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Windows Live Writer is a free tool for Windows that is included as a part of a bigger product suite called Windows Live. You can install just Live Writer or any other applications. Only the Live Writer product is needed to do offline blogging.
Download Windows Live Writer
Enabling Live Writer Support
By default the Syrinx CS starter site does not enable the Live Writer support. To enable it, you must edit the <system.webServer><handler> entry for the handler that processes Live Writer requests. The web.config should have the entry commented out, which looks like the following.
<add name="MetaBlogXmlRpc" path="/xmlrpc/blog" verb="*" type="Syrinx.MetaBloggerXmlRpc, ScsCore" preCondition="integratedMode" />
Overview
The Live Writer support in Syrinx CS is only able to edit user blogs. No other types of articles can be edited with Live Writer. If users insert images or files into the article, they will be uploaded into the media library of downloads area of the site when the blog entry is published.
Each user that has their blogging option enabled can use Live Writer or other offline blogging tools to create, edit and delete blog entries.
Using Live Writer
When you first start Live Writer after installing it, you are walked through the add new blog wizard, which you can also start from the toolbar for more blog entries. The wizard presents a set of steps to provide the information needed for Live Writer to communicate with the site.
Step 1 – Pick the type of blogging service
Choose “Other services” as shown in the image below.
Step 2 – Add a blog account
Put the blogger’s home page url, which will have a relative path of /Blogs/userId.aspx. This URL should be the same value you see when you are viewing the user's main blog page. For example, my blog home page is http://syrinxcs.org/Blogs/MattsBlog.aspx. This is used to direct the user to their new blog post once is has been published.
The username and password used must match their site id. An administrator could also map onto the blog, but their id would be used as the author. It is best to use the id that you want to map onto for who actually created the blog entry.
Step 3 – Select blog type
Syrinx CS implements the Metaweblog API as shown in the image below.
The remote posting web address must match the path on the handler setup in web.config. The default path is /xmlrpc/blog in web.config, but can be changed to something else if desired. If you change the value in web.config, use the same value as the path into your website.
Step 4 – Setting up your blog account
Depending on how many blog entries the user has written in the site already, Live Writer will download previous blogs and other content to prepare for offline editing.
Step 5 – Your blog has been set up
The blog nickname is used for display purposes within Live Writer and is never sent to the site itself. Use this to identify the blog if you will be managing many different blogs.
Currently you cannot add new blog categories through Live Writer, but the support is in the Syrinx CS code already. The default configuration for Live Writer is not to allow its user to add new categories, but if Live Writer is configured for it, you can use it to define categories specific to that blog. You can assign blog entries to existing blog categories, which will be shown in the categories dropdown toolbar control. Use the blog home page to edit the categories (or the category management admin page).
Images are uploaded into the users/[blogger_username] folder. The folder will be created if it does not exist already. Live writer also uploads a thumb, which is also saved, but future updates will ignore the thumb and just save the full size image.