Flaws Found in Windows Live Writer!
Windows Live Writer (WLW), one of the famous desktop blogging client for Windows users that made lives of pro bloggers really easy and comfortable. But have you ever realized there is a major flaw discovered in Windows Live Writer that may sometime put you in trouble? If you have ever used WLW, you must be aware, it has an inbuilt option to set the publishing time of particular posts, that will automatically get published on the desired date and time. But a few days ago, while going offline for a day or two, when I tried publishing a future dated post, it got published immediately. I was just wondering about how this could happen and started blaming myself, thinking I must have not set the option to publish on a future date.
But after a few days, while publishing another post, I was confirmed that the fault was not mine, rather a flaw in WLW made the scheduled post to publish immediately. Even the Windows Live Writer blog has confirmed about a fault in WLW that, sometimes, made scheduled posts get published immediately. WLW team members have assured that the bug will be rectified as soon as possible and have also suggested on what you can do, if you too face such problems. So, if you are a blogger too, using WLW to schedule posts, then be careful next time.
Link: Official Announcement about the Bug!
Related Reading: Windows Live Writer – Best Blogging Client
Deepak Jain has written 178 posts.
rtBlog's Editor who loves to write practical and useful stuff about technology and mobiles. He writes at mobilegyaan.
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I have been Using WLW for 2 months now… and I must say its the most handy tool for a blogger, esp if you are trying to produce quick content.
Till date I haven encountered such problem… and I think this is dependent on the Platform… mainly Remotely Hosted Wordpress Installation.
I think Blogspot Users will never face this problem.
Any Blogspot User Faced this Problem yet ?
Hi, I’m on the WLW team. I think there’s been a misunderstanding. There is a bug in Windows Live Spaces (only) where publishing a new post, it doesn’t respect the publish date. But even when it does respect the publish date, Spaces has never withheld future-dated posts from being published. Support for withholding future-dated posts varies from service to service, Writer tries to alert you if you future date and publish to a service that we KNOW doesn’t support it.
Certainly this shouldn’t be the case with WordPress–it supports future dating just fine. And there isn’t a bug in WLW that we know about, that causes it not to send the date when you’ve got that option checked. It’s just that Spaces currently has a bug that it doesn’t always respect the date.
Hope that helps!
I was using WLW (It was my first try).
It hanged & crashed my computer.
The full long post I had written was also not saved anywhere
From then I haven’t used it.
@Gautam
You are right. WLW must have an auto-save feature..
I have lost my hours of work on few occasions.
@Joe
I request you to please add auto-save feature in next WLW release. Thanks.
@Debajyoti
I don’t know about blogspot users, but with wordpress, since last couple of days this problem occurs frequently with me
@Joe Cheng
Hi Joe,
I have published this post after confirming myself about this bug. I personally use WLW with wordpress blog, but in wordpress too, I am getting the same problem. Specially since the last couple of days, I am facing this problem very frequently.
@Gautam
Dude, I think, its a thing that every blogger must have. Infact it would change the lives of a blogger.
You should reconsider to use it once more, it is then you’ll know the power of WLW
I say to stay away from WLW for now until Microsoft fixes these issues. The most annoying for me is the non valid XHTML code.
@Rahul, @Gautam: There’s an auto-save feature, you have to enable it under Tools | Options. We disable it by default because it works similar to how Blogger or Gmail auto-save works, the same as clicking the “Save” button every few minutes. This is different than, say, MS Office and we didn’t think desktop users would be used to that behavior.
@Hamid, we generally do valid XHTML if either 1) your blog declares an XHTML doctype, or 2) under Blog | Edit Blog Settings | Advanced you select XHTML. Otherwise we do plain HTML.
@Joe
Thank you very much for your answer. I am really shocked to acknowledge that I never explored Tools >> Options option in a year.
I have now enabled not only auto-save but word-count, reminder on missing categories & tags, forcing spell check before publishing and many other options.
Regarding auto-save option, I really think it wasn’t there last year.
Anyway it was my fault. Thanks for your valuable feedback.
Wanted to ask you something off-topic if its fine with you…
Does Microsoft have any plan for releasing WLW for Mac? I am a Mac user and WLW is the only thing that force me to go through pain of using bulky virtual machine for blogging.
I guess most Mac bloggers will be more than happy to pay for it. I already paid for Ecto on Mac but it is not even close to WLW.
@Hamid
Glad to know your issue is solved.
Personally I have tested more than 20 different desktop blogging clients on Mac, Windows, Linux, Java-based, Adobe-air based. WLW generates best markup. In fact, WLW generates better markup for images if compared with Wordpress itself. Wordpress add many unwanted class values to image tag which hardly any theme designer utilizes.
@Joe Thats I know and as far as text goes WLW outputs valid XHTML by default but give problems with images and videos.
Check http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thelifedigital.com%2Fhow-to-access-linux-ext2-ext3-partitions-in-windows%2F&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0
@Hamid Oh, you’re validating on XHTML Strict, that’s not something we aspire to currently. If you validate on XHTML Transitional for that page, you’ll get two errors, both of which come from your theme.
The problem we encountered with XHTML Strict is it deprecates some common tags and attributes that can only be replaced by JavaScript or CSS, both of which may get stripped by blog platforms for security reasons.
I didn’t see anything around images and videos in those validation results, I’d be interested if you have another post that could demonstrate those problems. Thanks!
@Joe Thank you for the comments. It was very nice talking to you.
@Rahul, sorry, no plans for WLW for Mac at the moment. While we do get a lot of requests for it, it’s not a great fit for the strategy of the division we belong to (Windows & Windows Live).
@Joe
Thanks again Joe.
I asked just out of curiosity.
But considering many professional bloggers use Mac and like WLW, just try putting a suggestion.
I personally won’t mind paying something like $500 for WLW on Mac! Because its only WLW, one need to pay for Windows XP and VMware Fusion.
Also with WLW, I can blog atleast 2-3 times more.
If possible, try passing a suggestion.
Microsoft already have many products ported on Mac.
@Rahul:
$500??
Then you guys have got a reason to use Windows on your Mac pcs
Hi! WLW guys… I have a question. Well, more of a problem really. Every time I update my WL suite (I have IE 8 RC1, so I have to update it or I get an annoying message about disabled add-ons), it causes major problems with Word, to the point that Word crashes on opening. I have Word 2000, so I was wondering if there are some kind of incompatibility issues between Word 2000 & WLW? Or another one of the WL programs? I just picked WLW because it seemed the most related to Word & so, the most likely to cause some kind of conflict.
I’ve been trying to solve this problem for about 4 hours, now, & I’m getting to the point of wanting to tear my hair out.
Thanks for any insight you can provide!
Chris, hmmm, I’ve never heard of an incompatibility, though I don’t know that we do compat testing with versions of Office that are that old. It almost certainly isn’t WLW though, as the changes we make to your system are very simple and self-contained.
What other WL applications have you installed?
Have you tried using your Office 2000 disc to do a Repair? (Assuming we even had that option in 2000)
You can e-mail me at joe.cheng *AT* microsoft.com to follow up if you want. Thanks.