Sundance

Important updat - 7th October 2007

If you are using a recently downloaded version of windows live writer the information in this post is no longer valid. Please read this post for an easy walkthrough to setup newer versions of Windows Live Writer for Drupal blogging.

I found making the Drupal 5.1 Ping module difficult to configure and when I made it work it didn't really do what I wanted it to do. All I needed was to ping a couple of decent servers with the completion of each blog post. The ping module was set to ping www.ping-o-matic.com when cron was run if the front page had changed. There were two problems with this:

- Often a Webmaster doesn't want a blog to appear on the front page.

- For whatever reason my pings didn't seem to be getting through anyway, not at least to any of the mojor blog search engines.

All I could do was to visit a decent pinging service site, like www.pingates.com and do it manually. I decided to see if I could set up Windows Live Writer to do it all for me, as it has the built in capacity, which I have tried and tested, to ping multiple servers.

Setting up Windows Live Writer is a little bit tricky.

1) In Windows Live Writer go to Weblog>Add Weblog Account

2) From the choices select "another weblog service"

3) On the next page fill in the URL with the homepage of your blog e.g. http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/1 and your username and password.

4) On the next screen select your weblog provider as WordPress(Custom Installation).

5) Then, swap this

http:////xmlrpc.php

for this:

http://www.MyDomain.com/xmlrpc.php

6) In the next screen select your blog from the list and click Next.

All done!

A few things you need to know: Navigate to the page where your blog and click edit. In Drupal's Input Format section, directly underneath the "body" select "full html" in order to preserve your formatting.

You can configure Windows Live Writer to ping servers in Tools>Preferences>ping servers