WLW beta2 Good and bad For Wordpress
I’ve spent the better part of the last two days working with the new version of Windows Live Writer and it’s been an adventure to be sure. This is not a thorough review since there hasn’t been time for that but I do wish to touch upon a couple of points both good and bad.
And so…
The Good News (some of it anyway)
The good news is that the two major complaints about the first version have been fixed. The first being the infamous duplicating images upload where Live Writer would upload an entire new set of images when editing an existing post that contained these images. Having a few extra copies of a single image in a post that was edited two or three times was quite an unwelcome surprise to the blogger’s who first discovered this problem, as you might imagine. No more apparently now that the new version has hit the streets. The proof will come with time. So far I haven’t seen this particular problem occur in my test edits.
The second biggest complaint was Live Writer beta 1 creating it’s own upload path for these images instead of the respective blogging platform’s default path. For Wordpress users that default path was “wp-content/uploads/yyyy/mm” for images (unless you specified a unique path) and now that’s where the new version of Writer puts them instead of something like this: “windowslivewriter/yetanotherpost-10757/image.jpg”
or in later versions of Wordpress just combining the whole thing into one long name:
“windowslivewriteryetanotherpost-10757image.jpg”.
Yeah…Am I glad that’s gone! And I’m sure I’m not the only one.
The added features are also good news all around especially the ability to create and edit pages as well as posts (I love this!) and Writer appears to work fine in this aspect with a couple of quick tests on my main blog. Tables are a nice added feature also although I haven’t been able to test this thoroughly yet. And for those of you that were hankering for Live Writer to support the “More” feature where you can divide up your post using the “!–more–” tag, you’ll be glad to know this is now included in the new version as well.
And I love the inline spell checking!
These are the some of the good points I have been able to touch upon in the relatively short time I’ve had to work the new version simply because…
The majority of my time was taken up with chasing down the problems (sigh).
The Bad News
As with any beta software, especially when the software is as complicated and powerful as Windows Live Writer has become, there is always that anomaly of a newer version fixing the majority of the problems the previous version exhibited while at the same time unleashing a whole batch of new quirks in the process. And as it was with the fist betas of Internet Explorer 7 and Office, so it is with WLW beta 2. Can’t be helped, but that’s what we’re here for now isn’t it? Of course not all the problems have been ferreted out yet by the blogger’s at large but after all, the new version has only been out a couple of days or so be that as it may, I’ll touch on a few I’ve seen while testing my favorite blog editor.
It Froze My Computer!
The first problem I’ll address is one that has been already reported to the Writer Forums and that’s the complaint of WLW freezing up the user’s computer when the Writer is up and running. I encountered this also when I first installed the new version. The problem turned out to be a secondary service that was started after the Writer had opened called Windows Live Setup. This is one of the things that I absolutely despise when it comes to the latest offerings from MS or Google and the like. When a program brings up these secondary services you don’t need to run the program, eating up your resources needlessly.
In this case however, Joe Cheng immediately came through with a fix he posted at the forum:
To make the svchost.exe taking 100% of CPU go away, go into Services control panel (run services.msc) and find the Windows Live Setup Service, and change it from Manual to Disabled.
For those of you are unfamiliar with using the Services panel, all you have to do is go into your Start menu, select run and then type in “Services.msc”. Once the Services panel loads, scroll down until you see “Windows Live Setup” and double click this entry. In the dialog box that follows select “Disable” from the drop down menu located in the center of the dialog box and then just below, if it states the service is running, hit the Stop button. Now hit OK to close out. Close the Services panel and you’re done. No more freezing UI’s.
Darn Thing Is Arguing About Edits Now
The second problem is not so easy and involves a comment I received on my previous post on the new Writer:
I had an ArgumentOutOfRangeException error when tried to open my existing posts from WordPress. It looks like a problem with WordPress provider.
In this case the provider was Wordpress.com and the problem turned out not to be the provider but in the WLW beta 2 itself. A single, botched up line of program code that throws the exception when more than one set of tags are used in a post. One of the commenter’s at the forum seems to have found the problem.
There’s already a post with the same subject, but this may be different and I’ve also narrowed it down to the HTML which causes the problem.
If your blog contains any recent entries with more than one set of tags you receive an ArgumentOutOfRangeException when attempting to view a list of posts.You can test this by entering the following code in the HTML view, publishing the entry, then attempting to open the post for editing.Unfortunately this pretty much screws up most people who insert formatted code/text snippets in their posts.
I haven’t tried to duplicate this yet but the problem has been acknowledged by Joe Cheng and unfortunately, it won’t be able to be fixed until the next release…whenever that may be.
Update 06-16-07: The problem described below turned out to be caused by a Pmetrics tracking script that was placed in my footer which sends visitor data to my stats service. Luckily, I was able to replace this script with a Pmetrics plugin which performs the same functions as the tracking script did without interfering with WLW. Problem solved!
