Windows Live writer allows you to spell check an article and automatically find spelling or grammatical mistakes. The problem is that you can only use one language with Windows live writer. If you want to add multiple languages to Windows live writer for publishing blog posts in diffferent languages, you are struck.

Luckily, Aaron shows you a way to add more languages to Windows live writer and spell check blog posts in different languages. To do this, go to Windows control panel and select “Clock Language and Region”. Here you will find the Windows live language settings and the languages that are allowed in your Windows live writer installation.

Click to run the application and then select the location of the dictionary you want to install. When the installation of more languages is complete, select your main language from Window live language settings window, this is required because the next time you run Windows live writer – it may show a completely different language. In the same way, you can add more dictionatiries in Windows live writer and write blog posts in different languages.

The language can then be selected from Windows Live writer > options under the “Spelling” tab. You can install different dictionaries in Windows live writer, more than 33 international languages are supported. Hit the above link for the complete step by step instructions.

Related: Back up Firefox Dictionaries For later use.

Add More Languages And Dictionaries in Windows Live Writer originally published on Ampercent

Microsoft has recently released the online and offline installers for Windows Live essentials suite, which can be downloaded from the following links:

• Windows Live Essentials 2011 – Online installer
• Windows Lie essentials 2011 – Offline Installer

Using the online installer, you can choose to install only selected programs of Windows live essentials. However, the offline installer will download the entire suite in your computer and the file size is around 155 MB. The new programs included in the stable update of Windows live essentials 2011 are Bing Bar, Messenger companion and Outlook Connector pack.

This is just a routine upgrade with some new features and enhancements, not to forget that Windows live writer and Windows movie maker already got the new office ribbon in the earlier version (wave 4).

Tip: Most useful Windows live writer plugins.

Download Windows Live Essentials 2011 Online and Offline Installers originally published on Ampercent

There are two separate installers for the new Windows live essentials suite.

To download the entire suite which will install all the software in one go, use wl-setup-webd.exe. This will install MSN messenger, Windows live photo gallery, Windows live mail, Sync, Windows Live writer and Movie maker in one shot.

To individually choose which programs you want to install, use the wl-setup-webc.exe installer.

Note: The new wave 4 version will only run in Windows Vista and Windows 7 and is not meant for Windows XP users. Windows Vista users will have to install the latest service packs along with Windows 7 program enhancer. I had some problems installing the wave 4 suite on Windows Vista but it was fixed by patching the latest service packs.

What’s New in Windows Live Writer Wave 4

The new version completely mimics the look of Microsoft office 2010 suite. The interface has been revamped but except of a few design changes, there are no new features. Here are some noteworthy features of Windows Live Writer 2010:

More writing space: The sidebar has been removed and all the common options have been moved up to the ribbon options. You get more writing space, which is useful when you are writing long posts and do not have to scroll down to read the earlier paragraphs.

Contextual Tabs: One of the major enhancements is the introduction of contextual tabs and grouping of similar tasks, as in Microsoft Office. There are three tabs namely Home, Insert and Blog account, as seen in the following image:

The home tab lets you choose the blog where you want to publish a post, select font, colors, heading and subheading styles. The good thing is that they have added Spell checking and Word count shortcuts so you don’t have to pull down the menu options and perform the spell check or word count.

Ribbon options: The common tasks panel which used to appear in the right sidebar has been moved to the menu ribbon. The “Save draft” button has been removed, which is a bit annoying because it was very useful for saving posts quickly. To access the last published posts, you have to click the menu button, select open and click on a recently published post or draft.

The keyboard shortcut for saving a local draft is Ctrl +S but there is no keyboard shortcut for saving a draft to your blog. Strange !

Image enhancements: A “Format” tab has been added which lets you add more image effects than earlier versions. You can adjust the contrast, brightness and add more effects e.g Blur and Emboss. The Image linking and adding of Alternate text will appear in the “Format” tab.

