Do you use Windows Live Writer and the DotNetNuke Blog module?  I do, and I just discovered a great new WLW feature which is going to greatly simplify the steps I have to perform for every blog post.

I have been using Windows Live Writer (WLW) for a few years now.  I really love WLW for writing my blog.  In fact I loved it so much that it was one of the reasons I had shifted my personal blog to BlogEngine.net.  At the time, the DotNetNuke Blog module did not support a posting API which could be used with WLW.  You don’t know real pain until you have tried to write a blog post with nothing but a web based rich text editor.  Once you lose one or two posts because of a session timeout or your post gets mangled because of the way the editor handles script blocks or xml blocks, you will quickly swear off all blogging with an RTE.

Once I started using BlogEngine, I came to really appreciate some of its features.  It really tries to leverage the capabilities of WLW to make the blogging experience as pain free as possible.  One feature that I use quite a bit is the ability to split my blog into a summary along with the full post just by including the “[more]” tag in my post.  Everything before the tag will be used when displaying the blog summaries.  The entire content will be displayed when viewing a specific blog post.  This is great, although it does limit your ability to craft a great summary that differs from the opening of your blog post.

Unfortunately, the DotNetNuke Blog module does not support the “[more]” tag.  If you don’t provide a summary when creating a post for the Blog module, then it will try to create a summary using the first 1000 or so characters.  This rarely works with my blog posts and even when it works it is generally not optimal.  Because I usually include an image at the top of my posts, the auto-summary feature usually just chokes and I am forced to hand enter a summary for my blog on DotNetNuke.com.  This is definitely a problem.  My blog posts often include coding examples.  When I edit a blog post just so I can hand craft the summary, it also has the side effect of opening the main blog content in the RTE which then reformats my code blocks when I go to save the summary.  Hello mangled code samples.

This article is cross-posted from my personal blog.

Today Microsoft opened up the beta for Wave 4 of the Windows Live Essentials tools including Windows Live Writer.  I have been a long time user of WLW and have come to really enjoy both the simplicity and the power of the tool when writing my blog posts.  I really didn’t see a lot that needed “fixing”, and in this release of WLW it looks like that is exactly what I got – not a lot that has been fixed.

That is not to say that a lot hasn’t changed, because from a UI perspective, it is almost completely different.  The biggest change is that the new live writer now proudly sports a fairly standard ribbon bar just like those found in Microsoft Office.  And just like in Office, I find that the new ribbon bar is somewhat of a step backward.  People are by their natures creatures of habits.  Once we learn how to do something, we don’t want to have to relearn it without a very good reason.