Using Microsoft Live Writer with Blogger

I was recently pondering my reluctance to post to my blog. I analyzed the problem and came up with the following facts…

• I don’t like the blogger interface for posting to my blog. Especially when I need to post code samples.
• I don’t typically take the time to post something cool I just did with some code I’ve written because I would typically want to upload a new project that people could download and explore should they want to.
• I won’t typically post to my blog after a long day of writing code.

Having made these identifications this is the first step in solving the problems. I’m certainly not a lazy person. I want to post more useful content to my blog so these issues need to be resolved for me personally before blogging on a regular basis will become reality.

Setting up Live Writer with blogger is a snap. I simply went to the Tools menu then Accounts…

… entered in the required URL for my blog, my username and password ( I use my Google credentials ) and viola… Windows Live Writer is up and running. I’m publishing as I go as I write this. A very cool feature.

So far, so good but what about source code? I use the Manoli Formatter which is quite good. I actually downloaded the source code and started to write myself a little blogger application to handle my blog posts or at least allow me to cut/paste the content into the blogger editor. That didn’t pan out due to time constraints and the fact that I wanted something now, now, now.

Anyway, Live Writer seems to bridge that gap for me so far. The previous images (which are totally superfluous) since the setup process is so easy were all handled automagically via Live Writer. That means I don’t have to upload the image to flicker, get the public link to the image, cut/paste and mangle that link into Blogger, etc. OK, I’m making it sound harder than it is but repetitive processes like that drive me insane. That’s why I’m a software developer… I’m too lazy to do anything twice.

So now, lets try some code… If I hop over to Visual Studio and copy some generic Cache code I wrote and paste it into Manoli I get my CSS tagged HTML back and paste it into Live Writer I can preview what my code snippet is going to look like quite easily…

That’s good stuff! I can immediately see that one code line is wrapping due to the format, styling and layout of my blog. Poof! No worries, I can just edit my code in Visual Studio and paste back into Manoli for a quick update…

public class Cache<TKey, TValue>
{
private readonly Dictionary<TKey, TValue> cache = 
    new Dictionary<TKey, TValue>();

public TValue this[TKey key] 
{ 
get 
{ 
return cache.ContainsKey(key) ? cache[key] : default(TValue); 
} 
set 
{ 
cache[key] = value; 
} 
}

public TValue Fetch(TKey key, TValue value)
{
if (!cache.ContainsKey(key))
{
this[key] = value;
}

return value;
}
}

…and there you have it. Easy code that will fit inside my blog nicely without too much hassle. So far, Windows Live Writer just scored mega kudos with me. Look for more blogging soon. Maybe I can keep my New Years Resolution after all. Note: Live Writer is by no means specific to Blogger. It supports many blogging platforms. Let me know what you like and don’t like about it. My 5 minute analysis is “Why wasn’t I using this the minute it was released”? Anyone use any similar applications? Love to hear your stories. My next task: Making the format of my blog more Web 2.0 compliant.