Sunday, November 22, 2015

Windows Live Writer lives again

If you’re reading this post, it does. If you can’t see this post … Well, in that case, never mind.

Thanks to a an online article by Vinod Kardam, I can once again post to my Blogspot blog using Windows Live Writer, which is both an excellent offline blog post editor for Windows and free.

The process is a bit cumbersome and involves turning on 2-step verification for Gmail and then generating an app-specific password for Live Writer that replaces the Google password Live Writer used to use to log into Blogspot. After that’s been done, you can turn off 2-step verification again, if you prefer.

In June of this year, there were reports that Microsoft planned to turn Live Writer over to an open-source group, which would enhance and maintain it. I can’t find anything more recent than June 2015 about that, however, and I’m growing skeptical. Until that happens, or if it doesn’t happen and some other change at Blogspot once again renders Live Writer unable to log in, this fix makes Live Writer usable again.

Thank you, Vinod Kardam.