With Windows Live Writer, blogging is a breeze. You can add photos and videos, format everything just so, and publish to your DotNetNuke Blog module directly from your own computer.
Writer makes it easy to share your photos and videos on almost any blog service—Windows Live, DotNetNuke, Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, and many more.
With Writer, you can preview everything you’re adding to your blog, to see how the fonts, spacing, colors, and images will look, before you publish.
Have you ever struggled creating images for your blog on your local computer and then needing to upload them for use on your portal?
I know I have. It becomes cumbersome to upload these photos to your portal using the DNN HTML editor.
With Window Live Writer it is fast and easy to make your photos look great on your blog. Insert them and apply cool borders and effects. You can even pull your photos together into an album—just select the style you want and Writer takes care of the rest. When you publish, Writer automatically saves your picture or album online and links them to your blog.
Writer can help you publish videos to Soapbox on MSN Video, or to YouTube, and embed them in your blog. And just like photos, it’s easy to align, resize, and caption your videos, so they look just the way you want them to.
Need fresh content for your blog?
Writer is already packed with useful features, but if you like to tinker, there are all sorts of plug-ins you can add to help you do even more—like insert your stuff from Facebook, Flickr, or other websites.
In this lesson, I will show how to easily get started adding blog posts. I am using the DNN blog module version 03.05.01 with DNN 4.9.4.
Getting Started.
Install Windows Live Writer to your local machine. You can find the free download and instructions at: http://download.live.com/writer
Complete the wizard as shown below.
Next we will select other blog service and click next.
Next add the web address of the page on your portal that contains your blog module. Enter the username and password of your DNN user account that has permission to add blog entries and click next.
Login to your portal >> go to your blog >> click Blog Settings
On the blog setting page locate the MetaWeblog settings and copy the web address URL that is shown on your settings page.
Return to Windows Live Writer setup. On the next screen select blog type Metaweblog API and in the remote posting URL box enter the web address from the step above.
Next you should see a modal box that asks the following question.
Click yes. There is a good chance that Writer will not be able to locate a theme. If this occurs simply click OK.
Next confirm your Blog nickname and click finish.
Next you will see the Windows Live Writer edit screen. Enter the title and your blog content. You can preview your blog, spell check, insert images, and perform word counts.
When you are satisfied with the results simply click publish. All of the content and images will be uploaded to your blog and your blog post, on your portal, should open in a browser window for review or final editing.
An additional option during the publish procedure is a Writer window as shown below.
Oh, did I mention that I created this blog post using Windows Live Writer?
An additional module, that is built for DotNetNuke, is named metaPost 1.3.5 by IT Crossing. Although this module is not needed to use Writer with your DNN blog module, the metaPost product has several additional features including full Microsoft Word 2007 support. It also has additional support for:
Ventrian News Articles 5.77
DotNetNuke FAQs
DotNetNuke Text/HTML
ZLDNN DNNArticle 5.0+
Magic Content
Expandable Text/HTML
According to IT Crossing a future version will also include support for:
DNN Announcements module
DNN Forum module
I hope to test and review the product in the near future and will add the review to the DNN Professor DNN Reviews.
Enjoy,
Buck