Getting started Blogging with MS Live Writer

I won’t go into a long winded explanation of ‘why’ you should have a blog, or many blogs, if you are a person with many fields of interest and or a business owner, so I will provide a few links to some good reasons but you can find many more yourself.

I blog for a few reasons; get my ideas on paper(albeit digital paper), share news and ideas with others and probably the primary reason is that it allows me to put information into a place that then allows ME to easily find that information I know I have ‘somewhere’ into an easily ‘searchable’ format. I often go back to my own blogs to find technical information on how to do things I know I have done in the past but can’t remember exactly how to now. By putting this information online I can easily find that information. A recent example was trying to help someone share an external Mac Volume. I couldn’t remember the  terminal syntax. But I know I’ve done it many times before in the past. So I just searched my blog for ‘external Mac volumes’ and found what I was looking for! For business owners, special interest groups and artists blogs can be an invaluable method for connecting with the public!

Here is a good article on 10 reasons a small business should have a blog:

Here is another guys blog with 33 good reasons:

Of course you can do this: http://tinyurl.com/2vs5trg and find many more.

There are some other ‘rules’ or tips you can find via the search engines too. Two which I will mention are; adding content on a regular basis and having others provide links to your content on their sites. These two things will, more than anything short of paid advertising, get your blog ‘noticed’. If your desire is to actually make money (monetize your blog) you can also find that via the search engines too. Though that subject is way too convoluted and complex for me to handle here, there are hundreds of thousands of sites to explain that. Just Google ‘how to monetize your blog’. Even then 99.999% of blogs will never generate real revenue anyways. [If you are nice you’ll click on my adds here in the hope I might though 🙂 ha ha]

So let’s get started. Virtually all blogging services offer a simple ‘new post’ option to add new entries. It’s as simple as logging into your Blogger, LiveJournal, WordPress or other account, going to the ‘dashboard’ and choosing ‘new post’. Simple and easy but not that customizable or feature packed. For many people this is usually more than enough to get started. But once you decide you really want to continue your writing you should look at some other ‘publishing’ tools.

My favorite tool for creating posts/blog entries – Windows Live Writer. Live Writer makes it easy to share your photos and videos on almost any blog service—Windows Live, WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, and many more. Live Writer lets me truly create the post I am looking for. It also allows me to create ‘drafts’ that I can work on as time permits and review them before publishing.
You can get Live Writer here:

The following videos directly from the Live Writer Team are excellent and way better than anything I could have done by just doing screen captures and writing explanations. They are short and very instructional and well worth bookmarking and watching several times.

Note that if you use Google’s Blogger blog service or WordPress (or even host your own) blog you do NOT have to set up a Windows Live blog.
Make sure to click on ‘ I already have a weblog set up’ and go from there.

Basic Authoring:

Live Writer is VERY much like MS Word in it’s formatting options. This makes it very easy to get the look and feel you are shooting for much easier than trying to do this via the ‘dashboard’ of your blog account.

Inserting Rich Content:
How to insert images, video and other content into your post.

And the last video in the series – Saving drafts, printing, modifying existing posts and categorizing posts:

 

If you really want your blog to be ‘found’ by people searching and actually read you should make a concerted effort to create appropriate ‘categories’ or ‘tags’ for you posts.
Just like you organize your hard copy files in a file cabinet, you can organize blog posts into categories or with tags, so they’re easy to find by people using search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.) and by people searching your blog site in the future. Tags are often listed on blogs ‘sidebar’.
In order for your blog’s categories to be helpful to your readers, they need to be fairly intuitive, meaning it’s obvious what kinds of posts are included in each category. As you create your categories, think like your readers would. It’s also important to strike a balance between creating categories that are too broad and therefore don’t help readers narrow their searches and those that are too specific and offer so many choices that readers are confused.

I could go on and on but I just wanted to get this out there for those that were looking for some good directions to start.

