in Windows 8). Then click Local Disk under Computer in the navigation pane (If you renamed your main dirve look for that name. It is usually your C: drive). In the search box enter blogtemplates. The folder will be found in C:\User\yourname\AppData\Roaming\Windows Live Writer. Of course, you can step through the folders and get there that way.

Now it gets a bit interesting. Computers are completely tasteless when it comes to naming folders. If you have more than one blog, as I do, you will see a weirdly named folder for each blog. Of course, there is no indication as to which belongs to what. You can look through the folders to find the header or background image, you will recognize it more easily if you set the file listing display to large icons. An easier way is to download the theme for the blog of interest, the folder will then have the current date and time as the Date modified. (See below.)

There will be two subfolders in the the blog template folder. It is the second subfolder that contains the offending images (at least on the computers I tried it on it was always the second folder.)

You can load the header or background image into Paint and there draw a light-colored rectangle over the area where text entry will take place. My approach was to get the correct width by doing a screen capture of the open blog in a browser and then clipping out a bit of the text area and pasting it to the appropriate location in Paint.

Note of caution: Both subfolders in the theme folder in blogtemplates will have the header and background images. If you make the changes in the wrong one, you will not see the correction in Live Writer. I have not explored the reason for two subfolders and how the contents is used. If you mess up royally just update the theme to get new files downloaded and start over.

Good luck!

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

Blogging with Windows Live Writer 2011. 1.Let’s begin!

Blogging with Windows Live Writer. 2. Writing your post.

Blogging with Windows Live Writer 2011. 3. Let’s insert something!

Blogging with Windows Live Writer 2011. 4. Inserting Everything bar the kitchen sink.

Blogging with Windows Live Writer 2011. 5. A closer look at photos.

Blogging with Windows Live Writer 6. Handling your blog account.

Blogging with Windows Live Writer. 7. Handling those files!

Blogging with Windows Live Writer 8. Categories, tags and dates.

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

Especially for my “boilerplate” at the bottom of posts, I source little images from a SkyDrive album called “Utilities”. Prior to August 1, 2012, the sharing of this folder was set to “People with a view link” and worked perfectly across my various blogs.

Then all my links on the bottom suddenly no longer showed the little pictures, my links at the bottom looked like this:

The links worked fine, of course the readers had no clue unless they moved the pointer to the image placeholders.

Changing the sharing setting to Everyone restored the images to operational status.

If you notice that your SkyDrive sourced images no longer show up in your posts, check the Sharing setting.

Click Sharing to display the settings, click Share folder.  In the next dialog click Get a link. Click the Make public button.

You can ignore the public share URL provided.

Continue to source images as before:

Click the image, in the information pane on the right click View original. Then copy the URL from the browser address bar (Ctrl+C).

This does mean that your sourced images have to be public, and when people get into your SkyDrive they can see the pictures. It also means that Microsoft is more careful with the access controls, and that is really a good thing.

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

For blog posts some repeating text, especially with graphics and hyperlinks, can be very useful to provide credits, references and links to other sites or pages. For posts here, I use such “boilerplate” to provide links to my home site and to my Twitter, Facebook and Google+ pages. Here, then, a quick tutorial on making and using boilerplate.

There are a number of plugins for Windows Live Writer that make inserting boilerplate very easy. I use Text Template Plugin for Windows Live Writer by Greg Duncan. Plugins can be be found on the Windows Live Plug-ins site (trust it is still there by the time you read this).

Creating the boilerplate

1. First, of course, you decide what the boilerplate should say, look like, and do. For this quick tutorial I will use my “created with Live Writer” slug (once more Wikipedia: Slug (typesetting)). Write down the text and make a sketch of any graphics and list any links.

2. If your boilerplate is to include an image, you must first create the image. I used Paint to prepare the text with the graphics. Here is what it looked like (frame added for illustrating the graphic). My original image was 1287 by 180 pixels. As you can see, it contains text and an image of the Windows Live Writer logo.

3. Scale the image to the actual size that it should be in use and save it as a JPG file. Mine is 360 x 50 pixels.

4. Upload the image, or images, to a site so you can use the graphic repeatedly without having to upload it each time. The easiest way is to insert the graphics into a post in Windows Live Writer. Set the Size to Original and  the Link to option to No link so WLW will upload only one copy. Upload the post as a draft to your blog.

