Sourcing images from Flickr
Posted by Ludwig in General, sourcing images on August 15, 2011
To show a photo in a post it has to be located somewhere on the Internet. You can use Windows Live Writer to upload images to your blog service image store, or you can do it manually. You can also insert the address of a photo stored on another service on the web. Flickr makes it particularly easy to source photos for a blog.
Getting your photos to Flickr
Flickr, the popular photo-sharing service from Yahoo!, is widely used by bloggers for their photo storage. To use it, you need an account, of course. Flickr offers a free account and a Pro account, for many bloggers the free account is quite sufficient. 
Windows Live Photo Gallery can upload photos directly to your Flickr account. To upload, select the thumbnails then click the Flickr symbol in the Share group of the Home ribbon.
If this is the first time you are uploading to Flicker, you will see a dialog telling you that “Windows Live requires your authorization before you can publish on Flickr”. The Authorize button opens the browser and takes you to your Flickr account. Sign in and step through the authorization process. Close the browser when finished. Back in the Live Gallery dialog, click Authorize again and the upload process starts. You need to go through this only once. After that, Live Gallery will remember the settings and the upload proceeds smoothly.
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The upload dialog allows you to choose the account and the “set”, Flickr-speak for album, for the uploads (ignore this, it doesn’t work), you can also specify the “Photo size”. Live Gallery will resize your photo to this size before uploading. I suggest you choose 1024 pixels. More on this shortly. The last option is “Public” or “Private” (several settings). Leave this on public. Then click Publish. After the upload the browser opens and you can view your uploads in Flickr and select the set and add other details.
If you use the free Flickr account, your original uploaded photos will be inaccessible. Flickr makes JPG copies, the largest being 1024 pixels on the largest side, plus several smaller ones. These will be accessible to you. For use in a blog, you do not even need the 1024 px size, however it might be nice to link to the large size so your readers can see it in good detail. More on this below.
Getting the URL for Flickr photos
Once you have photos on Flickr, you will need the web address, URL, of a photo to insert into a blog post. Go to your Flicker photos and select the one of interest. Click on Actions (above photo on left) and select View all sizes. Select the size that you wish to insert into your post, or the next larger size if what you want is not there.
Right-click on the image. In the menu select the web address. If you are using Internet Explorer, click Properties to get to the address. Copy the address (Ctrl+C). Paste the URL in the Live Writer Insert – Picture – From the web… dialog.
The URL you got is the address for the actual image. There is one other address you will want. Back in the Flickr page for the photo, click on Share (see illustration here). Click in the text box under Grab the link and copy this address. This address is actually the address of the Flickr page for this photo.
You can use this as the hyperlink assigned to the image in your post. Maybe this is getting ahead of the story just a bit, so let’s go over the details for inserting a photo into a blog post.
Inserting a picture in Windows Live Writer
Above I explained how to get two web addresses, one to the image itself, the other to the Flickr page that shows the photo. Here is how to insert the photo into the text of a blog post in Live Writer.
Pick the place for the image. In the Insert group (Home tab), or Media group (Insert tab), click Picture. 
Click From the web… in the dropdown menu. This opens an “Insert web image” dialog. Paste the URL of the image into the the address field. A view of the photo will be shown in the main area. If you do not see this small image, then the address you entered is not valid. The Flickr page address will not work here. This must be the URL of an actual image. Click Insert and the picture will be placed into your post text. I have done this here with the barn photo.
Note that when you click on this picture, the “Picture Tools” ribbon will be available. There will be just two “Picture styles” offered. A frame (shown in blue) or no frame. This is true for all images sourced from a web location. 
The Size options will be available. The best size to use is Original, that is as it is stored in Flickr. You can choose a smaller size, even specify the number of pixels for width or height. When a reader views your post, the stored size is downloaded to the browser and resized as specified. If you chose Original then that resizing will not be needed. You can select a larger size than original and the browser will scale the image up. It will, of course, loose resolution, so this is not recommended.
