MyGeekPal » Blogging

Setting Up Windows Live Writer for Easy Blogging [WordPress Blog]

Atif — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 05:40:04 +0000

If you are a good blogger you don’t get bored writing a blog. However lack of essential tools for blogging can sometimes get make blogging boring. There are many tools that allow you to write a blog post locally and publish it to your WordPress blog via XML-RPC service. XML-RPC is a service that remotely allows you to do things on your website using XML data feed. One such example is publishing a blog post. I would rather not go in detail about XMP-RPC.

There are many tools available for you to write blog posts on your PC. In this article I picked up Windows Live Writer because

It is Free (even many others are free like Zoundry Raven)
It is faster
It is more user friendly
It has got many third plugins
It has got theme support (where you can live preview your blog)
A free product from “Microsoft”. Lol yeah!

So first you need to download and install Microsoft Live Writer from here (and for those who love offline installers like me here is the link).

Lets begin installing. In the mean time, open the admin panel of your blog. Go to Options > Writing Settings

Make sure XML-RPC is checked which is under Remote Publishing. Save your settings.

Now lets start with the Windows Live Writer. I hope it is already installed by now. There should be a window that would be asking you for which blog service do you use. Select “Other blog service” and click Next

Now add your blog writing your blogs URL followed by your admin username and password. Then click Next

The Windows Live Writer will not try to connect to your blog and validate your username and password to set up your blog.

You will be prompted to create a temporary post to detect the current theme for Live preview. In our case, I selected No. Now you should see something like this

That brings this to an end. Windows Live Writer is now connected to your blog. Simply write a new post, click publish and see the magic.

60+ RPC and RPC2 Services to Ping your Blog

Atif — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 07:43:27 +0000

Wow I am writing a post exactly after 50 days. Sorry guys for being away, I was extremely busy establishing a Social Networking website for Hyderabad called Wakaao. It took me 4 months to code that website (at the rate of 1 hour a day lol). By the way if you are from Hyderabad then you can join now and make a whole lot of friends at Wakaao.

Ping services are those that allow you to automatically notify blog directories and search engines that your blog has been updated. So each time you write a post, you can ping these servers to let them know that you have some new content. (WordPress users can modify their ping list on the Control Panel, then Options, then Writing). The bigger your ping list the more chances that you ma get traffic from those. Here is a compiled list of 60+ ping servers where you can ping your blog.