Only The Best

I was going to make this an addition to the Live Writer post, but decided it deserved it’s own glory. I’ve been doing a lot of web design lately, as a result I have a greater use for Live Writer. Tonight I attempted to add a new account and was greeted with a friendly dialog stating Writer was unable to determine the blog I was using.

…….?

I figured since Wordpress 2.5 isn’t that old, perhaps something changed enough to break it for Writer. Looking at the options is gives me I chose Wordpress 2.2+. Then it wants the post API URL. I obediently enter the host and path, click next, and am greeted with another dialog stating there was an error. Bummer.

I have other Wordpress sites, one of which I also updated to 2.5. This account was setup in Writer before updating it to 2.5, and continued to work. Of course the next action was to determine where Writer stores its configuration and try to create an entry manually. I quickly located the registry keys and attempted to do just that. I was able to get it to appear in the blog list in Writer but couldn’t copy the binary value that was the password and you can’t edit that in the program without going through the detection again. ARGH.

Nonetheless, I am now happily using Writer with my shiny new Wordpress 2.5 site. The solution to it is really quite simple. As you’re reading this now.

The issue is not with Wordpress 2.5 itself, or even 2.5 period. You could potentially encounter this with any version. The issue, at least for me, was a rogue plug-in. Being that I was able to create a new account in Writer for another 2.5 installation, I disabled all of the plug-ins.

*poof*

Writer detected the blog without any problems. One by one I activated each plug-in and gave it a go in Writer. Eventually it threw up the error from earlier. The offending plug-in was Eyebees. I haven’t had a chance to poke around the code for Eyebees, but if a plug-in is capable of breaking interoperability with Writer, there are likely others out there and they possibly all share a common trait.

Considering how widely used Wordpress is, and how Writer is gaining momentum, this is something that should be nipped fairly quickly. Hopefully I can examine it soon. If anyone else would like to take this on, please post any findings in the comments. Same goes if you run into this issue with a different plug-in. The more plug-ins there are to compare the greater the chance of tracking it down.

Filed under: Blogging, Tips & Tricks