Making Windows Live Writer Work With Blogger Beta (Text Instructions)

Author's note on this workaround: I'm not sure this is going to work for all of you yet, but I'm doing my best to assist the developer community to come up with a solution for this issue.

Ok. I'll try to make this simple for you. This tutorial assumes you already know three things:

1. You're running WLW version 1.0.1 (6).
2. You're running blogger beta
3. You know how to get your FEED ID from blogger's Dashboard site.

Step 1:
Delete your blog from WLW completely. Don't skip ahead, because it's a really dumb fix that you'll miss if you follow the instructions WLW provides.

Step 2: Add New Blog
Press Tools--> Add weblog account and follow the prompts:  (Names of Prompts are in Blue)

ADD NEW BLOG SCREEN: Choose the second option, titled "Another Blog Service" and press NEXT.

Step 3: Configure Writer to work with your current blog service.
Weblog URL: ENTER A FAKE ADDRESS THAT WILL NOT RESOLVE! I used "http://text" for mine.
Username: enter your blogger beta email address "username@gmail.com"
Password: enter your password.
Press NEXT

(The screen will now say "Analyzing Weblog Settings" which is actually the problem. If you give WLW the correct address, it's going to setup wrong. This way, we're going to trick it into thinking you have some strange custom blog that its not expecting)

Step 4:
Select Provider: Choose "Blogger (Atom)" from the list of available providers.
Remote posting URL for your weblog: This is already going to appear in the text box and it will look like this: "http://www.blogger.com/feeds/<feed-id>/posts/full"
Replace the <feed-id> with your own unique ID for your blog. This will be a number format and will look something like "1234567890123456"

If you did this, the link will now look like the one below:
http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1234567890123456/posts/full

Press NEXT

(DETECTING WEB SETTINGS: At this point, the WLW program is going to try to get your template code and do a few other things. It will probably fail.. that's ok. You can fix this in a minute.)

Step 5: Thank you for using Windows Live Writer
Enter a friendly name here for your blog: "My Blog" or whatever you want it to be.

Make sure the "Switch To This Weblog Now button" is checked.
Press Finish

DONE WITH THE TWEAKS... ONE MORE THING

Now, you SHOULD have a new blog post screen opened up before you, but you won't have your blog template yet most likely.... now we fix that.

Go to "Weblog --> Edit Weblog Accounts..."
Choose your blog, and press "Edit" on the right.
When the screen comes up, to edit your blog settings, DO NOT CHANGE ANYTHING. Just press NEXT, until you get to the screen with the 'Update Style Template" button. Press this button and wait while the program detects your theme and downloads it to your computer.

Note: Mine gave me the "unable to delete test post" message, but that's ok too. You can do that manually from the blogger dashboard.

Once this is done, you should be able to press NEXT again.
Now, press Finish
Once you get back to your main screen, press "View --> Web Layout" and you should now be seeing your template view on your WLW screen.

I hope this helps you all out. When I tested this, I did encounter one error on one blog, but not on the other. The error was that WLW posted the message as a draft, so it appeared in the user's dashboard as ready to publish but didn't publish completely. We BELIEVE this was a glitch as it seemed to fix itself later.

Comments welcome and appreciated.

 

Technorati tags: How To, Windows Live Writer, WLW, Blogger Beta, Instructions, Compatibility, Help, Tommy Jordan