A Warning About Windows Live Writer
I have previously written a very positive posting about using Windows Live Writer as desktop editor for Wordpress.
I have installed and used Live Writer on my WordPress installation. It works beautifully, but has created huge problems for me. As it turns out, the program for some reason uses ISO code representation of extended characters instead of “standard” HTML (I have the Norwegian version of the program, and I am not certain whether this is a problem in other versions - but it probably is in non-English versions).
That is, « is represented as & #171; (ISO Latin-1, with a blank space inserted after & to prevent from not displaying) instead of  & laquo; (HTML). And so on, for all the extended characters.
So why is this a huge problem: Because in WordPress, plugins like “Sensitive Tag Clouds” and the like assume standard HTML. And WordPress 2.3.x tags seem to be generated on this assumption as well. So my Wordpress installation generates tags that include these odd ISO-code numbers into my Google sitemap. But when that page comes up in a search, and the users wants to open my page, the page can not be found, and generates a 404-error.
So I am losing a traffic due to this program. I have gone through the documentation for Windows Live Writer, and as far as I can see, this is not at all documented. And there doesn’t seem to be any way to configure this. Also, you can only see the representation when you switch from normal to HTML view in Live Writer.
The only solution I have so far found is to write the text directly into the HTML-view instead of using the ordinary views. Then the characters will be correctly represented in WordPress.
So for me this has meant: (a) I have stopped using Live Writer, and (b) I have had to go back and correct all the post I had written using it before I detected the problem.
Be warned! This is not a good program to use with WordPress installations!
– Peter
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2 Responses to “A Warning About Windows Live Writer”
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Hi there, if you don’t want numeric escape codes (they are actually from Unicode, not ISO-8859-1) you can change the setting on a per-blog basis by going to Weblog | Edit Weblog Settings | Advanced, and change markup style from “Default” to “HTML”.
When using XHTML it is actually safer to use the numeric codes, and they are supposed to be semantically identical to the named equivalents. Of course, I understand that that’s not much help to you if the programs you use don’t know how to deal with them!
Hi Joe!
Thank you very much for the advice. I checked it out, and it worked. That’s good. Being able to change setting on a per blog basis is exactly what at least I, and I suspect most other bloggers as well, want!
Also - I was impressed by the speed of your response!