gmcdonald

Just for the hell of testing it out, I installed Windows Live Writer (WLW) so I could blog from a desktop app and try out the Roller weblog API.

First off, in the global admin config, tick the ‘Enable Blogger / MetaWeblog API’ option and save. Then in the blog config ‘Enable weblog client support’.

Open WLW and goto Blogs –> Add Blog Account. Choose ‘Other Blog Service’. Add in your blogs homepage, your username and password to that blog, click next, give it a nickname and then Finish. Now you can start blogging from within the comfort (?) of WLW.

So, you have a twitter account, and you want to tweet to your faithful flock that you have just made a blog post. Goto Tools –> Options –> Plugins and click on ‘Add new plugin’. Your browser will open and take you to someone on gallery.live.com where you can download the twitter notify extension.Double Click to install it, restart WLW and goto Tools –> Options –> Plugins and tick the box to enable twitter plugin (something I failed to do first time around thinking installing it would enable it by default!)

Now, create your blog post as normal in WLW and hit Publish. The first time you do this a box will pop up asking for your twitter login details, after which it is automatic (but still with a confirmation that you wish to tweet that post). And there you have it, a small snippet of the blog intro with a tinyurl to your blog post. Neat. (for the easily pleased at least) And yes, this post was made this way, dogfood blah blah.