You will want to offer your reader a larger view of your photo, so send your fan back to your Flickr photo. You can use a hyperlink to the largest image that was shown in the Flickr “View all sizes” page. Such a link will show the photo bare of any other details in the browser. It may not be centered or set in an appealing way.
This is where the other address comes in. It takes your reader to the photo page with all the additional info around it. Your reader can click the photo to see it in the slide view mode. You can take her or him directly to that view. Remember the address you got for the page, it looks like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ludwigkeck/5711283156/ If you append the word “lightbox” to it, like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ludwigkeck/5711283156/lightbox then it takes your reader directly to the photo in slide view mode. Much more appealing.
To attach a hyperlink, click on the picture, then click the Hyperlink icon in the ribbon. Paste the Flickr page address into the address field, and click OK. I have done this on the little barn photo above, click on it to see how it works.
There is more. You can take your reader directly to a running slide show of one of your sets on Flickr. Here is how:
Link to a Flickr slide show
Back on your Flickr page, select the set you wish to show. In the upper right above the thumbnails, click Slideshow.
Once the slide show starts, move the pointer to the upper right corner and click Share. In the dialog you can copy the address to the slide show. Click in the field to select it, then press Ctrl+C to copy it. It will look like this: http://www.flickr.com//photos/ludwigkeck/sets/72157626699391108/show/
You can attach that hyperlink to an image, like I have done here, or just show it in your post, like just above.
When your reader clicks on such a link, the Flickr slide show will start. Try it here on the picture on the left.
So you see, Flickr makes sourcing photos for your blog quite easy. There are some rules that Flickr has set up concerning such use. I will quote from the Flickr Community Guidelines:
Flickr Community Guidelines – excerpts:
- Do link back to Flickr when you post your Flickr content elsewhere.
Flickr makes it possible to post content hosted on Flickr to other web sites. However, pages on other web sites that display content hosted on flickr.com must provide a link from each photo or video back to its page on Flickr. This provides a way to get more information about the content and the photographer. - Don’t use your account to host web graphics, like logos and banners.
If we find you using your account to host graphic elements of web page designs, logos, icons, and other non-photographic elements on other web sites, we will warn you or delete your account. - Do upload content that you’ve created.
Respect the copyright of others. This means don’t steal photos or videos that other people have shared and pass them off as your own. (That’s what favorites are for.) - Don’t upload anything that isn’t yours.
This includes other people’s photos, video, and/or stuff you’ve copied or collected from around the Internet. Accounts that consist primarily of such collections may be deleted at any time.
These rules help us all, so be observant of them.
Other articles you might like to view:
- Sourcing images from the new SkyDrive
- “Insert Picture” in Live Writer – a look behind the curtain
- A SkyDrive Photo Album in your Blog Post
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© 2011 Ludwig Keck
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“Insert Picture” in Live Writer – a look behind the curtain
Posted by Ludwig in General, sourcing images on August 13, 2011
Windows Live Writer makes inserting pictures so easy that many bloggers never need to know what happens behind the “curtain”. Here is a quick look and review of the process.
There are two methods shown in the Insert – Picture menu: “From your computer…” and “From the web…”. A third method is simply to paste an image from the clipboard. The first image here was inserted by the paste, Ctrl+V, method.
Just so I can demonstrate what happens, here is a picture inserted by the “From your computer…” route.
In Live Writer the images can be positioned, scaled, framed, even artistically modified and a watermark can be added. It all looks just as it will appear in the published post.
When you click the Source tab (near bottom left of the Live Writer window) you see something like this:
There are no images there, just text. Actually HTML code. The references to the pictures, excerpted from the code, are like this:
- … href=”$image[5].png” … src=”$image_thumb[3].png” …
- … href=”$mothA15[3].jpg” … src=”$mothA15_thumb.jpg” …
- … href=”$LWB-110813-02[5].png” … src=”$LWB-110813-02_thumb[3].png” …
No such files exist on my computer, I do have a “mothA15.jpg” and a “LWB-110813-02.jpg” but these designations in the code are strange, there is the extra dollar-sign, $, and the bracketed numbers, as well as the “_thumb” entries, what is that all about? Well, this is how Live Writer keeps track of the images – these actually are saved on the computer.