For now LiveWriter is still only a Windows application – Sorry Mac enthusiasts. But you can run it from a Virtual Machine ‘inside’ OS X. Or use the Firefox plug-in ‘ScibeFire Blog Editor’ for LiveWriter ‘like’ functionality. But I’ll save that for another post.

WordPress 500 internal Server Error xmlrpc.php fix part 2

I had this issue previously and it appeared resolved. But it has returned after upgrading my WordPress installation to 3.x.

So I tried the simple thing of just disabling all my plug-ins but that didn’t do it this time.

I had to do that (disable my plug-ins as described here) and all this too!

I hope this helps some of you. Please make sure you have a complete backup of our MYSQL dbase AND your blog in case you hose something! I am a nut about backups and you should be too.

OK so..

Do this:
1. Using either FTP or CPanel, navigate to your WordPress root directory.
2. You should find the file “xmlrpc.php” there. Make a back up copy of it, just in case. Download it and then.
3. Open xmlrpc.php in an editor
4. Go to the end of the file.
5. Put your cursor after the final ?>
6. Delete anything there, including spaces, or blank lines.
7. Save the edited xmlrpc.php back to your WordPress root directory. [I also changed the permissions on this file to allow the Owner to ‘Execute’ too!]

image

Then:

If you don’t have one (php.ini) then create a text file and name it “php.ini” (without the quotes 😉 ) and with a single line of code in it:

memory=20MB

[If you have one just add that line.]
This file has to be placed into the root directory OR /wp-admin/ within your WordPress installation.
It caused me problems being in the /wp-admin/ directory so I deleted it from there and place it in the root of my blog /mysite/blog/
So keep that in mind!
Also if you are creating the file locally and then uploading it make sure you change the file to a .ini and it does not still have the .txt extension on it.

Then you might want to find your .htaccess file
[It is a hidden file! So if you are using an FTP client make sure you set your ‘filter’ with the ‘-a’ option to ‘see hidden files’ and directories.]
Add this line to the beginning of the file:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php
<Files xmlrpc.php>
SecFilterInheritance Off
</Files>

And lastly I did this

Run the following database query to change the data type on the post_parent column:

ALTER TABLE wp_posts CHANGE post_parent post_parent BIGINT;

So after a few hours of aggravation I can now publish posts with loads of content from Window Live Writer again!

UPDATE: This guy here has a new solution for 1&1 users that works well!

Windows Live Writer WordPress 500 Internal Server Error

This problem cropped up and recently and really got me pissed.

I absolutely LOVE Windows Live Writer. If you post often to sites or blogs this is probably the best tool I’ve found for easy posting, short of a full fledged website/content management application or system [Dreamweaver, SharePoint or the like]. I will post much more in the future on all you can do with this application or you can just ‘Google’ your time away and look for tips.

But.
Basically what happed when I used Windows Live Writer to upload my blog post to one of my websites that has a WordPress installation I then got the error message with the xmlrpc.php:

image

So I set out to find the solution with the best support tool around – Google

I tried this:
http://affiliate-minder.com/wordpresstutorials/livewriter-500-server-error-xmlrpc/
and this:
http://www.codedifferent.com/2009/01/12/solution-for-500-internal-server-error-after-upgrading-to-wordpress-27-at-1and1-server/
and this:
http://www.mindtweaks.com/wordpress/?p=233
and this:
http://ardentdev.com/fix-for-wordpress-xmlrpc-500-internal-server-error/
and this:
http://wordpress.org/tags/500-internal-server-error/page/2
and this:
http://www.43things.com/things/view/425695/find-out-why-xmlrpcphp-isnt-working-on-my-wordpress-blog
and a whole bunch of others.

I messed with php files, ini’s, mysql tables, and on and on.

NONE WORKED!

Then I found a site that suggested something silly:

“disable/deactivate all your plug-ins, try uploading and see what happens.”

Well dang if that didn’t work!!

I then just re-activated my plug-ins and all was good.

Maybe some of you might use this info one day.