Habari Watch

Windows Live Writer 2009 (Release Candidate) has recently been released and includes support for both the Atom Publishing Protocol and MetaWeblog interface.

I am pleased to report that the latest version of WLW works with Habari using the MetaWeblog interface although the Atom Publishing Protocol doesn’t currently work.

To configure WLW, simply download and install Windows Live Writer (a Linux version is in the works apparently due for release in mid 2009).

Before configuring your Habari blog, ensure you have the latest version of the MetaWeblog plugin installed and configured.

Then configure your Habari blog for use with WLW specifying the following options:

• Type of blog: Select 'Metaweblog API'
• Remote posting URL for your blog: Enter 'http://<mysite.com>/xmlrpc'

Initially when beta versions of WLW were released, there were sporadic problems with the MetaWeblog plugin. However, Rick Cockrum has resolved these issues with recent fixes to the MetaWeblog plugin and I can now successfully edit and publish posts to Habari.

Lots of people rave about WLW and while I prefer to edit posts in the Habari editor, I think it’s very important that WLW is available for potential Habari users.

One feature I did really like was the ability to resize, crop and manipulate pictures within WLW and many people think a picture is worth a thousand (of my) words. Images get a thumbnail and a larger size click-through image and there are loads of options to tailor the finished presentation.

Images are uploaded locally to the desktop blogging tool and then transferred to the remote site using FTP which worked fine. I simply designed the ‘/user/files'/’ directory to store WLW images which meant they are also displayed in the Habari media silo. WLW creates a subdirectory for each post.

WLW offers three views when creating content: 'Edit' (WYSIWYG editor with familiar icons and formatting options), 'Preview' (Live preview including Theme) and 'Source' (raw HTML) although I did note the occasional spurious <p> and &nbsp; tags when switching between editor modes.

I am also pleasantly surprised to see that WLW detected the list of available Habari tags although it calls them ‘categories’ and prompts for Technorati/IceRocket tags which is potentially confusing. However, it is not possible to define a new tag in WLW.

WLW also preserved the correct timestamp for the publication date and time, author information, generated a sensible slug and also includes ping and auto-save functionality.

Surprisingly, the WYSIWYG live preview (using the Charcoal theme) worked too although I preferred to post a draft to the Habari blog for a quick scan, solely to admire the contrasting beauty of the blank canvas of the Habari article editor, before finally publishing the post.

WLW has a plethora of WYSYWG features (including support for tables), spell-checker and a word, character and paragraph count – in fact, at times it is a little like using a cut-down and usable version of Microsoft Word.

All in all, I think Windows Live Writer is a very powerful blog publishing tool and it’s great to see it available for the Habari platform.

This post was written in Windows Live Writer 2009 (Version 14.0.8050.1202), Habari SVN r2969 and r1488 of the MetaWeblog plugin.