5. Now you have stored the image or images in an accessible online site.

If you are using WordPress, find your image by going to your WordPress Dashboard > Media > Library. Find the graphic, click Edit. Copy the File URL. That is the web address for the graphic that you will re-use again and again.

If you are using Blogger your graphic will be in your Picasa Web Albums. Click Show All Albums, find the album titled Windows Live Writer – your newly added graphics should be at the end. Click the graphic to show it it large on a page, right-click the image and click Copy image URL (this may be different depending on your browser). Now the URL is on your clipboard, save it for later use (I use NotePad for this).

6. Set the boilerplate in a new Windows Live Writer post. Type the text and insert the graphics with Insert > Picture > From the web. Use the URL for the graphics. Insert any hyperlinks. Make all the positioning adjustments so the boilerplate looks just as you want it.

7. Click the Source tab in the lower left of the Live Writer window. Copy the source code. This is what you will need. I pasted mine into NotePad and saved the file. You can reuse this saved code from this file or you can install it in a plugin. If you wish to use a plugin, read the next section, otherwise just skip over it.

Prepare for reuse with a plugin

1. If you want to make it easy on yourself, install a Live Writer plugin. Click the blue tab > Options > Plug-ins. Live Writer makes this easy by even providing a link to the plugins download site.

2. Go to the plugins download page, install a plugin you like. I found Text Template in the Other content insertion section. 

3. As they used to say in school, the remainder is left to the student as an exercise. Since the details vary, depending on which plugin you choose, I will not go through the installation and setup procedure. You will find your way easily enough.

Reusing your boilerplate

When you come to the place in a post where the boilerplate should appear you can insert the code form the saved file or install it using the plugin.

Directly install saved code

1. Open the saved code file.
2. Copy all the code – select all > copy with Ctrl+C.
3. Click the Source tab in Live Writer. Scan down to the end. Paste the code (Ctrl+V).
4. Click the Edit tab. Your boilerplate will be there in all its glory.

Install with Plugin

1. Click the Insert tab.
2. Click the plugin. Select the slug. Click OK (This may vary depending on the chosen plugin).
3. Your boilerplate will be there in all its glory.

Now, wasn’t that easy? Actually, you will find it easier to do and faster than you might think. Go do it!

Take a moment to admire my boilerplate here. It consists of some text and several graphics with hyperlinks. Go ahead, give me a thrill by trying the links.

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

Show that you are using the best, easiest blogging tool, Windows Live Writer, at the end of every post. Give others a link to get their own copy of the greatest blogging tool out there!

You are welcome to copy the image that I am using at the bottom of this post.

Below is my code for my WLW credit line. You are welcome to use this as is. It grabs the image from my site. That’s OK I will keep it there. Of course, you are welcome to upload an image of your own to your file store.

Here is what the code looks like. Do not copy and paste this, as some of the characters will get mangled:

<p><a title=”Windows Live Writer” href=”http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-live/essentials-other-programs”><img style=”background-image: none; border-right-width: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: block; float: none; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin-left: auto; border-left-width: 0px; margin-right: auto; padding-top: 0px” title=”Windows Live Writer – download your own copy” border=”0″ alt=”LiveWriter-credit-360″ src=”http://ludwigkeck.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/livewriter-credit-360.jpg” width=”360″ height=”50″></a></p>

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

First a bit about blog sites and services

A vast number of blogs are hosted by WordPress, as is this blog. There are other blogging services and they differ in many respects from WordPress, but I will quickly go over how a blog functions on WordPress. A blogger sets up an account by clicking the “Get started here” button on WordPress.com. With the account comes a blog site. In setting up the blog, the blogger selects the site address and name. This blog has the address “http://livewriterbasics.wordpress.com” the name of the blog is Live Writer Basics as you can see at the top of this page. The blog consists of one or more pages. Typically the “landing page”, the one you get to with the blog’s URL or web address, shows the posts, the short articles, with the most recent one at the top.

The formatting, layout and style, of the blog is defined by a “theme” provided by the blogging service. WordPress has hundreds of themes to choose from. There may be a header image in addition to the blog name and byline. Most blogs have “sidebars” with various items of information. Typical items in the sidebar are links to prior posts, a search box, archive, links to other blogs, and other items that are automatically updated so the blogger does not need to worry about accessibility to information on the blog.

