Almost Somewhere

Microsoft has released an excellent blog editor called the Windows Live Writer. It’s still in beta. Get it here: Windows Live Writer Beta. I’m trying it out now and so far, I think it’s cool!

When I upgraded to Microsoft Office 2007, I saw that Word 2007 supports publishing to blogs. It was a bit of a hassle to configure at first but wasn’t so bad. I did not expect Word 2007 to produce good HTML for the blog, given past record of Word-generated HTML. I was mildly surprised, actually. I really like the graphic tools – saved me lots of time from the photo editor (I was using Paint.Net and sometimes, Gimp). I also like that it uploads all the images unlike when using the WordPress editor where it’s a bit of a hassle to insert pictures.

After reading an article in the newspaper, I tried the Flock browser. It’s cool, especially the "Blog This" function. However, I have some issues with the limited features of the editor. So, I turned back to Word 2007 or just use the online WordPress editor.

Then today, I get an email from Microsoft about this wonderful tool and decided to try it out. It’s a small download (5.4MB) and quite easy to install. However, it didn’t work right away with my WordPress server. It’s a beta, so that’s expected.

When I try to connect, it says: 403 (Forbidden). I was confused and login to the web server to check what’s wrong especially with the user access. The xmlrpc.php file got proper user access So, I updated WordPress to version 2.2 thinking that maybe that’s the problem. But I still get the error. It turns out that Windows Live Writer (WLW) claims it is Internet Explorer but does not send the ‘Accept’ header. I have the Bad Behavior plug-in in WordPress and it doesn’t like anything that claims to be IE but does not send the header. I found a solution from James McKay here: http://www.jamesmckay.net/2007/06/bad-behavior-does-not-like-windows-live-writer.

After I put the solution, I still cannot connect. Now WLW give this error:  Invalid Server Response – The response to the blogger.getUsersBlog method received from the weblog server was invalid. Invalid response document returned from XmlRpc server. What? I was confused. I saw somewhere that it could be due to a PHP bug and the solution is to add $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA = file_get_contents('php://input'); to the top of xmlrpc.php. But I saw in my xmlrpc.php that there’s already some code to handle that bug. I added it anyway but I still have the problem.

So I try visiting this blog and saw some error message from Bad behavior. It seems that in my haste, I wrongly copied James McKay’s solution and now Bad Behavior was behaving badly :). After I recopied the solution, it works and here I am typing away happily in WLW!

I think this tool is cool! I’ll write more about it later… Coming soon!

You can see more about the problems WLW have with WordPress here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Windows_Live_Writer_Help.

Edit: When trying to add another blog to Windows Live Writer, I had the "403 Forbidden" problem. However, I don’t have the Bad Behavior plugin for that blog. So, as a note to myself, make sure there’s a ".htaccess" file in the folder where "xmlrpc.php" is to allow Windows Live Writer to connect. The content of ".htaccess" should have: <Files xmlrpc.php>SecFilterInheritance Off</Files>.