Blog This In Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer includes the ability to blog about interesting stuff you find online. Basically, when you're surfing the net and you find something you'd like to write about, you can simply use the 'Blog This' button to launch Writer and pre-populate it with content from the web page. The great thing about this is that it allows you to reference content you find online, and it builds in things like a link back to the URL where you found the content.

Read on for a more detailed summary of the feature and it's capabilities.

Getting 'Blog This'

Starting with Beta 2, we automatically add this to IE, so you can find the button on the toolbar, like so:

If you're Firefox user, you can just download our Firefox Blog This plug-in. It will also make a Blog This button appear in Firefox, like so:

If you're using Safari, Opera, or some other browser, you're out of luck, at least for the time being. That said, Writer includes COM APIs for blog this, so an adventurous developer out there build build an extension that adds Blog This support for other browsers so long as the browser had an extensibility model that allowed that.

Using 'Blog This'

Using it is pretty simple- surf the web until you find something interesting, then press the Blog This button in your browser, and Writer will open pre-populated with content from the page, and with a 'Blog This' band showing.

The band contains a link back to the thing you're writing about, and also includes a button in the top right corner that will insert a link back to the item. So you can just type a few words about it, select the text you want linked back to it, and press the 'Insert Link' button. Nice!

But what is really great about Blog This, is that it is responsive to what you have selected in the browser when you press the button. If you just navigate to a web page, then press the Blog This button, Writer is pre-populated with some pretty minimal information. But if you select some text in the page instead, Writer will be pre-populated with that text, already block quoted for you.

So I went to this page, selected the quote that I think provides the most insightful summary of the content I'm writing about

The pressed the Blog This button and Viola!

Other Clients

Blog This is supported in other clients, too. If you're a user of Onfolio, the current version will automatically detect that Writer is installed and use it when you press 'Blog This' from the Newspaper. In addition, there is a plug-in that ~~Nick Bradbury~~ Nick Harris wrote that provides integration with the NewsGator Inbox. Download and install that and you can use Writer to blog about things your read about using NewsGator. Nice!

Getting Fancy

If you really feel like going wild with this, you actually have the ability to customize 'Blog This' to your heart's content. In Tools>Options>Blog This you find this:

The content panel of this set of options show the list of 'things' that you can blog about. For example, when you just navigate to a web page and press the Blog This button, you're blogging about a link (to that web page). When you make a selection in the browser and press the Blog This button, you're blogging about a Snippet. You can actually customize the HTML that is inserted for each type of item but selecting it and pressing the 'Customize' button.

Here's the customization dialog for a Snippet:

The top section basically lets you type the HTML that you'd like inserted. You can use the variables listed in the bottom panel enclosed in curly braces {}. Those variables will be replaced with the real content when Writer is used to blog about something. You may also noticed the conditional statements- these allow you to omit HTML if no content is available (this will stop empty <p> tags from showing up when they aren't needed, for example). If you're feeling really brave, spend a little time tweaking the HTML to your liking.