Get Productive with Windows Live Writer - Guide for Power Bloggers

Windows Live Writer from Microsoft (especially version 2) is probably one of the best and most popular blog editing software around for Windows platform. [poll results]

Have you explored all the wonderful features, tips and tricks of using Windows Live Writer ? If not, here's a comprehensive Windows Live Writer tutorial cum guide to help you become a power blogger:

Embed Video Clips from YouTube, Google Video, etc

There's a very easy way of embedding video clips inside your blog posts - just copy the video embed code from YouTube or Google Video and paste that inside the normal view of Windows Live Writer (or simple drag-n-drop). You don't have to switch to the HTML view of Windows Live Writer as the software is smart enough to recognize the Flash video code and renders it just perfect.

Do you Paste or Paste Special ?

When you paste a block of formatted rich text in WLW using the standard Paste command (Ctrl+V), all the font styles and hyperlinks appear exactly as in the source. Windows Live Writer gives you another option called "Paste Special" that's borrowed from Microsoft Office.

Using Paste Special (Ctrl+Shift+V), you have the option to remove all HTML formatting but preserve hyperlinks and images.  Or you can try the Thinned HTML option which preserve the fonts sizes and text alignments but strips the source text of all extra formatting like CSS styles.

Not just categories, Add Tags to Your Wordpress Posts

By default, Windows Live Writer lets you add categories to your blog posts that are listed as a tree view near the status bar. In addition to categories, you can also include any number of tags in your articles by using the following syntax [not to be confused with Flickr, del.icio.us or Technorati tags]:

[tags]windows live writer, tips and tricks, microsoft software[/tags]

The Ultimate Tag Warrior or Simply Tagging Wordpress plugin will automatically recognize these tags and this line won't appear in your main blog. You can also use Windows Live Writer to insert the More tag for Post excerpts <!-- more -->

Use Link Glossary for Quick Access to Favorite Websites and URLs

Link Glossary is your personal repository of web pages or URL that you frequently quote in your blog posts. For instance, if you are regularly link to the Yahoo! homepage in your blog post, you can include that address in the Link Glossary.

The next time you want to add a link to yahoo.com in your post, Link Glossary will do that for you without you having to type the whole URL over an over again. Available from Tools -> Options -> Link Glossary or right click any hyperlink in your post and say "Add to Link Glossary".

Tumbleblog - Quick Blogging from the Web Browser

Similar to the BlogThis bookmarklets, you can select web images, hyperlinks or any portion of a web page inside Firefox or IE and quickly publish them to your blog using the Blog This feature available separately.

Windows Live Writer will automatically insert the attribution links (source URL) in the blog posts. You can also customize these HTML snippets through Tools -> Options -> Blog This. A good example would be to include social bookmarking icons, Technorati cosmos, Sphere related posts, etc.

Resize Images using the Image Handles

Most of us may know this trick but still mentioning it here since it is simply the biggest time-saver for bloggers. Sometimes that web images don't fit our blog layout so you can easily resize them right inside WLW by dragging the pointers near the image corners. Windows Live Writer will maintain a link to your source image for readers who like to view the image in full size.

To Move Draft Blog Posts from one Computer to Another

When you are composing blog posts inside Windows Live Writer, the software won't save the draft entries to you hard drive - they are only accessible from the Windows Live Writer interface. If you like to move your unfinished blog posts from one PC to another, the best option is to save them as online draft which are accessible from all computers (Goto Save Draft -> Post draft to Weblog)

Turn Off Smart Correction

When you type a string of characters that resemble a web URL or an email address, Windows Live Writer will convert that into an http: or mailto: hyperlink. You can easily reverse this change by pressing Ctrl+Z or right-click the hyperlink and says "remove hyperlink"

Insert Blog Widgets, Google Adsense Referrals and other Javascript

Switch to the HTML code view (Shift+F11) and insert any scripts or CSS code.

Important Windows Live Writer Shortcuts

Ctrl+K - Insert Hyperlinks 
Ctrl+L - Insert Images from the desktop or the internet
Ctrl+S - Save drafts locally
F7 - Run Spell Checker
F9 - View or Hide the Sidebar

Get the Most Out of Windows Live Writer -

Additional Reading: More Windows Live Writer Tricks, Add Google Blog Search to Windows Live Writer, Windows Live Writer Plugins [Insert Flickr Pictures, Screen shots, Source Code with Syntax Highlighting and more]

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Apple Releases Patch for Windows Safari 3.0.1

The half baked public beta of Safari 3 bought enough bad PR for Apple and so they have silently released a new version - Safari 3.0.1.

The new patch fixes certain security issues but the font display problems persist on lot of computers. Here's a screenshot of the latest version of Safari (notice the random fonts in the menu bar, bookmarks and the About dialog)

You'll have to redo the entire exercise of editing the fonts.plist file in order to see the menu bars and websites like Yahoo or Amazon correctly.  The other option is to manually copy the Lucida Grande fonts from your c:\windows\fonts folder to the C:\Program Files\Safari\Safari.resources folder. It has worked for lot of Safari users.

If you don't see the toolbar or status bar in Safari 3, copy the Defaults.plist from C:\Program Files\Safari\Safari.resources\ to C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\Apple Computer\Safari and rename it to Preferences.plist - this will reset everything to factory defaults.

This overnight release looks more in response to the 0day exploit discovered just two hours after the public release. Should wait for another patch from Apple.

Download Safari 3.0.1

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Search Video Clips from Popular Video Sharing Sites In One Place

How do you find videos on the web related to some topic? The Youtube website is probably a good place to start but if you confine the search only to YouTube, you will miss so much exciting stuff that exists in other places. 

