I’ve used the Windows Live Writer content creation and publishing tool for blog posts and pages from Microsoft since it first appeared in beta form in the mid-00s. In my experience, it is the best offline blog editor for Windows bar none.

It’s not perfect, mind you, with probably the biggest frustration being that of configuration with a theme on your blog, often manifesting itself  when you change the theme from one to another.

When WLW doesn’t recognize your theme, it means that you don’t get almost-true WYSIWYG when you write or edit content. So you don’t see your writing as you would when the post or page is published on your blog.

It is frustrating when you can’t see what you’ll get either in WLW’s edit mode or, more importantly, in its preview mode. What you have to do is publish the post to your blog as a draft and then view it in preview there if you want to see what it will look like when actually published, before you hit the ‘publish’ button.

What a performance – one that frustrates many bloggers enormously and can seem a huge deal if you do a lot of blogging.

If you search for solutions online, you’ll find no end of suggestions: this one, for instance, which talks about setting a static page – a suggestion I’ve seen quite a bit.

I tried it, but it didn’t work for me for my self-hosted WordPress blogs (meaning, it might with other blog platforms).

I experienced the issue myself this week when I changed the theme of my primary WordPress blog. WLW worked fine with the previous theme, but wouldn’t ‘see’ the new one. As I ‘ve been through this quite a few times before with mixed results on resolving it, I decided to live with it this time after being unsuccessful with the suggested solution I mentioned above.

Yet a thought occurred to me today that, when I tested it out, proved to be a solution to the problem. When writing in WLW, I now see a post as it will closely appear when published as this screenshot shows.

The fix was very simple. I don’t really know why or how it works but it does.

One thing I noticed when researching a solution this time was references in some of the ideas I encountered to how WLW works when it tries to detect your blog theme.

A common view I saw that was that when WLW publishes a temporary post to your blog as part of its detection process – which, btw, it asks your permission first – it publishes that temp post to the category ‘Uncategorized,’ which is the default category set by WordPress when you first install that platform.

That was the key in my case – the default category was set to something else. Here’s what to do:

1. In your WordPress admin dashboard, go to Settings -> Writing.
2. Check in the dropdown list that the default post category is set to ‘Uncategorized.’ If not, select it.
   
3. At the bottom of the page, click ‘Save Settings.’
4. Then, in WLW, try to detect your blog theme again.

(While you’re on that page, double-check that the check box for ‘XML-RPC’ in the Remote Publishing section is actually checked.)

In my case, it then worked. As I mentioned, I don’t know how or why it worked as ‘Uncategorized’ wasn’t set as the default category with the previous theme I was using: WLW had detected that theme just fine. Maybe it’s something in a particular theme as well.

Still, if you’ve been experiencing this issue, and whatever WordPress theme you have, maybe this fix is worth a try to see if it works where other suggested fixes haven’t.

If it works for you – or doesn’t – I’d love to know.

Incidentally, it looks like the future of Windows Live Writer in terms of Microsoft’s continuing to develop it is in doubt with changes to Windows Live Essentials (the software suite in which WLW forms part). It would be a shame if WLW falls by the wayside in terms of development as blog platforms evolve and become ever more functional, where an offline editor that lets you take advantage of that becomes even more an essential tool.

I’ve always thought that WLW ought to have been an integral element in Microsoft’s Office suite. You can write blog posts in Word (did you know that?)

A far from satisfactory tool or experience, though, compared to Windows Live Writer.