When the post is published these images are uploaded to the blog site folder for storing images. To demonstrate where they go, I did a “Post draft to blog” command (Home – Publish group) of this post. This being a WordPress blog, I then opened my WordPress Dashboard and opened Posts. The draft was listed on top, of course. I opened it in Edit mode and clicked the HTML tab. There was the code, except now the references to the images were like this:
- href=”http://livewriterbasics.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/image4.png”
- src=”http://livewriterbasics.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/image_thumb4.png”
- href=”http://livewriterbasics.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/motha15.jpg”
- src=”http://livewriterbasics.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/motha15_thumb.jpg”
- href=”http://livewriterbasics.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/lwb-110813-02.png”
- src=”http://livewriterbasics.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/lwb-110813-02_thumb.png”
Notice that in the upload process the “funny” references from before now are full web addresses, URLs, to the WordPress location.
WordPress makes it a bit easier to see and understand because the images can now be found in your Media Library.
Why are there two of each? There is the image that is shown in the post (the “_thumb”) and also the larger image that the reader sees when clicking on a picture in an article.
So this was a little peek behind the curtain of Live Writer showing what happens when you insert images from your computer into a post.
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© 2011 Ludwig Keck
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When Live Writer is WYSInotquiteWYG
Windows Live Writer has justifiably been listed among the best blogging tools available, and often at the top of the heap. It is easy to use and allows you to prepare your blog in the font, style, and colors of your blog. You see exactly what the post will look like in your blog. Well – mostly. There are some “gotchas” and some situations when WYSIWYG – what you see is what you get – becomes WYSInotquiteWYG – what you see is not quite what you get.
Live Writer downloads the design properties from your blog site, your template if you use Blogger, your theme if you use WordPress.
This topic started quite a while back when I selected the “Fusion” theme for this blog and added my own header graphic. Windows Live Writer does not seem to be able to handle this theme as nicely as it does others. It also downloaded the graphic and overlays it on the text with the result shown in the left illustration.
In “Preview” the layout and text is properly rendered. This bothered me, but I liked the theme, so I just started a new post in another theme by selecting one of my other blogs in the Publish group (Home tab). This worked well enough until I overlooked a serious typo in a post – it was hidden by the graphic, and I did not notice it until after I published. Yes, I should have checked it in Preview. Of course, it stood out like a sore thumb once published. I corrected the mistake and republished. This feature works very well, corrections are quickly made. There is a big “gotcha”, however: The feeds and notifications to Twitter, Facebook, etc. are made on the first publication, so they go out with all the errors.
Layout problems
I like to include a lot of illustrations, some I set to the left, some to the right, and often I have illustrations side-by-side. It is easy to leave a bit of room and hit the Return key to move text to below a couple if pictures. It may look “pixel perfect” in the Edit window, and even the Preview often is correct, but in the published post a layout error might creep in.
The default margin settings around pictures do not always correspond to the published settings. This also can be a source of positioning errors of illustrations.
Unanticipated layout problems in RSS readers and emails
There is one area where WYSIWYG just can’t work: In RSS feed and email subscriptions. 
If you offer your readers the option of getting RSS or email feeds of your post, and indeed you should, you need to anticipate what can go wrong when your post is displayed in an RSS reader or in an email. There is, of course, no way for Live Writer to help you with that.
Here is an illustration of such a problem. The small image was correctly positioned to the right of the larger one. It looks fine in the blog post, but in Google Reader the picture slipped and there was a large blank area. Sure, all the text is there and no one complained. One suggestion: Always place image anchor positions (you can see them best in Source view) at the beginning or end of a sentence. When an image slips, at least the text is not split in mid-sentence. Here is a problem a bit more troublesome:
Here the illustration did not have proper margin settings for the top and it overlaps text. In this case the text is still readable, but that might not always be the case. My advise: Always set top and bottom margins (I use mostly 5 pixels).