There may be other pages, reached with links on a menu bar, very much like any typical website. The pages in a blog contain more permanent information such as the About page here. There may be some advertising. This post may be followed below by an ad that WordPress places. This is how WordPress can make blogging free or very inexpensive. The blogger using a WordPress.com blog may not place any ads in the blog.

The “front” page may be quite long, showing a number of the recent-most posts. One such page is illustrated at the right. Posts and pages can be created in Windows Live Writer.

The blogging service, in this case WordPress, provides summary pages reached by the category and tag links.

Possible the most important part of a blog is the ability for readers to leave comments at the end of each post. This provides two-way communication between the blogger and the audience.

What does a post consist of?

Each post has a title. This is followed by the text or the article, maybe photos or other content. There is a post date showing the date, and often, the time the post was “published” or placed on the blog site. Typically a post is also marked with a topic, called “category” at WordPress, and “tags” that describe the topic details in more detail. Such categories and tags link to similar content in the blog and, more importantly, to other blogs. WordPress provides for such tagging. In addition there may be tags using another service. This blog also contains “Technorati” tags – you can see them illustrated below and real ones at the end of this article.

Here is an illustration of a typical post title, post date, and all-important first paragraph.

The end of that post looks like this:

The article ends with an “end of Ludwig’s story” mark, a copyright notice, links to the author’s website and social sites. This is followed by a group of Technorati tags. Each tag links to a Technorati page showing blogs on that topic.

There are a group of links to allow the reader to share the post and to indicate a “Like” to the author.

The gray links are the WordPress categories, marked “Posted in” that link to pages showing posts of that category, and tags introduced with “Tagged”. These also link to pages showing posts on those topics.

The last item in the gray WordPress items is a link to the comments on this post.

The skeleton of a blog post

In spite of the complex and and well-manicured look, the actual post consists of just HTML code. It is the reader’s browser that puts it all together and makes it look the way it was intended.

This is the code produced by Live Writer. Of course, when writing the blogger uses the “Edit” mode which shows the post pretty much as it will appear to the reader. Note that there are no images in this code, the pictures are defined by hyperlinks and are not stored with the post code. Live Writer takes care of those details and a novice blogger can be unconcerned – it just works.

When writing the text the author has “HTML styles” available to define the elements of the text and a limited set of font and positioning commands.

Normal text is called “Paragraph”, there are six “heading” styles. The actual appearance is defined by the blog theme and, once selected for the blog, is not further controllable. There are, however, additional controls for font, type size, and text placement. These are also limited. In Live Writer fonts can be set to any available on the bloggers computer. They will work just fine if the reader has that same font available on the computer used to view the blog. That last sentence contains the reason why a blogger must be very careful about setting the font. There is no assurance that it is available to the reader.

This is a quick look at the mechanics, the anatomy, of a blog post. A blogger is assisted by Live Writer in putting it all together so it works. It is easy to prepare a blog post, writing a captivating, informative, helpful, and timely article, well, that is another story.

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

First, be sure you know the width of you blog. This helps you to plan your layout in advance.

Arranging photos side by side

To position several images in a row proceed as follows:

• Insert the left-most photo. In picture tools set the Alignment to Left.
• Insert the next photo. Again set its alignment to Left.
• For the last photo set the alignment to Inline. This will prevent any text from being placed next to the images.

Hint: Some browsers have their own ideas, to keep them at bay set a margin value for each image. I like to use 5 pixels for the Bottom margin.

Hint: If your photos have different aspect ratios due to cropping, set the vertical dimension for all photos in a row to the same value. The photos will appear neater that way.

Hint: With photos in a row there may be a large blank space at the right. You can even the space out by setting the left margin of the first photo to about half the pixel value of the space. Or even larger if you want to move the images toward the right margin.

Placing a vertical column of photos to the right of a larger one

Having a column of pictures next to a larger one can be very attractive. This arrangement does require a little more care. Here is the procedure:

• Insert the large photo first. Set its alignment to Left. Set the right margin for this image to a small value, I like 5 px, to provide separation between the photos.
• Insert the smaller photos one be one. Set their alignment to Inline if you do not want text alongside.
• Set the top and bottom margins of the center image to balance the spacing so they will look good on the page.