Stripped “div” tags (from “Inserted Tags” when editing)>>Not a WLW BUG!!
The third and final problem I’ve encountered is a bit strange and was harder to find (Wordpress or Wordpress 2.2 only?). Now I don’t know if it’s just me, my theme, Wordpress or just an anomaly in this latest version of Writer and I’ll know better once I can test using my other site (different theme) and when I get time to do some serious testing in my Wordpress Sandbox but until then let’s see if anyone else has encountered this.
Upon editing my previous post about Live Writer and re-publishing, I found that my blog was now “broken” with the sidebar pushed all the way to the bottom underneath the post/posts (depending if it was the Home page or the single post page) and the title to the second post on the main page up at the top right where the top of the sidebar used to be.
After much removing of tracking scripts and such from my header that I had inserted for my metrics system and a lot of constructive cursing I found that when opening a previous post that was written using Windows Live Writer and included tags at the bottom such as Technorati tags, WLW strips away a vital tag from the surrounding tag code thereby “breaking” the overall html coding of the post and my blog as well.
You see, WLW surrounds the entire block of html for the inserted tags with “div” tags that allows you to edit these tags on the fly while using the Web layout or Normal view of the Writer, just by clicking on the inserted tags, bringing up the “Insert tags” dialog in the sidebar. Unfortunately, if you download the post again for editing, WLW (or Wordpress?) strips out these “div” tags effectively “breaking” the post and causing all sorts of trouble with your blog or it did with mine at least. Of course this is nothing new. WLW has been occasionally breaking my blog since the first version was announced to the world. The work around of course, is to manually reinsert the “div” tags yourself before you publish your edit or just remove the entire line of WLW code and leave just the typical Technorati tag html.
The disappearing tags.
That’s all for now
Only so much one guy can accomplish in what amounted to just a few hours. Suffice it to say that this still beta software and when it comes down to beta’s, there are going to be problems, no way around it. And we, the blogger’s, have to find them and report same. If you don’t—it won’t get fixed. That’s what beta testing is all about and if you download it and install it, you’re going to find these problems or more to the point, these problems will find you. Find ‘em and head to the Live Writer forum and let them know and hopefully it won’t take another six months for beta 3 to arrive.
In conclusion—There are a great many new features in this new offering that will make using the new Writer a much more satisfying experience overall than the previous version was. There are also several new “glitches” we will all have to deal with. And as in the previous version, once we figure out the work arounds to this new set of conundrums that the beta 2 brings to us, using the new Writer will be a much better experience all around. We just have to remember to keep the development team informed.
Happy writing.
Technorati tags: WLW beta 2 problems, windows Live Writer problems, Windows Live Writer, WLW freeze
Windows Live Writer – ArgumentOutOfRangeException…
Although the new beta of Windows Live Writer is pretty slick it does have one horrible horrible bug that affects Wordpress users.
After installing the second beta I found any attempt to open an existing post or draft from my Wordpress blog wo…
[...] 2 fixes a raft of bugs in beta 1 and introduces some new ones, of course. After all, it is beta software . . . There are a load of functional enhancements [...]
The only problem I had was the upload for photos. It worked to do it directly the first couple of times, then stopped working so I had to make the FTP connection work.
Other then that I absolutely love it. The first blogging software that has everything I want in one place.
@Alex:
The software is nice that’s for sure. What blogging platform are you using BTW? My article concerned my Wordpress install(s) and there are already acknowledged problems with Wordpress. I’d be interested to know about problems with any other platforms whether hosted such as Blogger or self hosted. I can’t seem to get your blog to load up for some reason so I can’t figure it out for myself.
Thanks for the review. I used to use the first release version but stopped after a bit. I was thinking of trying the second version, but I might just wait for the bugs to get ironed out.
Hi Owen,
There’s no harm in trying it out. Unless you use code snippets or scripts or styling within your posts you most likely will never see the ArgumentOutOfRangeException error. Even if you do there’s a plugin available that will solve the problem until the WLW dev team gets the next release out.
And the slowing or freezing of your computer is easily fixed after you install it. The most complicated thing I have to do before posting is that after setting my Technorati tags after the post is written, I have to go into the code and strip out all the MS “smartcontent” nonsense and the “div” tags that suround the code so I end up uploading standard “tag” code instead of WLW’s “editable content” BS which breaks my theme after an edit (WP strips out the “div” tags. Works okay once but not after an edit is uploaded) . This may just be a problem with my theme or a conflict with one of my tracking scripts. I haven’t had time to find out yet.
[...] causing some interesting problems when uploading an edit. For an explanation of this see my previous review and scroll down to the “Stripped “div” tags section. Now this may only be a [...]