The process for setting up Windows Live Writer to post to a WordPress account is actually substantially less onerous than the process for setting up Word itself: you just enter the actual URL of your blog and hit go and the program will figure out the rest by itself (although I will confess that my blog was already setup for remote posting because I had to do that for Word).
Writer’s support for the whole “blog” thing is somewhat more robust than Word’s: you can use Writer to set both categories and tags and post-date a post (haha—no pun intended) without ever logging into the site itself. Of course, Writer’s ability to deal with the language itself is inferior to Word’s, but I guess that isn’t honestly a huge deal when you consider what you’re actually writing here. (Really, who wins a Pulitzer with a blog post, even in the 21st century?)
I suppose the ideal process would be to write text in a real editor and then transfer it to something like this for final posting, but I just really don’t like that idea for some reason. Adding a whole extra step to the publishing process seems like a waste. Unfortunately, others seem to be reporting similar experiences to mine: Word itself is not capable of adding tags, scheduling posts, etc.
For the inaugural post on my new site, I have decided to test out Word’s web publishing capabilities.
Now, I know that you can use Word as sort of an offline interface to a blog (particularly one based on one of the many well-known engines in the universe), but I have not done it too often and so have not been just entirely clear on how the process works. This post is starting life as a perfectly normal “Document1,” purely for testing purposes. What I’m going to try to find out here is how tags and categorization work after the fact—that is, after the document’s creation.
Publish as Blog Post seems to be the relevant menu option, under Save and Send on the backstage menu (big blue file button in the upper left hand corner). Let’s give that a click and see how this goes!
Annoyances
WordPress has apparently changed since the last time I tried this (at which point it worked without any issues. As pointed out here, you now have to turn on some kind of XML-RPC protocol in WordPress to do it, and you have to use a special “blog post” URL rather than simply the main URL of your blog (ending in xmlrpc.php, in fact).
The second thing I noted here that bugs me a bit is that once you have clicked “publish as post,” you still have to put in a title. Now, the way I see it, Word should automatically catch the fact that I had a title (an H1, in fact) and make that the title, but I guess that’s mostly a matter of opinion.
I keep the Navigation Pane open in word because I use this mostly for editing long documents organized by headings, but the title of this document (the actual “title” for the post) does not appear there. Of course I can get to the top by clicking the little “top” button, but that’s not what I had in mind when I glanced at the navigation pane. The subheading “annoyances” above still works fine.
Lastly, there is a space up on top where I can see that I can insert categories (pointless, since I don’t have any yet), but I don’t see any place where I can tag the post. Maybe there’ll be something somewhere else.