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From time to time I’ve read some positive remarks about Windows Live Writer, which generally begin with something along the lines of, "Despite being Microsoft software …" We’re amused: these comments even helped me to want to try it, but, alas, I had not found a way to make it work for me, until this week.
If you’re also one of those awkward, independent types who use Blogger’s API to publish via ftp to your own web space (the only sensible choice if you want to "own" your blog, your traffic, revenue, etc.), this tip is for you.
For a few years I’d been perfectly happy with w.bloggar, however, after the last update (because Blogger had changed), support for Blogger had been badly crippled: it worked, so long as you didn’t expect to write your own post title / headline (essential as it influences the post filename and impacts on SEO).
When I swapped this blog to Wordpress, w.bloggar supported that, but swapping accounts (now no longer on the same platform), became too fiddly.
For some reason also, w.bloggar would no longer handle image uploads without being reset every time I swapped to and logged into the Blogger account.
All of this meant the software became merely useable for preparing and saving posts, but not for posting them, which then had to be done through the Blogger dashboard. In short, it all became rather a pain, so, as you can imagine, I was keen to find an alternative. However, everything I tried would support one or other platform, but not both, or lacked some other essential feature.
Windows Live Writer, has both Wordpress and Blogger support. By default, the Beta / New Blogger support expects you to be using Blogspot, but the good news is that it can be tweaked and made to work for self-hosters.
Here’s a review of Windows Live Writer and a look at it on video:
(One complaint, Microsoft appear to have moved the spellcheck button off the interface since this video was made. That seems a silly thing to do.)
Adding your Self-Hosted Blogger Blog to Windows Live Writer
From the menu, choose Add Weblog Account … and, fairly obviously, take the third option presented: Another weblog service.
On the next screen, enter the URL of your self-hosted blog and your Blogger login and password (your Gmail address and password, as normal.)
Click next and it will then go off and look for the blog’s settings (you might strike lucky here, depending on your own setup.) When I entered the URL for the Secret Tenerife blog, it couldn’t detect the settings and needed me to enter them manually. If you do too, quite obviously, choose Blogger:
It then wanted to me to "fill in the blank" (replace the feed-id), but since I’m not using the Blogspot setup and host the blog on my own site, the format of this URL is not one that I’m familiar with. What did feed-id need to be replaced with? My setup provided no clues. So, I searched Blogger and Google to try to find out how the new Blogger API URL should be formatted, or what to use with third-party blogging tools, but I came up with nothing recent, or that worked.
In the end, I opted for good old trial and error, or, as it turned out, a lucky guess! 
I replaced feed-id (replace the pointy brackets too) with the Blog ID number. You can find your blog ID at the end of any of the URLs inside Blogger dashboard, where it says blogID=123456789 (whatever number your blog is.)
And it works! Windows Live Writer posts to your self-hosted Blogger API driven blog, with titles. There’s all sorts of other nifty features and add-ons too, it even handles Blogger’s Labels (as categories) and, swapping from one weblog account (and platform) to another has returned to being a simple matter.
How it handles image uploads, by default, is that it send images for the Blogger blog to your corresponding Picasa Web Album. That’s not what I would choose to do, since I have my own space, but this was also easily changed to the FTP location, via Tools, Accounts and then select to edit the relevant weblog.
In conclusion, despite being Microsoft software …
… it does the job very well indeed.
Written by Pamela Heywood - Visit Website | Leave a tip | Buy me something
This looks interesting. I never really took Windows Live Writer that seriously until after reading your post.
Thanks Pamela!