Auto Capture Hyperlinks: The newer version supports capturing hyperlinks from the clipboard and placing them easily in your blog posts. It works simple – copy a link to Windows clipboard and select the phrase in your draft which you want to use for the link. Then hit the hyperlink button and the phrase is automatically linked.

Emotions: Windows live writer now supports adding emotions directly from the menu bar, click the emotions dropdown from Insert tab and select the emotion you want. No need to remember keyboard shortcuts.

The newer version hasn’t fixed the image bug yet which strips off dashes from image file names. I have been using the newer version for the past week and all the image file names were modified. However, you can solve Windows Live writer image problem using a neat workaround.

I was expecting more features in the wave 4 version but  I am really disappointed. There should be some more features like backing up blog settings, adding custom fields and comment moderation. Hope they will add them in the upcoming version of live writer.

Tip: Most Useful Windows Live writer plugins

Windows Live Writer 2010, Wave 4: Best Desktop Blogging Client Ever originally published on Ampercent

First, Picasa web albums gives a hefty 2GB of online storage space which is sufficient enough to store a lot of photos and images. And since Picasaweb has a free plan and comes by default with a Google account, there is no need to host your photos on other websites that ask you to pay a registration fee or put a ban on your account after the trial period.

Second, you can control the privacy of any image stored in your Picasa web albums account and make only selected photos as “Public”. This is useful, since I can share specific photos with my social friends, blog readers, Facebook friends while keep other photos as “Private”

Third, Picasa provides a very useful desktop client which can be used to bulk upload photos or videos to my Picasa web albums account from desktop. Although Picasa’s web uploader works just as fine and there is also an option to upload photos by sending email, the desktop client is useful  for non tech savy users.

Adding Photos From Picasa Web Albums in Windows Live Writer

If you’re a blogger and have ever owned a blogspot blog, you might reckon that Blogger stores all the images to your Picasa web albums account. Hence, it might be a good idea to use the same images in your future blog posts, without having to re-upload them on another file hosting service.

The above idea have a couple of advantages. First, you don’t have to worry about where your image is hosted. Second, all the images can be downloaded in your computer using the Picasa desktop application.

If you have migrated your blog from Blogger to a self hosted WordPress platform and want to use the same images stored in your Picasa web albums account, this tutorial will prove to be useful.

1. Download the Picasa Live writer plugin and install it.

2. Start Windows Live writer and click “Insert” from the program menu. Next, select “Picasa photo” from the options.

3. This will open a login prompt where you have to enter the username and password of your Google account.

4. Once you have logged in, the plugin will show all the albums listed from your Picasa web albums account. Select the desired album and click the “Insert” button to add an image in your blog post.

5. You can set the margins, border, width, height and other image properties in the same way as you do in Windows live writer. If you want to retain the image file names without stripping the dashes or underscores, refer to this guide.

Now that you have successfully added photos from your Picasa web albums account into Windows Live Writer, you can publish the blog post. The image will be fetched from Picasa web albums address and you need not worry of running out of hosting space for a huge number of photos and images.

Tip: Useful Windows live writer plugins for Power blogging.

Add Images From Picasa Web Albums in Windows Live Writer originally published on Ampercent

This file name of the resulting image has the following disadvantages:

1. Search engines prefer images whose file name contains words separate by dashes or underscores.

2. Words in image file names separated by dashes are easier to read.

There are alternative ways to solve this problem. You can upload the images from WordPress post editing panel or upload the image to your image upload folder using FTP tools. Then you can copy the image URL and use the image in Windows Live writer from “Insert image from URL” function.

Both the above methods require some extra effort and thus you would want a quick an easy solution. That’s when Rightupload comes to the rescue.

After you have installed the application, open the program interface and go to “Tools > options”. Click on “New server” and enter the FTP details of your blog and the folder where you store the images of blog posts.

Remember to enter the URL mask as: http://yoursite.com/foldername/$file

Switch to the Advanced tab of the program and hit “Enable context menu” option. Make sure you keep “When finished, close Rightupload immediately” checkbox selected.