Also keep in mind that RSS readers will not render your background color or image, and will likely show the text in black and not necessarily in the color you or your theme specify. I have seen one post where the author switched to white text on a gray background. Google Reader showed it as white text on a white background – totally unreadable. Another text color that is difficult to read when shown on white is yellow.
Emails – another problem
When a reader receives your post as an email all bets are off. Email text is wrapped to fit the window. The display window is totally under the control of your reader. You can see in these illustrations how the appearance of a post is totally at the mercy of the email window. There is nothing you can do about that except to keep this situation in mind.
No doubt you will find some discrepancies of your own. Just take WYSIWYG with a grain of salt, or a “not quite” in mind.
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© 2011 Ludwig Keck
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A SkyDrive Photo Album in your Blog Post
Posted by Ludwig in sourcing images on August 9, 2011
Sometimes a single photo just is not enough. Windows Live Writer offers an attractive way to insert a link to a SkyDrive album. You can select from a number of layouts to show thumbnails from the album.
Here is an album of photos from the Georgia Botanical Garden. This is a working link, of course, just click on any part of it to see the SkyDrive album.
Here is the procedure:
As you are writing your article in Windows Live Writer , click the Insert tab. In the Media group click Photo Album, then select Add online album… The command is illustrated here.
If you are signed in to Live Writer the insert dialog will download information from your SkyDrive. You can change to another account by clicking Switch user.
Select the album that you wish to insert by clicking the thumbnail, then click Insert.
The default layout, called “Album style”, is the first one shown in the Photo Album Tools Ribbon which comes up when the album set is clicked. Note that there is a Shuffle photos command to change the order of the thumbnails in the set.
Illustrated below is the Photo Album Tools Ribbon and a selection of the album styles that are available. Just click on another style to rearrange the looks of the thumbnails.
The title of the album will be shown as it is on SkyDrive. This can be edited by just editing the text – as you can see in this article.
There will be two links added to the thumbnail set, “VIEW SLIDE SHOW” and “DOWNLOAD ALL”. These cannot be removed. The “VIEW…” link with take your viewer to your SkyDrive album. There the visitor can step through the photos – unfortunately the automatically running slide show is no longer available (as of July 2011). Your visitor can download the album from the blog or from the SkyDrive album. Please note that visitors have access to all of the public folders in your SkyDrive.
You can really dress up a post with these thumbnail sets and make your photos in SkyDrive available to your readers.
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© 2011 Ludwig Keck
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Sourcing images from the new SkyDrive
Posted by Ludwig in sourcing images on June 26, 2011
UPDATE 10 December 2011: SkyDrive has been updated, URLs are again easily accessible. See Sourcing photos from SkyDrive is now easy.
Illustrating blogs with images makes them more interesting and informative and Live Writer makes the process of inserting pictures very easy. You can use photos from your computer and Live Writer takes care of uploading them to your blog file store. Images can also be sourced from other locations on the
web. My post “Sourcing blog post images from SkyDrive” explained the process in detail. The recent facelift of SkyDrive introduced changes that necessitates these revised instructions.
The look of the new SkyDrive has been handsomely improved, more of that is covered in my post “The new SkyDrive – Bouquets and Brickbats”. When you display an album the thumbnails are larger and show the image in correct proportions. The next level is similar to the slide show view in the previous version.
There is no additional view, as before, that shows the image in an otherwise empty browser window. That is where one got the image URL in the past.
Sourcing with “Embed” code
REVISED AFTER POST – The “embed” code does not work! It is stripped during publishing.
DO NOT USE THIS METHOD!
Before inserting an image from your SkyDrive, make sure that the album containing the photo is shared publicly. 
