As if my previous pastings of Windows Live Writer wasn’t enough, I’ve got some more complaining to do about Windows Live Writer’s latest update.

Page Authoring

The latest update advertises that it now supports Page authoring (such as my About Page) - which is true. However, what it doesn’t tell you is that you need to jump through some hoops to get it.

When I register my blog in WLW, it defaults to a generic Wordpress configuration. This config, unfortunately, doesn’t let me author pages.

It is possible to get it - but it depends upon your setup, and how much stuffing around you’re prepared for.  Here’s how I did it, but I’ve got my blog in it’s own root directory.

Step 1: Add a new blog

Just as you normally would, select “Another weblog service”

Step 2: Lie to Live Writer

Feed it a false URL - it really doesn’t matter the URL as long as it’s not your blog’s default page. I Just added an ‘x’ to the end.

Step 3: Let it Error

It’ll try detecting your blog settings, and then error when it doesn’t work. Now select Wordpress 2.2+ as the blog type, and give it the correct XMLRPC URL.

Step 4: Done!

 Done! Go have a beer or something.

There is a bug that I’ve got, where categories fail to show up now - looks like it’s a bug with Wordpress though.

Jumpy posts.

Whenever I have a blog post (such as this one) which gets long and has a scroll bar - WLW develops a nervous tick.

If I try and drag and drop an image into the text at the bottom of the page - I suddenly find myself at the top of the post hovering with my selected image results in it scrolling down by a few lines at a time until I hit the bottom - and then it immediately jumps to the top of the post again.  This ends up being a right royal pain in the backside if you’re using a touchpad.

It’s not an issue with my particular setup either - I’ve tried it in three different PCs (two Vista, one XP), and all exhibit the same behavior.

More finicky Title Editing.

I think the WLW guys want you to write the title only once. Any time I try and click inside the title, it jumps the cursor to the start of the title. Selecting text isn’t possible either - I just get the ‘Forbidden’ icon, and nothing happens.