You are all done. Compose a new blog post in Windows Live writer and when you want to attach an image, follow the steps mentioned below:

1. Right click the image and select the image upload folder of your blog from “Send to” context menu.

2. As soon as you select the RightUpload icon, the image is uploaded in default image upload folder of your blog and the URL is copied to Windows Clipboard.

3. Open Windows Live Writer, click the “Insert Image icon” and hit ” Ctrl + V ” in the Picture URL field to attach the image in the blog post. You are done.

When you publish the post or save it as draft, the dashes won’t be stripped from the image file name anymore. Tip: Send screenshots, files and folders to FTP from desktop.

Windows Live Writer Problem – How to Retain Dashes in Image File Names originally published on Ampercent

Some bloggers use custom fields in their theme such as showing a thumbnail image or may be showing the post’s meta description as excerpts. In those cases, you can’t directly publish a post from Windows live writer. You have to save the post as draft, login to your blog, add the custom fields and carry on with publishing.

To solve this issue, download this plugin from Windows live writer plugins gallery and paste it in the plugins folder where Windows Live writer is installed. Typically the folder resides in C: > Program Files > Windows Live > Writer > Plugins.

Restart Windows live writer and write a post. When you hit publish, Windows live writer will prompt you with a message as shown below

Hit Yes, and Windows Live writer will prompt you to add custom fields and save the post as draft or publish it in your blog

You can use multiple custom fields in your post using this plugin. A good idea may be to add the meta title, meta description and keywords tag from custom fields and later paste them in All in One seo pack description fields. There are some workarounds for adding All In One SEO Descriptions from Windows Live Writer and managing blog comments.

Tip: Useful Windows Live Writer Plugins for power blogging.

Note: If you are having Image related issues with Windows Live writer, check out this Image problem troubleshooting guide.

How to Add Custom Fields Entries from Windows Live Writer originally published on Ampercent

Here is a screenshot of my Google reader feed which shows the “Temporary post for theme detection” being syndicated unnecessarily.

How to Remove Temporary Post for theme detection from appearing in Rss Feed

If you are on WordPress then use the Feed Pauser WordPress plugin. It allows you to delay a post from being published as a feed, thus making it unavailable in the RSS feed.

Now whenever you wish to refresh your Live writer theme just activate the feed pauser WordPress plugin, set a time (e.g 5 minutes) and then refresh your theme. A temporary post will be created by Windows Live writer but it won’t be shown in the Rss feed.

This plugin can be very useful at other times too. Sometimes you may wish to change the content of a post due to some grammatical mistakes or if you have posted a wrong link. After doing a final revision of the post you would like it to appear in the RSS feed and viewable by everyone. Feed pauser lets you do just that. And yes, it can also stop Windows live writer temporary post from appearing in the Rss feed.

For more information about the plugin, visit the Plugin project page.Thanks Keith

Stop Temporary Post Used For Theme Detection from Appearing in Rss Feed originally published on Ampercent

Installing Live writer plugins : Installing live writer plugins is easy. You have to download the plugin file from the plugin location as specified below and copy the file into your live writer plugins folder (Typically C:\Program Files\Windows Live Writer\plugins). Most of the plugins come with an auto installer  which you can double click to install.

And here is a complete list of the most useful windows live writers plugins we recommend :

Media Plugins for Windows Live writer

1.Screen Capture tool : This plugin integrates Snag it screen capture into Live writer making it easy to take screen shots while you are writing a blog post. As soon as you hit the screen capture button , Windows Live writer is minimized and Snag IT is initiated. You perform your capture and then Snag it editor opens . Edit your captured image, apply the effects and save  the image in the temporary directory. As soon as the image is saved it is inserted into your blog post.

This plugin includes a timer feature and you can save the image in bmp,png,gif,tif or jpeg formats. The best screen capture utility for Live writer (of course if you have Snag it in your system.)