The easiest way to bring a picture from SkyDrive to a blog post is the “embed” method. Note the Sharing group in the information pane to the right of the photo. There is a link “Embed”. Click it to obtain the code. In the next page click in the code box. It will be selected, highlighted, and you can copy it with Ctrl+C to the clipboard. Then, in Windows Live Writer, just place the pointer where you want the image and press Ctrl+V to paste it in. You don’t need to do this in Source view, this works fine in Edit view. Here is what you get:
It looks like this and there is a hyperlink to the SkyDrive page of this image. It work in Preview, but during publishing the code appears to get stripped.
Nice, quick, you couldn’t ask for more. Or could you? Click on the image and the tools in the Ribbon are greyed out. There is no Picture Tools tab. You cannot change the size, location, nor specify text wrapping. Yes, clever blogging geeks can make changes to the code in Source view, but even that is a rather aggravating. If you can be happy with an illustration as shown here, you can use this method. There is one nice feature: A hyperlink is already present that takes the reader to the full view of the image in SkyDrive, with access to the other pictures in the album (and other public albums and files). If this is not to your liking there is another way.
When this is published all you get is an URL text that may or may not connect to something. So this method does not work! Here in Windows Live Writer is an image that looks right and works in preview, but see what you really get in the actual published post:
Sourcing the image directly
To get control over the image size and placement you can get the address to the i
mage – sort of. In the full view SkyDrive, right-click the image. You may see Copy image location, or Copy image URL, or Copy image address. Some browser do not offer the image address (URL) directly, including Internet Explorer, but you can get it by clicking Properties at the bottom of the menu and then copying it from the properties listing. This address can be used in the Live Writer Insert Picture dialog. 
Click Picture in the Insert group of the Ribbon, then click From the web… In the next dialog paste (Ctrl+V) the address of the image. A preview of the image will be shown. If you don’t get the preview, you did not get the address correctly.
Click Insert and the picture will be inserted full size into your post. It likely will spill over beyond the post margin. Click on the picture to select it, the Picture Tools tab will be displayed. Click Lock aspect ratio, then select a size, Small, Medium or Large. You can manually set the size, of course. You can set the alignment and margins around the picture and a simple frame, or none, as is usual with web-sourced images. Do not attach a hyperlink to the address you used for the picture. It will not work. You cannot show the image full-size in a browser window. You can get the address of the image in SkyDrive from the browser address bar. This will give your reader access to that image in your SkyDrive and all other public material.
If you do not wish your reader to have access to your SkyDrive album (and more), simply set the link setting in Picture Tools – Properties to No link.
Sadly, the self-running slide show feature is no longer available in SkyDrive. Let’s hope that this is just a temporary shortcoming.
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© 2011 Ludwig Keck
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Creating a Static Page on your Blog
Static pages can be quite useful beyond the “About Us” or “Contact Us” pages that are so common. This blog has a “Resources” page and there are many ways to enhance a blog with pages. Creating in page in Windows Live Writer is just as easy as preparing a blog post – if your blog is hosted by WordPress. Just click the File 
tab, move the pointer down to New post and over to the right to Page page. Hovering on New page brings up the screen tip balloon. It show the keystroke for initiating a new page, Ctrl+G, and also a disclaimer: “Not supported by all blog service providers”.
For a WordPress blog page, just create the page as easily you would a regular post, then publish it as you would a post. You may want to arrange the menu location in your WordPress Dashboard. That’s all there is to it.
If your blog service provider does not support creating a page in Live Writer you can still use it for the detail work. Blogger is one of the services that does not support creating a page in Live Writer. To get a page started, proceed as follows:
In your Blogger Dashboard click the Posting tab, then Edit Pages. Click the NEW PAGE button. Give the page a title, then click SAVED to save the page as a draft. The actual page composition can now be done in Live Writer. Instead of creating a page as you would for a WordPress blog, just prepare a post draft with all the information you want on the page. When the page is done, copy the HTML source code and paste it into the Blogger editor – I will come to the details shortly.
There is one very important “gotcha”: Any images must be sourced “From the web…”. The reason is, Live Writer will not be used to publish the page and so it can’t upload your images. Upload the images manually. I like to upload images to my SkyDrive and source them from there. Since SkyDrive provides a generous amount of storage this is an efficient place even though getting the image URL is a bit of a hassle. See my post “Sourcing content for your WordPress gallery page” for the details of getting the image URL for a picture on your SkyDrive.
