Saturday, May 30, 2015

Can't Publish to Blogger? May 2015

If you’re one of the many Windows Live Writer users who found themselves stumped, when you could no longer publish to blogger, you’re not alone. Many Windows Live Writer users were disappointed when they found that towards the end of May it would no longer connect to Blogger. May users found themselves staring at a “Blogger returned the following error: Notfound: Not Found” message or a “The user name or password is incorrect. Please try again.” message.
This was a planned change by Google. Although Google officially Announced the deprecation of the tools required for Windows Live Writer in April the first impact was seen roughly on May 25 to May 27th. Google deprecates components necessary for Windows Live Writer and several other blog editors. In the past there have been work arounds to this issue, like enabling less secure apps in your Google security configuration. This is no longer the case.
Unfortunately Windows Live Writer is no longer a supported product from Microsoft. There is a possibility that Microsoft opens the source to open source community to allow the continued development of the product, but even if this occurs it will be months before we would see a resolution to this issue.
Hopefully Google steps in and fixes this issue in the meantime to allow blog writers to continue to use one of the most popular blog editors available.

Unfortunately the Google blogger interface is not well designed for an active writer. So I will continue to research until I find a good alternative and post when I do. Many of the other alternatives available have similar issues. A quick workaround is to connect your email account to outlook or similar email client which has a rich text editor and continue to post through emails. A feature blogger has made available for many years.

There is some news that Google and Microsoft are working together to provide a solution. It sounds like it will be a two part solution an update from Google followed by an update to Windows Live Writer to the new OAuth method google is now enforcing.

Several temporary workarounds exist.
1. Use you windows live writer tool to develop your content then view html and upload to your blogger account through the blogger web page. You'll still need to manually load your images but the content itself should be intact. I'll post some on using this method in a separate post shortly.
2. Another method is to hook outlook up to one of your email accounts and use the rich text editor to email the content and upload images to blogger. This may be more appealing to many since your images will also be uploaded. Advanced features however will not exist in your email client.
3. Use bloggers web post tools to post. Although this tool is fairly basic and missing many features a true writer needs it works as a temporary solution.

I've tested a few other tools and they seem to be in a similar position. Firescribe for one does not want to connect as well.

1 comment:

  1. Awesome I tested this and it worked better then any other workarounds that I found. But it looks like Google and Microsoft are playing nicely together it is working once again if you have unsecure apps setting set.

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