I have long been a fan of Windows Live Writer. I tend to start blog posts and capture bits of information before creating a fully formed article to post to one of my WordPress blogs (here or here). WLW lets me do this easily and with a little setup I can also share the draft posts between all my machines ensuring that the latest changes are available wherever I want to work.
While most of the time it works without fault there have been a couple of persistent problems that have come up when posting.Having now found solutions for both of these I thought I would share them so you don’t have to go looking.
The first is a “500 Internal Server Error” message that is displayed (see below) when posting and seems to be due to the size of images being uploaded.
The answer to this is to change the method by which images are uploaded to your sever. By default these are passed as part of the request sent to the xmlrpc.php script. The solution is to change this to upload the images to your account via FTP.
To do this select Blogs | Edit Blog Settings… from the menu. Select the Pictures option from the list on the left hand side which will display this screen:
Click on the Upload pictures to an FTP server which will open the following screen:
Enter your FTP settings and click OK.
When you now post the images will be FTP’d and you should find that the post is sent without any problems.
The other problem I have had is with a “Parse Error. Not well formed” message.
This seems to be due to a discrepancy between the encoding used for the blog and that used by Windows Live Writer. The default is set to utf-8 but I found that this needed to be changed to Unicode utf-8 before the post would be sent without problems. There is obviously a special character that I am using that is causing problems but I have yet to identify it.
To make this change select Blogs | Edit Blog Settings… from the menu. Select the Advanced option from the list on the left hand side which will display this screen:
Choose the required encoding option from the drop down list and click OK. Try posting again and you should find it is sent without problems.
The above are the only problems that I have had with using Windows Live Writer with WordPress but there is a further list of possible problems and solutions here.