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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!