Paste from Visual Studio naughtiness

There’s a nice add-in for Windows Live Writer called Paste from Visual Studio that lets you copy and paste syntax highlighted code from Visual Studio into Live Writer. I’ve used it for a while and had no problems with it. But the other day I looked at the source of the generated HTML and was a little disappointed to find a link to the author’s website with no link text, meaning it never shows up on the page.

I guess it’s OK wanting to get some links to his site, but to do it in such a way as to be invisible to the end user is a little underhand. I’m not sure what a search engine would make of a link like that. Very possibly it will be considered as some kind of black hat SEO and my pages will be downgraded as a result.

So I guess I’ll have to re-implement the plug-in myself. The guy does kindly provide the source code on his website so it shouldn’t be too difficult to get my own version built. Or I guess I can go back to using the excellent C# code format site, which does the right thing by just adding a comment to the generated HTML that includes the URL for the site.

New version of Windows Live Writer

There is a new version of Windows Live Writer available. It looks prettier and has squiggly line spell checking but beyond that I don't know if it offers a lot. My problems with Live Writer in the past has been its inability to upload pictures to Blogger (which by all accounts is Blogger's fault) and its inability to check for new versions. I only found out about this new version after stumbling across a review of it. Admittedly, programs that do check for updates tend to upset me as well since they seem to require a new install every time I run them, so there's no pleasing me...

Anyhoo, I'll see if it uploads images now.

Time passes...

OK, so it can't upload images to Blogger directly but it will upload them to an FTP site and hook them into the page. The FTP integration is pretty sweet, although I guess it'll be no use to a lot of punters. But it solves my problem.

So that and the squiggly line spell-checking means I'll give it the thumbs up, even if it can't spell colour.

Some more time passes...

OK, perhaps I should have used the thing before writing a review. It now supports Blogger tags as well, meaning I'll now very rarely need to use the Blogger web interface, so even more thumbs up.

iTunes and Windows Live Writer love-in

For the past few months I've been using my Toshiba Gigabeat to listen to music in my office, but something has been bugging me about it for a while. The random play functionality is completely whacked out. It seems to be random based on the artist, so if you've got one track by an artist, that artist will get as much coverage as an artist with 100 tracks.

So I decided to move my MP3 collection on to my new PC and use iTunes instead. That in itself was a bit of a pain. The Gigabeat converts MP3s into a file with a SAT extension so you can't just copy them back across, since nothing but the Gigabeat knows what a SAT file is. But if you plug it in right, Windows recognises it as a media player and knows what to do with the files and does the conversion on the fly. All seems a bit odd really, but I could now listen to my MP3s through iTunes.

And now I've found a very nice plugin (well two actually) that lets you insert the track you're currently listening to into your blog post. Perhaps it should be called 'Completely Pointless Vanity Plug-In' but I like it.

Couple of things to note. The Apple website doesn't seem to be correct when it tells you where to put plug-ins for iTunes to pick up, it says they should go under 'My Documents' somewhere but I had to put it in C:\Program Files\iTunes\Plug-ins.

The Live Writer plug-in goes in C:\Program Files\Windows Live Writer\Plugins but by default the plug-in will insert 'Nothing playing', you need to update the HTML template to something like <P>Currently listening to %t% by %a% from the album %al%</P> to get it to work.

Currently listening to Carrion by British Sea Power from the album The Decline of British Sea Power

More Windows Live Writer

A comment to my previous post from Spike Washburn (of the Windows Live Writer team no less!) suggests image uploading won't be supported until Blogger improve their API, which is a shame. So Blogger, get your finger out! And apologies if it appeared that I was suggesting Windows Live Writer deliberately wasn't supporting image uploads to Blogger.

A couple of other points about Writer. First, I'm very pleased to see it is a managed application. Great to see MS dogfooding the .NET Framework and proving it's possible to produce professional apps using WinForms. 

Second, it's great to see developers from MS responding to blog posts from little old me. Fact is I'm a Z-list blogger that no-one reads but I've had two lots of feedback from MS people. That kind of communication will really help build a good feeling towards MS in the IT community.

And yes, I'm using Writer to write this post.

Windows Live Writer

Just playing around with Windows Live Writer and it's mostly pretty cool. The first problem I've encountered is the lack of image support on Blogger, which is pretty much a showstopper. Odd really, because Blogger does support images, but I guess this is a beta...