Blog Publishing

I promised to tell you about a cool program for publishing to your blog without even going into Blogger.  It’s called Windows Live Writer and you can download it here. 

Once you download the program, you will enter your Google user name and password and let it know which blog you want to publish to.  Once you do that it will recognize how your blog is formatted and give you the perfect amount of writing space to fit your blog.  Uploading photos is a snap and you no longer need to worry about the order of uploading, like in Blogger.  You can resize your photos quickly without messing in the HTML coding and also crop them and add effects.  Also, like any Windows program, you can always “undo” something with a click of a button before you save it.  Also, you can tilt your photo, like I did below, make it look like a Polaroid and easily add a watermark selecting from a gazillion different font choices. 

As you’re typing your post, you can just drag and drop the photos to different locations.  Oh, you can add tables, insert a photo album, insert a map of a location…the list goes on.  I think you get the message…it’s just SOOOO much easier than Blogger. 

Oh, and if you create your first post in Writer and then get this error message when you try to publish: “The remote server returned an error: (403) forbidden", then do the following.  I don’t know why it works, but it does.  Don’t question the computer Gods. 

1. Go to http://picasaweb.google.com.

2. Log in using the same Google account you use to post to Blogger.

3. Create an empty album called "Windows Live Writer" (without the quotation marks).

Now go back and try to publish.  Works like a charm!  Have fun and come back and thank me later!  ;)  

PS…thanks again, M3, for introducing me to Writer!

PSS…Writer is supposed to work with Windows Live, WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, SharePoint, Community Server, and many more.