Windows Live Writer (WLW) is a great tool for bloggers who want to make the process of publishing their posts as quickly as possible. It allows you to publish it right from the desktop without logging into your WordPress Blog.
I had been writing and publishing posts using different methods like the default WordPress editor or MS Word, but Windows Live Writer has always been my first choice since I came to know about it in 2007.
Here are few tips that can automate your blogging even more.
Customize the default template and make fonts bigger
Windows Live Writer has a feature of downloading the blog theme so that you can write your posts and see how it will show on the blog.
But is not always that WLW will download your theme and display it correctly. I mean it never detects my current design and the result is awful. Here is how to fix it.
But, in case you are not able to fix it, you can customize the default template and modify it according to your need by making the fonts bigger.
Here is a path to find the file,
C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\template
When you find the file, you can open it in notepad and change the font size of the paragraph and title post.
Here is how the default template of my WLW looks,
Inserting Full Sized Images into the Posts
The another great thing about WLW is that you can inset images to it by simply copy pasting, such as taking a screenshot and directly pasting in a post without having to save it to your desktop and then insert it from there. It simply reduces one step which is quite a relief.
By default the images are inserted with a small width of 240px, have shadows and are hyperlinked to the original image source.
But we like to post images in original size, with no shadows and link to none. We can make the second one the default action so that you don’t have to spend time on all the images to change the size, remove the shadows, unlink etc.
Customize the Dictionary by adding words at once.
WLW has an inbuilt dictionary but it does not get all the new words or technical terms, though you can add them individually but here is a more convenient way to add few words at once.
WLW has a custom dictionary where the new words can be added, here is the path to open the custom dictionary.
%appdata%\Windows Live Writer\Dictionaries\User.dic
Add new words to it, one word per line.
Auto linking the words with your Affiliate/Product links.
If you are promoting a product of yourself or the one you are affiliated with, using auto linking can save you time of finding and linking manually.
Many other small customizations that matter
There are many other small things that can be customized to make the publishing easy and quick. Surprisingly many people use WLW the way it has been installed but customizing it according to your need will save plenty of your time.
