How to Blog Easy with Wordpress

Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer makes blog composing, posting and updating an easy and hassle-free experience. This article will talk about how you can use Windows Live Writer with Wordpress, a free website builder that allows you to create a website with an integrated blogging platform.

If you use the free website builder Wordpress to power your blog, you know that it’s easy to compose posts, edit your blogs and create pages from the Wordpress Dashboard, right? However, this requires you to get online, open your browser, and log-in in order to compose your blog post or create a new page. That’s not a lot of work but what if I tell you there’s an easier, more hassle-free way?

As a busy website builder and blogger, I was in search of a desktop blogging client that would allow me to compose blog posts even when I’m not online. After some searching, I found out that a few years ago, Microsoft released a desktop blogging client for writing posts and managing your blog right from your desktop, regardless of whether you are online or not? Yes, they did and it’s called the Windows Live Writer.

Some Cool Features The Windows Live Writer Includes

A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that uses the theme of your blog as background, a built-in image manipulation feature that lets you control the size of your photo by simply dragging it, adding watermarks, adding drop shadows and other neat stuff like that, a spell checker, Virtual Earth maps integration and whole lot more of other awesome features.

Convinced that you want Windows Live Writer? Great! I’m enumerating below the step-by-step guide on how to install and use Windows Live Writer to update and manage your Wordpress blog posts right from your desktop.

How To Install And Use Windows Live Writer To Update Your Wordpress Blog

  1. First, you need to download Windows Live Writer to your computer. You can find a link to download it from our resources page. Download them in a location you will easily find, like your desktop.
  2. Once download is complete, find the location you downloaded the file and install Windows Live Writer. Once the installation process starts, it may suggest you to install a few other options but you don’t have to install these other options. You can uncheck them if you don’t want them included in the installation ie you don’t have to install Messenger if you don’t want to.
  3. Now that installation has been completed and Windows Live Writer is in your computer, we need to authorize Remote Publishing via XML-RCP from the Wordpress Settings. In layman’s terms, we are going to ask Wordpress to communicate with Windows Live Writer and allow it to update our blog site from our desktop.

Log-in to your Wordpress account via http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin. Once you are on your Dashboard, go to Settings > Writing and check the box that says “Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols.” Save your changes. That’s it!

  1. To start using Windows Live Writer, open it from your Start Menu. From the menu, click Blog > Add Blog Account. First, you will be asked which blog service you use. Choose “Other Blog Service”. Next you will be asked to put in your blog URL, username, and password. Click the “Remember password” box and click “Next”.

Note: You should enter the URL where your blog posts can be read. Some Wordpress site owners set their homepage as static and the blog location is in another page.

  1. Once you are done putting in your account configuration, Windows Live Writer will attempt to communicate with your blog. After a while, it will ask you to make a temporary post so it can detect the blog theme and format settings, click “yes”. The post will be deleted automatically after the test post.
  2. Finally, it will ask you to enter a blog nickname for this account. If everything went correctly, you will see your blog background load and you are ready to start posting right from your desktop!

Tinker with the features Windows Live Writer has to offer and you will be impressed at how you can manipulate photos, include photo albums, add videos, and so on and so forth. It’s the things like this that makes me like to create a website with Wordpress. Blogging has never been this fun!


Why WordPress is the Best Free Website Builder

by Melanie Citron

There’s a reason why WordPress is the world’s most beloved blogging platform and the best free website builder around: It’s because people love what works.

People are attracted to clean, efficient, organized sites that instruct them how to achieve their desired goals in a step-wise fashion, with just a click of the mouse here and a click of the mouse there. People like choices, and colors, and templates, and features, and a finished product that shines.

In short, people like WordPress because WordPress likes people.

WordPress is User-Friendly

WordPress is the most user-friendly website builder, providing website builders ranging from no prior programming experience to top-tier programming Ph.D. students with a playground on which to explore, build, play, and show-off.

Here’s how it works. First you choose a web host—BuildMySiteforFree.com takes the challenge out of that by recommending Blue Host (In addition to many other benefits and savings, people appreciate Blue Host’s quality customer service, having 24/7 help, now, when they need it, and not later when they’ve gotten themselves even deeper in and more stressed out by a problem).—then you download and install the WordPress software (which takes all of one click and less than five minutes), and then you begin designing and building your site by following simple instructions.

WordPress is Packed with Features

The free WordPress web building software offers dozens of free features, including themes and templates to choose from, an integrated stats system, blogs, photo and video uploads, sidebar widgets, and more!

Still not convinced that WordPress is the best free website builder around? Most free website builder programs will help you set up your website, but when it comes to personalizing it, jazzing it up, and truly making it your own, it will leave you high and dry. WordPress will not only help you set up and manage your website, but will make available to you thousands of Plugins that will allow you to further enhance the functionality of your website. Some Plugins cost money, but you’ll have no trouble finding Plugins that suit your needs that are also free.

Popular WordPress Plugins

WordPress is constantly updating their list of Plugins. Here are some of the most popular and most often downloaded WordPress Plugins:

  • Fast and Secure Contact Form
  • Google Analytics for WordPress
  • WordPress Stats
  • Broken Link Checker
  • Advanced Rating and Review Star System
  • WPtouch iPhone Theme
  • WP e-Commerce
  • WP Security Scan
  • Twitter Widget Pro
  • ShareThis
  • Post Videos and Photo Galleries
  • WP-Polls
  • MobilePress
  • SEO Packs
  • And thousands more!

What More Do You Need?

WordPress provides a website builder program for the people. It is attractive, simple, elegant, and comprehensive. And most of all, what the people really like after all, is that it’s free, and provides an endless number of options.

About the author: Melanie Citron is a freelance author who wants the web to be open to everyone. She regularly researches and writes about great free or low cost resources to help all have a great presence on the web. See more of her writing at BuildMySiteforFree.com.