The coding blog of Alastair Smith, a software developer based in Cambridge, UK. Interested in DevOps, Azure, Kubernetes, .NET Core, and VueJS.
I’ve heard many good things about Windows Live Writer as a blogging tool, so I thought I’d give it a go. Drupal’s great an’ all, but entering HTML manually to format your post is so 2001. So, here’s my first post from Live Writer!
[img_assist|nid=128|title={ Insert Obligatory Image Here }|desc=Image © 2007 MichaelMaggs|link=node|align=center|width=400|height=267]
I’ve literally just got it installed, but my impressions are good so far (we’ll see how they change when I hit “Publish”…): Live Writer was an easy download and install – no surprise there, although it did try and give me the rest of the Live tools too – and I just had to add and enable the Drupal Windows Live Writer BlogAPI module. The documentation is detailed and easy to follow, and although it is a little out-of-date it’s still correct.
Sadly, there’s no obvious list of implemented features which is disappointing considering the ambitions of the project maintainers. Some of the proposed features are listed on the setup documentation, and it seems at least some of them have been done; for example, the tags I have already defined are provided as options in Live Writer, and file uploads are apparently working (if you see a picture above, then they are!).
Anyway, here goes nothing…
Update 15 January: since posting this yesterday, I have tidied up the formatting to correct the rendering of the post. Live Writer posts HTML to Drupal (unsurprisingly), but my default Input Format for blog posts severely limits the number of HTML tags that can be used. As a result, the <img> tag and all the <p> tags were stripped out of the saved post before they were displayed, which meant that the post appeared as a single blob of text. I've flipped the Input Format over to Full HTML for this post to fix the problem.