2.Insert images from Flickr : If you often upload your images to Flickr and integrate them in your posts to save space then this plugin will help you perform it from Live writer Itself. This plugin can show all the images of a Flickr profile that you provide in a new window.Just drag and drop that image in your blog post to use it. No need to search Flickr , save the image in your computer and upload it again.

3.Insert images from your Picasa albums : This plugin lets you insert your Picasa web albums into your blog posts. You can create albums and upload images directly from Live writer. Saves a lot of time and Effort.(also see : Upload images to Flickr and Picasa using email )

4.Thumbnail Creator of a Website : If you want to embed a full screen thumbnail of a website in your blog post this plugin can do it . You just need to give the URL of the page and you are done.You can specify the width and height attributes and can crop the image as well.

5.Insert Facebook photos In Windows Live writer : This Plugin lets you insert photos from your Facebook albums in your blog posts. When initiated opens a new window for you to login to Facebook. Once logged in you can select your albums and insert specific photos. This saves you time  from manually saving the Facebook photos and adding them in your posts.
( Also see : Upload and download Facebook albums from desktop )

6.Insert Images from live search : Lets you do an image search  from Live writer using the Live search engine and add an image instantly. No manual saving and insertion is required.

Social Media Plugins

7.Social Bookmarking icons -   This plugin can be used to add social bookmarking icons in your blog posts from windows live writer. Allows your reader to share your article on Digg, Delicious,Furl,yahoo and plenty of more popular social networks.

8.Technorati plugin : Lets you add Technorati tags in your blog posts. So if you want some Technorati juice in your articles use it. While writing the article click “Insert Technorati tag” from the sidebar and separate each tag by a semicolon.

9.Delicious plugin : Just like Technorati if you want to add the Delicious tags this plugin lets you insert them at the end of your blog post.The Plugin can retrieve the tags from your delicious account but you can add manual tags as well.Supports tags for Delicious, Flickr and Technorati all together at one place.

Update : A more useful plugin to cross post your blog posts in delicious via Live writer is Delicious notify plugin .While you are publishing a post through Live writer this plugin can send the URL,Title,a short description,categories and tags associated with the blog post in your Delicious account. Works just like the Twitter Notify plugin. However this plugin won’t work if you are saving your post as draft.

10.Tweetmeme : This plugin lets you integrate a tweet meme button just under your posts. Unlike the wordpress plugin for Tweetmeme if you want to show the Tweetmeme button on selected posts then  you can do it from Live writer.

11.Tweet your Post :  You can Ping twitter about your blog posts from windows live writer but how about posting a tweet just when you have published a post from windows live writer ? . This plugin  automatically generates a Tiny URL and sends a Tweet about your blog post after you publish it from Writer.

12.Twitter Inserter : This plugin Lets you insert Twitter Tweets in your blog posts (up to 200 ). Compiles your recent tweets into a bulleted list and converts all the appropriate text to clickable links, then inserts it into your Live Writer blog post.

13.Digg this button : This plugin lets you add a digg this button in your posts. So you can show the digg this button on selected posts rather than using a WordPress plugin.

Organizing Information

14.Zemanta related links and images :  As you write a Post Zemanta scans your content and generates relevant images , Links tags and related content based on your blog entry.The Related content is scanned from blogs, news channels, media sources and you use can use the images under a creative commons license.A must have plugin.Apart from live writer Zemanta is available for Firefox and as a WordPress plugin.Try the live Demo here

15.Insert codes : If you do a lot of coding and write a lot of codes in your posts then you need this one.This plugin can format  a text snippet in a number of programming languages such as C#,HTML,JavaScript,Visual basic etc. Another similar plugin is code snippets.

16.Blog This -  Extremely useful for capturing ideas and text snippets while you are browsing the web. With this plugin installed in your browser you can select some text and save it in Live writer as a blog post. The post will contain the URL , Title and the text snippet that you choose.

