Windows Live Writer Crashes Fix Solution
Yea! I have my Windows Live Writer back! I downloaded BlogDesk but haven’t really messed around with it yet.
The truth is that I can’t spend too much time on my own blogs and get all of my writing work done at the same time, so learning a new blogging program wasn’t top on my list.
For those of you who are not familiar with Windows Live Writer, it is an offline blogging utility from Microsoft. Unlike many Microsoft products which seem to earn the automatic ire of the blogging community, this one has gone over pretty well, probably because it is a pretty good program.
One of the huge things it does for me, is that I can Copy and image off of a website or from a Word document, or wherever and then Paste that image directly into the post I’m writing without having to first save it to disk and then upload or attach the file to my post. Just by pasting it into the post, Live Writer handles getting it up on my WordPress site as part of publishing the article.
Sure, there is a lot of junk code that it puts in (go figure) and some things don’t work exactly the way I would like, but nothing else works as well yet, nor as fast, and since time is money, I’m going with Live Writer for the time being.
Live Writer Crashes Caused By Auto-Link Feature
I had been using Windows Live Writer for several months now, since it was beta, with no real problems. Then, it suddenly started crashing on me every time I clicked on the LINK button. Also, Live Writer crashed whenever I clicked on Options inside the Tools menu.
After a search I found a thread at Microsoft from someone who seemed to be having the same issue and was eventually directed to this guy where it turns out that if you have an empty auto-link entry somehow then Writer throws an exception and crashes.
And, by the way, big kudos to Microsoft for monitoring the thread and posting a solution. Even letting us know that a bug report has already been logged and that they hope to fix it in the next version. Thanks!
That wasn’t my problem exactly, but it gave me a place to start and upon further examination I found out that if you have a duplicate auto-link entry, Windows Live Writer will throw an exception. I had apparently already setup an auto-link for my Dad View of Parenting Tips and Advice website when I accidentally setup another one.
Auto-link entries are stored in an XML file in c:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Windows Live Writer\LinkGlossary
If you have an empty entry, you will have <text> </text> tags with nothing in between them. Either delete that whole entry (not just that line) or put something in between the tags. To find a duplicate, just go through the file and look, or carefully read Windows Live Writer error message which will tell you which entry is a duplicate. Then, just find and delete one.
So, either don’t use the Auto-Link feature, or try and remember what you have already set to auto-link. If you ever accidentally hit the auto-link button, don’t just cancel out. Fill in some junk text and then go back and delete it so that you don’t accidentally create an empty field.
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Denial and Windows Live Writer
Here is a good lesson for business owners and management. Do not pretend that you don’t know what is going on in the business world. It only makes you look like a fool.
There was an episode of the West Wing in which the staff insist the President not use his opponent’s name because it gives him free publicity. The President asks that if he doesn’t use his opponent’s name, won’t it just look like he doesn’t know his name? The absurdity being that everyone already knows both names; presidential elections are like that. (Whether you are Republican, Democrat, or hate politics, by now you know that names of the two guys running this year.)
This brings me to today’s post. I always laugh when people or companies try and pretend to be oblivious of the obvious to make themselves try and look good. Ironically, they only end up making themselves look foolish.
The folks at Microsoft’s new online push have released a new version of Windows Live Writer that addresses some of my previous problems with it, so I’ve re-installed it and am starting to use it again. So far, so good.
Windows Live Writer’s Absurd Omission
While setting up my blogs, I noticed that Microsoft has declared itself to be the victor in the blogging universe despite the fact that it is currently a tiny niche player. When you setup Windows Live Writer to work with your blog you get a setup screen like this one:
If you aren’t laughing out loud right now, you probably don’t know much about blogging. The most used blogging service is Wordpress. The other most common ones are Blogger and TypePad. These are so ubiquitous it’s like, not including Google, Yahoo, and MSN in your new search related software. Only, on the Microsoft blogging software, none of the top three are listed. Sure, they are there under “Another Weblog Service,” but what kind of message does this box send? If you have a great new search product and it says “What Search Engine Do You Use?” — Bob’s Search, Lycos Search, or Another Search Engine, what kind of message does that send regarding your understanding of your target users?
Microsoft hopes that this box add legitimacy to its Johnny-come-lately addition to the online universe called Live Spaces. What it really does is give everyone a big fat reminder that Microsoft is not only not a leader in the online world, but frequently a hinderance. (It’s Internet Explorer is legendary for it’s terrible implementation of standards it supposedly supports — Search anywhere for IE and CSS for examples.) Furthermore, it suggests that Microsoft is pretending that there aren’t thousands of people and sites out there who have been up and running and doing just fine while Microsoft was trying to decide if the this whole Web 2.0 thing was real or not. So, your average Internet professional (like Moi) sees this screen and thinks, “Who are they kidding?” I mean, I’m assuming that they aren’t delusional enough to know that the likes of Wordpress and Blogger make up the vast majority of sites out there. So, they have to be doing it on purpose. I guess they hope people will be setting this software up and decide to give one of these services a try.
What they have actually done is to put out a software that reinforces the notion that Microsoft software is cumbersome and difficult to setup. Not long from now, other blogging software will update or a new one will come along with features. But, this other software will have easy default buttons for setting up Wordpress and Blogger and the reviews will start to say things like “Much easier to setup than Windows Live Writer” and before you know it, Microsoft has released yet another product that no one has any interest in actually using. The only users they’ll be left with are the lowest end people who use whatever comes pre-installed on their computer without doing any research or investigation. Needless to say, these won’t be the people producing the top blogs on the Internet.
So, welcome to Windows Live Writer. It is cool today, but absurd corporate politics have doomed it to be a weak player in the market. Feel free to use it as a place holder until a Mozilla backed version of blogging software comes along.
