Live Writer and MultiSite

Using Windows Live Writer when you can’t use Windows Live Writer

I’m a great supporter of Windows Live Writer for putting blog posts and web pages together. The built in WordPress editor is rather clunky.

However, there are problems with Writer and access to WordPress sites. Writer seems to struggle to work with Networked/Multisite WordPress and certain plug-ins seem to stop it working. There seem to be very technical “work arounds”. Here is a simple way.

Note – in this method do NOT add pictures to Writer – add them after you’ve posted to WordPress.

Let’s quickly make some text in Word. The Rand(x,y) feature is a really neat trick – it gives you x paragraphs each containing y sentences.

The screens I’ll show below were grabbed, stored and uploaded seperately to WordPress.

expands to

Selective typography enhancement assist legibility (or not)

And here’s the text copied into Writer.

On the Insert tab, the galleries include items that are designed to coordinate with the overall look of your document. You can use these galleries to insert tables, headers, footers, lists, cover pages, and other document building blocks.

When you create pictures, charts, or diagrams, they also coordinate with your current document look. You can easily change the formatting of selected text in the document text by choosing a look for the selected text from the Quick Styles gallery on the Home tab.

Note that some formats don’t copy well. But seriously underscore AND right aligned.

Now for the trick.

If you look in the Writer screen at the bottom left hand corner you can see the three tabs Edit, Preview and Source. Select Source and.

Don’t panic when it all goes weird like this.

Simply select all (ctrl-a) and copy it to the clipboard (ctrl-a). The next full stop is where I finished writing text in Writer.

Now start working in the WordPress editor. Just above the Editor, you can see the tab showing Visual or HTML.

Select HTML then in the edit window click ctrl-v to paste it all in.

Now to continue editing, simply select Visual again and finish the post or page – add images and additional features as normal.