17.Text templates (Supports HTML) : This plugin is a time saver if you use the same text or HTML in your Blog posts often. Suppose you have to add a snippet of HTML somewhere between your posts in selected articles. Just hit the “insert text template “ Plugin  select your template that you have added earlier and that html code is added in your posts. The code is saved and you can reuse it  at a later time.

18.Insert youtube or google Video In your articles : This plugin will add the necessary code for your Youtube of Google video in your Blog posts. You just need to give the Unique ID of your video that you want to add. So if you are watching a Video in you tube and want to add it in your blog entry just note the ID. Later when you are writing your article you can embed the video using this plugin by supplying the ID of the video. No coding , No pasting.

19.All in One SEO plugin for Live writer :  If you have a self hosted wordpress blog then you must be using the All In One SEO pack Plugin. This Windows live writer bridge plugin allows you to post your All In one Seo Entries from Live writer itself . After you have finished your article you can supply the All in One SEO title, Description and Keywords. ( read detailed instructions on installing and using the plugin).

20.Insert feed links : You can add an Rss feed entry using this plugin. Also has a built in feed manager to manage your lists of feeds to choose. Doesn’t support Google reader shared items though.

21.Automatic Tag generator : This plugin can help you generate tags for your blog posts.Supports Technorati Blogger and WordPress.

22.Insert Emotions and Smilies : Lots of emotions and smilies to choose from and insert into your blog posts.So if you use a lot of jokes and humour in your articles you will love to try it out.

23.Insert Google maps : Does what it says. Lets you embed a Google map in your blog post.

24.Bit.ly Short URL’s : This plugin lets you insert Bit.ly short URL’s in your blog posts. You can add links from your Bit.ly account or use other Bit.ly URL’s.Just highlight any text in Live writer and click “Insert WLW Bit.ly icon”. All Links in the post will be converted to Bit.ly short URL’s.

If you are looking for a particular plugin not listed here please visit the Live Gallery or WLWPlugins.com.

Back up Windows Live writer Settings and Drafts

You cannot choose the installation directory of Windows live writer and it installs in the default system drive. This can make your drafts vulnerable, especially if your system crashes.

Here is a nice solution to the problem. Either use a portable live writer installation or learn how you can backup live writer settings and drafts regularly. The latter method is preferred as it can back up all your drafts and blog settings from live writer.

What Plugins to you use and recommend ? Please share  your ideas with us

Useful Windows Live Writer Plugins for Power blogging originally published on Ampercent

The problem with Windows live writer is that you cannot install it in a preferred location of your choice. It installs in the Same drive in which your Operating System is Installed  thus making it more vulnerable in case of a system crash. Yes you can use Portable Windows Live writer , but then again it is not a proper back up measure.

If you would like to back up Windows live writer Settings use the Windows live writer Backup utility. This tool backs up  Windows Live writer settings, Drafts,Recent posts and Plugins folder. You can save the back up file to another Drive so that in case of a System failure Your precious drafts aren’t Lost anyway. ( also read : Useful Windows live writer plugins )

After the backup process is complete you can Mount the back up in another computer using this back up utility. This may come in handy if you are using Multiple computers and want to carry your windows live writer settings from one computer to another.It would be even useful if Scott can automatically Schedule a daily backup of Windows live writer to a specified folder.

Update: The above link points to the older version of Windows Live writer backup. The latest version is available here

Completely back up Windows live Writer Settings and Saved drafts originally published on Ampercent

I mean every time I wrote a post I had to log in to my Manage posts panel and write the Title,description and Keywords into All In One SEO Pack. But thanks to Keith of Techie Buzz who has Come up with a Bridge plugin For Windows live Writer and WordPress Blogs.Now you can Post Your All In ONE SEO Pack details from Live Writer Itself.

To post your All in One SEO entries from Windows live Writer you need to download and Install the following Plugins :

Integrate All In One SEO Pack in Windows live Writer with a WordPress Plugin originally published on Ampercent