I came to know that many Mac users use either Ecto or Mars Edit as their desktop blogging client. My previous idea works in those clients too and infact from any blogging client. Now I want to show how to customize the existing tagging plugin, Tag4Writer for Windows Live Writer. Tag4Writer enables insertion of a list into a template for tags. By default it comes with various templates for Technorati, Delicious, Flickr, IceRocket, Buzznet, 43 things, Live Journal, but there’s no support for local tags in wordpress. We need to add our WordPress blog as a new template in the plugin and just add tags from the plugin interface. This idea is similar to my previous one of using Ultimate Tag Warrior’s embedded tags option.

1. Go to Ultimate Tag Warrior options page and then check the box next to use embedded tags option.
2. Go to the Windows Live Writer plugins folder and open the xml file (SmilingGoat.WindowsLiveWriter.TagTemplates.xml) in a text editor and add the following code just above the last line and save it. Give your own blog name and blog url in the following code.

   

3. In Windows Live Writer, go to plugins section and open the options for Tag list generator. In the Template drop down box you can see your blog name that you have added in the xml file. Select it. Once you have selected your blog from the list, it remains same everytime.
4. Now in the Tag list HTML Template section add the following code and close the plugin preferences.

   

5. Write a post in Windows Live Writer and at the end of the post, click on Insert tags from the sidebar. Write your tags separated by commas and click on insert.
6. Publish your post and Ultimate Tag Warrior adds those tags to your post automatically. That’s it.

When you try to edit this post after publishing, you can still see the tags you added, if you want to change them. Ok, I am able to add tags but how to pull the existing tags on my WordPress blog and how to get tag suggestions. If anyone got any ideas or solutions please share with me. I hope someone writes a plugin for UTW with all its features. Sorry for taking so long to post this guys. Happy Blogging…

Ten days back Microsoft shocked the blogging world with their wonderful desktop blogging application, Windows Live writer. You can go through some great reviews by some great bloggers in the blogosphere. As a Windows user, I too was playing with this for the past 10 days to customize it for WordPress and one thing I realized was it’s lack of support for tags. Windows Live Writer doesn’t have the support for tags by default but they have released an API by which you can extend the capabilities of Windows Live Writer.

I use Christine’s kickass Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for tags on my blog. Infact my theme, K2 comes prepackaged with support for UTW. So, this goes to all the K2 users using Windows Live Writer too. David Brunelle wrote how to make these two killer applications work together based on some existing hacks. His hack involves editing WordPress xmlrpc.php to add Ultimate Tag Warrior functionality to Windows Live Writer and use its inbuilt keywords section to convert them to tags. This works, but I am not comfortable with the idea of editing any WordPress files. No offence to David here but there is a simple way for adding tags using Ultimate Tag Warrior and Windows Live Writer.

1. Go to Ultimate Tag Warrior options page and then check the box next to use embedded tags option.
2. Write a post in Windows Live Writer and at the end of the post just use the following format to add tags to your post.

   

   Here tag1, tag2, tag3 are the tags you want to add to the post you just created.

3. Publish your post and Ultimate Tag Warrior adds those tags to your post automatically. That’s it.

No need of editing any WordPress files. When you try to edit this post after publishing, you can still see the tags you added, if you want to change them. This method for Ultimate Tag Warrior works from any blogging application. I know some people will ask me, why should I type some extra words like [tag]..[/tags], when David’s idea lets me just type in my tags in the keywords section. I got an answer for that too. It involves Timheuer’s Tag4Writer plugin for Windows Live Writer where you can just click on insert tags and enter your tags. I will write about it in my next post.

Note: Thanks to Christine for suggesting this idea.