Windows Live Writer is currently one of the most popular applications for blogging. It is an easy to use application that allows anyone to quickly post articles to their blogs in a WYSIWYG fashion. With live previews, its possible to see exactly how your post will look like before you publish the article.

This article will show you how to configure Windows Live Writer to work with your WordPress blog.

Prerequisites

The requirements before you start is that you have downloaded Windows Liver Writer and have it installed on your machine and also that you have a hosted WordPress installation somewhere. It doesn’t matter if the blog is a self-hosted one or one that is hosted on wordpress.com, the steps are the same…

Step 1

NOTE: This may not be required for blogs hosted on wordpress.com. This is typically only required for self-hosted WordPress blogs. In this case, go to Step 2.

Go to your WordPress Admin Dashboard, and under Settings.. Writing, ensure that the following item is checked:

Turning on XML-RPC will allow Windows Live Writer to connect to your WordPress blog. Scroll down and hit “Save Changes” to commit the changes.

Step 2

Start Windows Live Writer, go to the Blogs menu and click on “Add Blog Account…”

Choose “Other Blog Service” and hit Next

Step 3

Enter your web address of your blog, your admin username and password and hit next. If you like you can select “Remember my password”

Step 4

Windows Live Writer will now connect to the blog, analyze and set up the application.

During the analysis process, you may get a dialog box as below:

Hit Yes to this as this will ensure that you can get an accurate preview of your posts in Windows Live Writer.

Once it has completed setting up the application, it will display the following information:

Choose a name that can identify your blog and hit Finish.

Conclusion

That should be it. You can connect to several blogs at the same time in Windows Live Writer. To switch from one blog to another, its as simple as selecting the relevant blog from the Blogs menu in the menu bar.

I’ll set up some more posts later on how to get the best use out of Windows Live Writer. If there is anything in particular that you wish to know, please leave a comment and let us know :)

Relevant Links

• Download Windows Live Writer page: http://download.live.com/writer
• Installing Windows Live Writer on Windows Server 2003