Necessary tips for blogger?

Are you a blogger? And are you using Windows? Then I could help you with your blogging. Did you know about Windows Live Writer? I guess not! It’s not something to be separately purchased, nor a 3rd party software. You may be surprised, but it has been there all the time though we didn’t know about it. I found this out somewhere, I can’t exactly remember, but this tool is pretty awesome when it comes to blogging. It can easily be integrated with blogger. (and with wordpress and many other tools as well) I’m using blogger, so I checked with it and I’m even posting this via Live Writer.

The out-of-the-box version of Windows Live Writer is pretty powerful, but you can get more out of it by upgrading it. You can download the Windows Live Essentials pack and custom install it.

Remove the unwanted stuff and customize the install.

Now you can open the Live Writer. But you might not be able to find it. To open it just type,

Windows Live Writer in your start menu search bar.

Once you open the Live writer for the first time, it’ll prompt you to integrate your blog. (after you accept their agreement of course. )

You can select the service you want from the above list. Since I’m using blogger I selected Other services. Hit next after that.

Enter the details of your blog and provide authentication. You’ll need an active internet connection from here onwards.

It’ll start loading your blog details.

Set the name of your blog here. (Not that important though)

This step is pretty important. Here it asks to fetch the theme of your blog. To do this it needs to publish a temporary post which will be deleted automatically afterwards. Select yes and let it do it’s work and fetch the theme.

IMPORTANT: If you’re using an app like NetworkedBlogs,you need to be careful here. Although the temporary post that is published by the Live Writer is deleted, the post, posted on facebook by NetworkedBlogs would NOT be deleted. You have to manually delete it from your facebook account.

This is how the interface looks like when you are done with fetching the template and all. Pretty cool isn’t it?

There are lots of cool features available via Live Writer for us, bloggers.

You can easily insert images + add a watermark to it.

Add various effects to your images.

Easily add tables to the post.


Add emoticons.

And finally when you’re done with the post, you can preview it and see how it would look in the actual blog. See the bottom left corner for viewing options.

Now if you’re ready to post this to your blog, you have two options. You can either post it straight to your blog or you can post it to the blogger dashboard as a draft.

I only mentioned some basic tools that we can use. Play around with the Live Writer and you'll find more stuff.

[EDITED]

You can add more functionality to your Live writer by installing Windows Live Writer Plug-ins. Download plugins from here.

I hope this tutorial was helpful for you all. Happy blogging! Tell me your experiences in the comments.