Google Video, MySpace, DailyMotion, iFilm, Metacafe, Revver, Veoh, Reuters, Yahoo! Videos, BrightCove, MSN Soapbox, AOL, Grouper...these video sharing websites may not be as big as YouTube but they still have a great fan following and host tons of video clips that may well be of your interest.

We often ignore searching video content on these "non-YouTube" sites because of lack of time - fortunately, this problem is now a thing of the past with uLinkx - a comprehensive video search engine to help you conveniently search multiple video websites from one place.

[uLinkx has no "linkx" with blinkx video search]

uLinkx provides RSS search feeds for your video search queries. And you can also watch any of these videos without leaving the uLinkx website - no more hitting the back or forward buttons in your browser.

My favorite feature is the Live Video search which is like a common wrapper for all video sharing sites. You execute a live query on YouTube or sites right inside uLinkx.

Other than video search, uLinkx can be used for bookmarking video clips from multiple sites or organizing them in video playlists. [image a single playlist that streams videos clips coming from different sources like YouTube, Metacafe and Google Video]

Wishlist - more customizable RSS feeds and support for BrightCove and Blip.tv. I also faced problems subscribing to the Video search feeds in Newsgator but they worked fine inside Google Personalized homepage.

uLinkx.com | Bookmarklet | Developer Blog | All In One Search

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Social Bookmarking Enters YouTube, Related Videos Now Optional

[screenshots of old and new version of Youtube website]

The YouTube Videos website sports a new look today that looks cleaner and more usable with the re-arranged modules. The site has moved from a 3-column layout to a 2-column with the embed section now placed just below the actual video clip.

They have added two new features and also removed few things:

What's in ?

Other than the cosmetic changes, the very interesting news is that YouTube is now giving users an option to embed video clips on their sites with or without the related video thumbnails. This option is available near the Embed box.

For existing videos in your blog, you can insert the parameter "&rel0" to the Youtube URL to include related video clips or "&rel1" to hide the related videos - the default setting is that related videos will be shown in the video clip.

Another enhancement is that use can now share YouTube videos on Digg, Delicious, Furl, Reddit and StumbleUpon directly from the YouTube interface.

What's out  in the new YouTube ?

YouTube has removed the favorites link that suggested how many YouTube members have marked some video as their favorites. The star ratings stay.

Also missing are the links which showed the top five websites who have embedded that video clip.

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View or Search Your Web Browser History in a Picture Timeline

Thumbstrips is a wonderful Firefox extension that helps you view recently visited web pages in a visual manner - it's a more user friendly and powerful approach than the native Firefox History view (Ctrl+H).

Thumbstrips, like an automatic screen capture program, takes screenshots of the websites that you are visiting and also records other details like how long you stayed on that web page and the number of times you viewed that page in your current session.

With recording turned on, press F2 and the website thumbnail images will display as a filmstrip in chronological order - move your cursor over the thumbnails to browse through your web history or right click any image to get more details about your interaction with that particular webpage.

Since thumbstrips will also save the associated HTML source code of web pages, you can use it for searching the browser history with keywords that may be in the title, URL or body of the webpage. The thumbnail images can also be saved to a local folder or shared with friends.

And Thumbstrips will save a snapshot of the webpage as you see it in the web browser - not the entire webpage which could span several folds.

I was expecting Thumbstrips to consume tons of memory since it is always processing in the background but fortunately, that's not the case.  Give it a shot.

Thumbstrips Extension [Firefox Only] | Thanks Dave

Related: How to Capture Web page Screenshots

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Find Alexa Rank of any Website using Google Talk

Imagine typing "whois xyz.com" inside GTalk to find out who owns that web domain name. Or saying "alexa abc.com" will show you the Alexa Traffic details of that website right inside your Google chat window.

You can now easily run popular network commands inside Google Talk, Yahoo!, AOL or Windows Live messenger through IMified - just add imified@imified.com to your buddy list and start using the chat window as a network command line tool.

Other than whois, commands like traceroute and ping can also be executed from GTalk.

We earlier mentioned IMified as a quick tool for publishing posts on Wordpress or Blogger blogs through messenger clients.

The service has come a long way since then and now works seamlessly with tumblr, jaiku, twitter and so on.

You can even use Imified to add bookmarks to your del.icio.us account from Google Talk. How cool is that.

imified | Add it to your friends list and the add the netlookup widget.

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Convert Powerpoint Presentations to Flash with GMail PPT Viewer

GMail now has an inbuilt PPT viewer that lets you view Powerpoint attachment as a Flash picture slideshow in the web browser itself without requiring Microsoft PowerPoint application.

This slideshow feature of GMail will be useful since you no longer have to download the full PPT attachment in order to view that 16th slide of the presentation.

Here are two additional situations where it may help:

1. If you have to view a presentation on some computer that has no copy of PowerPoint, gmail yourself the PPT file and watch the slides inside the web browser. [similar to converting PDF to text using GMail]

2. GMail converts every slide of your Powerpoint presentation to a Flash (swf) file - if you manually advance the entire PPT slideshow using the arrows, all the slides will become available as Flash files in your browser's temp folder.

Just a quick way of transforming Powerpoint slides into SWF documents without using any desktop conversion software. The swf files may then be embedded in your blog for sharing with readers. Nothing great since Scribd can also convert your PPT to Flash paper.

Do you know if GMail Powerpoint viewer can read PPS (Powerpoint Show) formats.

Related: Reduce the File Size of PowerPoint

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