Windows Live Writer (WLW) is a tool for offline blogging. This post is for all those who struggle with Windows Live Writer (WLW) integration with wordpress for offline blogging. Let me start with some background before we jump into how it actually works.
It has been almost two years since I started blogging. The reason behind starting it was to share some of my experiences with the folks out there who might run into same issues or situations, that I ran into, and who could use the piece of write-up I put out on how I got around them. It is not an easy task to create quality content and put out five to six blog posts a month consistently. There have been times where I did not blog for couple of months due to lot of different reasons.
One of the reasons was connectivity to wordpress. Every time the light bulb went on in my head, I would put it down in a note on my phone so I can revisit the list the next time I sat down to write some blog posts. But it so happens that I never really turned those ideas into blog posts. This got me thinking, every time I get an idea, I will start working on it immediately. On a wordpad or a notepad or a word document or whatever that will not make the idea just sit on one of the notes on Google Keep.
This lead me to search for an offline tool where I can draft a blog and publish it directly onto wordpress when I feel it is ready. After a lot of research I concluded that I will use Windows Live Writer(WLW) for the task of offline blogging. I installed it on my laptop and tried linking it to my wordpress blog. Everything worked fine until I reached a step where it tries detecting the theme of the wordpress blog. I tried and failed many times at this step. When I checked online there were lot of solutions to this issue. Some of the ones I tried were:
1. Changing your default category on wordpress settings to Uncategorized. You can find this setting under Dashboard>Settings>Writing>Default Post Category
This makes sense because the Windows Live Writer assumes that this setting is unchanged from the first deployment of wordpress and tries to post the temporary post under this category. However, This did not solve my issue.
2. Another solution was to change the Front page displays to “Your latest posts” instead of a static page setting.
I did not have to change this setting as mine already was pointing to “Your latest posts”. The theme detection still didn’t work.
I almost gave up on getting this working until I found this WPBeginner post which talks about adding a code into the header.php file.
3. So I went ahead added the below code into my header.php file.
<link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml "title="RSD" href="http://www.YourBlog.com/xmlrpc.php?rsd" />
This did the trick for me. Once I added this code and ran the “Update theme”, the Windows Live Writer detected my theme.
Note : You will have to replace www.YourBlog.com with your domain name before adding the code to header.php.
Below is the proof of this working on my blog and also, I wrote this blog using the Windows Live Writer tool
So if you are facing the same issue with Windows Live Writer and WordPress theme detection, go ahead and try all the above steps and one of it might work.
It might not work for everyone and only edit the files related to your theme if you know how they work.
Let me know what worked for you.