Ludwig @ October 25, 2006 EDIT: A day after I write this and Windows Live Writer gives me the “Invalid Server Response” again.
So Windows Live Writer is free and good!
For the past few days I have been experimenting with Windows Live Writer. I have been using it for Novia’s blog (making dummy posts, deleting them and then getting her to use it for the real thing) and am now using it here.
Using WLW here is simple, I have one plugin (Akismet, the wonderful SPAMcatcher) and that’s it. Basically a vanilla Wordpress Install - since Akismet comes with Wordpress.
Over at Novia’s blog is a different story. For her blog I have about 20 plugins installed. Needless to say it worked fine atfirst. Then I started trying to get the “Keywords” input in WLM add the keywords to the UTW plugin.
For this I installed the “Keyword Tags” plugin. Unfortunately then I started getting errors in WLW and I wasn’t get my tags to work. Now that I have finally got it working I will explain what went wrong and what finally worked.
What went wrong.
As soon as I installed the Keyword Tags plugin (supposedly to bridge the gap between WLW and UTW) there was an option to edit pages in WLM. I had enabled this (or it was enabled by default, I’m not sure) and this meant that I was getting errors thrown at me (Invalid Server Response) by WLW. I figured out that by disabled Extended Live Archives and Naatan’s Notifier that these errors went away (Yay, I thought, fixed that problem.) Unfortunetely this cost a lot of functionality on the blog. I finally figured out that by turning of the “Edit Pages in WLW” option for the Keyword Tags plugin meant I could use the ELA and NN.
Keyword Tags doesn’t support UTW, or as far as I can tell. I couldn’t find the “Metafield” for UTW so I don’t think it works on custom fields. I know, inline tagging works, but I was displaying tags in a template and even though I could hide the duplicate tags with CSS I didn’t want ditry HTML.
What finally went right.
Making the switch from UTW to Jerome’s Keywords solved basically all my tagging problems. I could just tell Keyword Tags to work for Jerome’s Keywords and it did. Jerome’s Keywords however does have awful support for ‘tag clouds’ or ‘tag cosmos’. With JK you need to declare a rule in CSS for every possible amount the keyword could be display. If it’s display once it gets a class, “keyword1″, if it’s displayed 28 times it gets the class,”keyword28″. At the moment I have the classes going up to 25 and this will hopefully be the limit for Novia’s Blog. It would be nice if Jerome’s Keywords had excellent cloud support as UTW does.
so in closing.
If you want to use WLW and utilize the Keyword Tags plugin for Wordpress, don’t turn on the Edit Pages option - it causes conflict with plugins. Also, use Jerome’s Keywords. If I did these two things from the start then I wouldn’t have had all those problems.
On the other hand, Wordpress is growing as the most popular blog engine. Ultimate Tag Warrior is the most popular tagging system. Microsoft, please make it just work.
All in all, Windows Live Writer is an awesome blog editor. I’m not going to write a full review as a quick Google search will display lotsof them.
Hi, two points;
1) I’m not sure what the problem with editing pages is with the other plugins. They must somehow modify how Wordpress works with static pages. Maybe I should make this default to off?
2) What functionality did Jerome’s keywords have that Keyword Tags didn’t?
The next version of Keyword Tags will support tag clouds, and yes, it will do so in a nice and simple way
Cheers,
Andrew
Comment by Andrew — October 26, 2006 @ 6:33 pm
Thank you for replying Adam,it’s good to see you are actively involved with your plug-in.
I am looking forward to the tag cloud/cosmos feature! I am using them both. I use Keyword-Tags to add the tags into Jerome’s Keywords using that option down the bottom and to append the tags to each post. I use Jerome’s Keywords for the cloud/cosmos and in the area where I need to call for tags in the templates.
Comment by Ludwig — October 27, 2006 @ 7:33 am