Windows Live Writer WordPress Editor

It has been some months that I’ve been working on trying out different offline WP editors. I was getting tired on having to be online in order to add new stories. After much searching and much trial and error on stumbled upon Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer. I have to honest, I figured since it was Microsoft’s and it had the whole "Live" tag with it, that it would somehow be tied to MS Messenger, Hotmail, etc. However, that’s not the case, it is completely stand alone and a great tool. Per it’s Wikipedia page it supports:

  • Windows Live Spaces
  • SharePoint blogs
  • Blogger
  • LiveJournal
  • TypePad
  • WordPress

Needless to say you should see a bit better formatting on my posts. Here’s a quick screen shot of the UI.

WindowsLiveWriter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notice the Edit, Preview, and Source buttons at the bottom of the main window, this allows you to quickly switch to different views and thus modify your page accordingly.

Another thing I love is how you can open any currently posted article and edit it very quickly.

WLWOpen 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ultimately, I’m extremely happy with it.  It’s fast, has a very small memory footprint and it has a lot of plugins.

~david

If you don’t play with it you’ll lose it.

So, recently I ran into a very nice WordPress theme which I’m currently using called Freicurv v2.0. However, there seems to be a very special combination of themes and MySQL versions which cause all your stories to show in ascending order instead of the default descending order. This is all great information, however it took me a few hours of searching around before I put the pieces together. So, here is it. If the order of your stories or posts is reverse and you’ve gone to WordPress support and read this article and you’re still trying to use this theme, here is my work around:

In the index.php change
php query_posts($query_string . "&cat=-111")
to
php query_posts($query_string)

I’m still playing around with the theme to see if I broke anything, but more than likely the big issue will be the whole Asides category this theme uses. Since, I will not be changing that section very often, I’m happy with just modifying the intro.php file when ever I want to make a change to that section.

david

Cross browser themes…

So, I had been running the same WP theme for a few months and not until yesterday did I decide to visit my own website using IE… what a monstrosity. The right column showed up at the very end of the page and a few things just looked out of order. Basically, it seems to be related to a way that IE handles some CSS, as opposed to Firefox and Opera. Needless to say, I’ve picked up a new theme called Barthelme and I’m really digging it. I might need to tinker with it a bit, but overall my site looks a lot better than it did before.

On a totally unrelated note, work has been kicking my butt. While I am one to usually turn the other cheek, I’m kicking butt at work too. It’s a vicious cycle of violence. :-)

~david