When you have finished the page in Live Writer, click on the Source tab in the lower left of the window. In the source window, select all the 
code, use Ctrl+A. Then copy the code onto the clipboard with Ctrl+C. Now go back to your Blogger Dashboard and edit your page draft. Be sure the Edit HTLM tab is selected. Just paste the code from Live Writer into the main window, use Ctrl+V. You can inspect the looks of the page with the Compose tab. Then publish it with PUBLISH PAGE.
These steps don’t really add any extra work as you would have had to do most of the steps anyway if you used the Blogger online editor. Using Live Writer makes the preparation of a page as easy as preparing a post, the publishing steps are not much of a chore.
Of course, you can keep the draft copy of the page so you can come back in the future to add to it or modify it.
The illustration here shows part of the HTLM code (the right portion is cut off in the image) of my page “Ludwig’s Galleries” of my Blogger blog Café Ludwig.
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© 2011 Ludwig Keck
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Getting found with Technorati
Posted by Ludwig in Outside posts on June 6, 2011
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This is a post to establish ownership for Technorati.
One of the pleasant things about blogging is that it provides a way for finding new readers and friends. This, like many other blogs, is aimed at a specific audience, but there may be many other folks who are looking for information on this topic. The topic of this blog is using Windows Live Writer for preparing blog posts. It is intended for beginning bloggers.
One way of helping others is to provide references and links to blogs covering similar topics. Technorati is a quick way to connect with others. Just click on one of the terms below and Technorati will show other blogs covering this topic.
This specific post includes a code to help Technorati verify the ownership. If you would like to learn more about Technorati and their services, click on the first term below.
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Connect Windows Live Writer to your Blog
This post was first published over at Ask Ludwig, but it fits the topic and is still current so I am reposting it here.
Windows Live Writer is an amazingly powerful, yet simple to use tool for preparing blog posts. If you are not using it, you should! Get it here: explore.live.com/windows-live-writer.
To connect Writer to your WordPress blog (other blogs connect just as simple) proceed as follows:
Open Live Writer.
At first time use, Writer walks the user through the setup procedure.
Click Next.
The next dialog ask about what service you are using.
In this case click WordPress. If you are using another service, this is where to make the selection.
Click Next.
The next dialog asks for the blog address, your user name and password.
For the web address enter the name of your blog followed by the blog service address, like this:
galleryludwig.wordpress.com
The dialog will add the http:// prefix, you need not worry about it.
Click Remember my password so the checkbox is checked. This will make later use simple.
Click Next.
Writer will set up the blog and download the template, “theme”, information from your blog.
This is how Writer will then use the layout, color scheme, fonts, etc. to be able to make writing posts a simple wysiwyg (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) process.
The next dialog will show the blog title that you have set up in your blog. You can leave this as is, or enter some 
other descriptive term.
There is an option to “Share my blog on Windows Live”. Click this to make this connection.
Your browser will open. You will need to sign in to your Windows Live service.
Another windows ask for confirmation to connect WordPress to Windows Live.
Click the Connect button or Cancel should you wish to skip this feature.
You can then close the browser and continue in Writer.
Click Finish.
Writer opens with the theme loaded. Here is an illustration of such an initial window:
Note the window color, font, headers, etc. all there just as you have defined them by the theme you set up.
All you need to do now is enter a post title, the actual post text and click Publish (on the Home tab) to get the post on your blog. It really is that simple.
Note: If you want to configure an additional blog or skipped the initial configuring, click File (the button in upper left), then Options, then Accounts. There is an Add button, click that and it takes you to the “What blog service…” dialog as illustrated above.
Notice the Blog Account tab on the 
Windows Live Writer Ribbon. Click that and you have access to your blog and your blog account. Click Dashboard and your browser opens and takes you right to your WordPress dashboard (you may have to sign in, set the “remember me” options to get right in on future visits).