Hint: If you want text alongside on the right side, set the alignment of the small images to Left. Also set their right margins to provide separation between the photos and the text.

Hint: If you want a column of text between the photos, set the alignment for the small photos to Right and set a left margin value for each.

Place the small images into text positions so they will look about right. You will not be able to make this perfect.

Hint: If you want to show bullets, the text must be on the left of the images, otherwise the bullet symbols will not show.

Arrange a column of pictures to the left of a larger one.

• The large photo must be inserted first. Set the alignment Right and set a left margin value.
• The small photos can then be placed with their alignment set to Inline.

With these procedures you can arrange your photos for best appeal. Remember, the size of photos can be changed to any horizontal or vertical value. Just be sure that Lock aspect ratio is set to avoid stretching or squashing them.

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck

Windows Live Writer has offered a very nice tool for a long time. It still functions just the way it always has. Old links to SkyDrive albums operate just as they did when they were placed into posts.

A quick review

Live Writer provides a tool on the Insert tab, Photo album, that downloads images from a SkyDrive album, creates a collage of thumbnails, and generates the necessary hyperlinks to the album. The illustration here shows the command location.

There are two options, “Create online album…” and “Add online album…” For most occasions the second option, to link to an existing album, is the preferred route. The album should be public, or in the vernacular of SkyDrive “Shared with Everyone (public)”.

This option allows importing from and linking to a SkyDrive album that resides in the root of the SkyDrive. That is, you cannot use albums that are sub-folders. This may seem like an unreasonable restriction, but farther down I will show workarounds for that.

You can use any SkyDrive that you have full access to, you are not limited to just one or to your own. If you have the credentials to a SkyDrive (login name and password, and, of course, the right to do so), you can use it in Live Writer. In fact Live Writer will store the credentials so selecting the SkyDrive you want is just a few clicks. The Insert Photo Album dialog is shown here. The first step is to sign in. The dialog asks for the Windows Live ID, this is now called Microsoft account. Note the drop-down arrowhead at the end of the field, this brings up stored credentials. Once you are signed in, the dialog downloads album information. As already mentioned, these are albums in the root location of the SkyDrive. Click on the album you wish to insert and click Insert.

Next, images are downloaded and the default collage is generated. Clicking on the collage enables the Photo Album Tools tab. The ribbon shows the available arrangements and clicking on an “Album style” instantly rearranges the thumbnails. There is also a “Shuffle photos” command – each click re-arranges the size and location of the thumbnails.

The code for the album link already contains the hyperlinks to the album. This is simple and straightforward. It gets a little more complicated if you wish to link to an album that is a sub-folder in another album.

Linking to SkyDrive sub-folders

The approach outlined above does not work for sub-folders, they are simply not shown in the Insert Photo Album dialog. So there are two approaches you can take.

Relocate sub-folder to root

Move the sub-folder temporarily to the SkyDrive root. The latest version of SkyDrive permits moving any folder to any other or to the root. This is very quick. Do be careful that there are no naming conflicts, if necessary rename the folder first before moving it.

After the folder, or album has been moved to the root the Live Writer insert tool can be used as described above. Once the post is completed and saved, the folder can be moved back to its original location. SkyDrive is smart enough to internally take care of all the links. Yes, that is right, you do not have to worry about the folder URL.

Make your own collage

The other method is to make your own collage, insert that as a picture, then link it to the SkyDrive album. There are numerous ways to make a collage, one of the easiest is using Picasa.

Picasa lets you set the background color (or a picture) so you can match your blog background. Each photo can be sized, rotated and shown on top or sent to back.  Making a collage this way lets you arrange it just the way you like. Title the completed collage with whatever message you want to show in the tooltip. Then insert the collage picture into the post in Live Writer.

Now all that is left is to link it to your SkyDrive album. That is also quick and easy.

Open your SkyDrive album. Click on the first photo so it is shown large. Click on the URL in the browser address bar. Click Ctrl-C to save the URL to the clipboard. Then use the Hyperlink tool in Live Writer to assign that link to the picture.

Here is how such an album link would appear.  I chose the title “view album of Tall Ships in Savannah”. Try it.

Tall Ships in Savannah

For a post in my photo blog Gallery Ludwig click on the picture below. This photo was inserted and then rotated in Live Writer. Live Writer has an array of useful Picture Tools.

.:.

© 2012 Ludwig Keck