In this video, we’re gonna take a look at how to use Windows Live Writer to publish new posts and new pages to your WordPress blog. Now the first thing you really need to do is to decide if you wanna publish new content as a WordPress post, or a WordPress page. And of course, there are differences between the two, so if you wanna create a new post, just click on New and select New Post, and if you wanna create a new page, select New Page. But I’m gonna select a new post for now.
[evp width=”640″ height=”480″]tutorials/wpvideos/livewriter-publishing.swf[/evp]
So this is the main editing screen of Windows Live Writer. I can enter a title for my post, and I can also enter some content. So I’m gonna do that now. So as you can see here, I’ve entered the title of my new blogpost, and I have also entered some content. So if I want to link certain parts of the text to a website, for example, it’s pretty simple. It’s basically the CMS; any WYSIWYG HTML editor or even pretty much similar to the built-in editor in WordPress. So if I wanna link these tags, for example, all I need to do is select the text and click on this button here that says Insert Hyperlink. And then I’d be able to enter the link that I want, and I can even select to automatically link to this text. What this means is that for the selected keyword – in this case, search engine optimization – a new entry will be edited inside Windows Live Writer which will automatically convert any keyword such as search engine optimization to the link that I specified. And this will happen automatically in any future post that you put. So for example, I want to link to searchenginejournal.com, but I can also link to any of the previous posts, or if I’ve created an auto link entry, I can also link to an automatic link entry. And when that’s done, just click on Insert. And you can see that now, this entire keyword links to the website that I want to take my visitors to.
And at the bottom here, you’ll be able to see that there are a few viewing options. What you are currently looking at is the edit view, but you can also look at the preview, and it will show you exactly how your new post will look like, using the theme that is currently active in your WordPress blog. And if you are pretty good in HTML, you may also want to take a look at the source view, which is all purely HTML right here, so let’s go back to the edit view.
And perhaps one of the most important things that you’ll want to do is also to add some images to your content. So to do that, you can either click on Insert and Select Picture, or you can click on the icon here that says Insert Picture. So I browsed through my collection of images that I can use for the Web, and I’m just gonna select the appropriate image here, so I’m going to select maybe this mouse image, and click on Insert. And you will see that as you insert the image, on the right-hand section here would be an entirely new image editing options that appear here, and this would appear anytime you click on an image.
So if you wanna reposition this image, all you need to do is click and drag it, and let it go here at the exact location that you want to place the image. Then click on it again, and the first thing you’ll want to do is select the text wrapping. You can either select it as in-line by default, or if you want to place this image to the right, I just need to align it to the right like this. Now, if you feel that the image is perhaps too close to the text, you may want to add some custom margins to your right-hand section of the image, or also to the left-hand section of the image, and you’ll see that the text will update accordingly and now it will be much more neater and there will be a very clear visible border or space – white space – between your images and your text.
In Windows Live Writer, you can also have a few basic image options, for example, I can choose to change how the image is displayed. By default, it’s selected as Drop Shadow, but I can always click on Instant Photo or I can also click on Photopaper and you’ll see that the image actually changes – the display of the image changes – according to what you want. I can select a solid 1 pixel; so this is how it would look like if I select a solid 1-pixel border.
And then what I can do is control the size of the thumbnail and the actual image. The easiest way to do this in Windows Live Writer is to simply place your mouse at the corners here and click and drag the image accordingly to resize the image, or you can also click on the Advanced tab, and you can select either the predefined sizes for the image or you can specify your own. So for example, if I want to only display a thumbnail of this image, I can click on Medium, and if this is too big for me, I can always go back to the small image version.
If I wanna specify a specific size of the image, I can always type in here. So if I want this image to be 300 pixels in width and I’ll just put in 300 here, and the height will automatically adjust because we’ve selected the log ratio option. And you can also add some basic formatting to your images; for example, you can choose a Contrast option to increase the brightness of your image, and also to increase or decrease the contrast of your image. So if you have images that are not really clear, it’ll be very easy to do some basic editing using Windows Live Writer.
And in the third tab you see here, which is right here – it’s called Effects tab – you can basically add new effects to your image. So for example, if I want this image to be black and white, I can just select the Black and White option, and you see that my image is black and white. If I don’t want this, I can always highlight this effect and just click on the Remove Effect option. Now, the really, really cool thing about Windows Live Writer is that it is completely integrated and connected to your WordPress blog. So you can actually click on this icon here, which opens up the main options window, and you can also specify a slug for your WordPress post, you can select from different authors if the authors are available, you can enter your own tags…if you don’t want to publish this post immediately, you can also select a publish date, and from this drop-down calendar, you can basically select any date that you want. And finally, of course, you should also set some categories, so…these are the categories that are existing in my blog, but if I want to add new categories, I can always add some new categories here, and just click on “Add.” And what happens is that these new categories will also be updated in your WordPress blog when you publish this post.
So now, it comes to actually publishing the post to your WordPress blog. You can click on this link here, so you can either save a draft only to your WordPress blog and choose to publish it within your WordPress blog itself, or you can “post draft and edit online”. What this means is that it will automatically post a draft and automatically open up a new browser window directly to your WordPress login page.
However, if you’re pretty comfortable with Windows Live Writer and you’re pretty sure that you want to publish directly from Windows Live Writer without having to log in to your blog, then you can just click on the first button here. It says, “Publish.” But in most cases, I would prefer to just save a draft to my WordPress blog and do the actual publishing on the WordPress blog itself. So I’m gonna click on “post draft” and “edit online.”
And so Windows Live Writer has automatically posted a draft only to my WordPress blog and automatically opened up a new browser screen where I need to log in, and once I have logged in, I can see the actual draft in my WordPress blog, so I can see how this looks like inside the WordPress editor itself, and if I want to publish this blog post or make any further changes, I can just edit it here and then select Publish or Save draft.
So that’s how you use Windows Live Writer to very easily add new posts and new content to your WordPress blog.