Note: If you are using another blog service, these option may be different or some may be missing.
Happy blogging!
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© 2011 Ludwig Keck
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Getting Started–Setting up Your Blog
A number of blogging services provide free blogs and others blogs at a modest cost. Here we will concentrate on two of the larger services: WordPress and Blogger. Setting up your blog is simple enough, the blogging services make that very easy, there are some items that you should consider carefully.
Your blog is a website of your own. Blogger and WordPress set up your site when you sign up and you can define the details later and modify it to reflect your style and a “look and feel” that suits your topics. Here are images of the home pages at Blogger and WordPress.
Each has a button to get you started. The next page is similar a sign-up page for getting an email or similar account.
Your first decision is to select a web address for your blog. Such addresses take the form myblog.wordpress.com on WordPress, on Blogger it is myblog.blogspot.com.
The hard part is the “myblog” name. Most people select a term that is descriptive of what the blog is all about – this blog here uses “livewriterbasics” because this is the general topic. There is nothing wrong with a whimsical name. Many people use their own name for their blog address. As you would expect, to get a blog account you need to a user name and password so you can log into your account securely. The blogging service also needs an email address so information and other communications can be sent to you. That is about it, click Sign up and your blog will be set up.
The blogging service takes you to your “dashboard”. Here the various account and design details can be taken care of. Each blogging service has a default design. Your blog will be set up with that design. You can make changes later but some you should do right away. For a WordPress blog go to the General page (under Settings in the navigation pane on the left). Here you can assign the title that should be featured on your blog. There are other choices and options, but this blog is about Windows Live Writer, there are numerous other sources that can help you with the details. Each blogging service has good tutorials that get you going. Take advantage of those help tools.
You can create and publish posts from your blog dashboard. Windows Live Writer makes that a lot easier. So this will suffice for this post. How to get going with Windows Live Writer is the topic of another post.
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© 2011 Ludwig Keck
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Windows Live Writer–Overview
Windows Live Writer is a desktop application for preparing and publishing blog posts. It supports the major blogging services like Blogger, LiveJournal, and TypePad and is particularly well suited for publishing to WordPress.
Microsoft provides Windows Live Writer as part of the free Windows Live Essentials family of applications. The current version, Windows Live Writer 2011, offers a “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” authoring interface with the familiar “Ribbon” look and feel of Microsoft Word 2010 and other recent Microsoft applications.
In use, Live Writer uses the blog theme settings so spacing, fonts, and similar elements, even background, correspond to the design set up in the blog account. All the normal authoring functions are available including spell checking.
For text editing in addition to normal (paragraph) text, six heading levels (“h1” – “h6” HTML tags) can be used and display in the style settings of the theme. Text formatting offers seven font sizes, a large pallet of colors, and the full array of font faces installed on the computer – something that might mislead the user into using a font that is not supported on the blog reader’s computer.
Photos can be inserted from the local computer or by supplying a web address. The pictures can be positioned, scaled and various effect options can be applied, even a watermark. Live Writer prepares the modified images and uploads them to the blog sites media folder. The image handling is very rich and amazingly easy to use. In addition to photos, videos from YouTube can be inserted, as can maps from Bing Maps. 
Live Writer generates HTML code which can be inspected and edited by just clicking the “Source” tab. The online appearance can be checked with the “Preview” tab. Publishing to the blog is just a one click operation as well.
Although there are minor faults, the tool is extremely easy to use and makes blogging a pleasure.
The 2011 version, released as part of “Wave 4” in September 2010, can be used in Windows 7 and Windows Vista. An earlier version is available for user operating on Windows XP.
Microsoft provides only rudimentary tutorial support online, and the “Help” button invokes a call to the Windows Live Writer Help Center. The Windows Live Solution Center has a forum for questions about Live Writer and Windows Live Writer tips and know-how are the topics of a few blogs. The newest one is Live Writer Basics right here.
This article was first published as Windows Live Writer on Blogcritics.
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© 2011 Ludwig Keck
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