WLW Cross-Post Plug-in Fixed!

For a while I was looking around for a better solution than my Blogger to LJ workaround to cross-post my entries here to my LiveJournal blog.  What I found was this for Windows Live Writer:

http://www.codeplex.com/clarius/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=6626

Technically, cross-posting is already possible with Windows Live Writer.  All you have to do is just switch blogs, and your blog entry will still be open for editing. Easy right? Yes! Is it really effective cross-posting?  Not quite. :(  That's where Kzu's WLW Cross-Post plug-in comes in.  You install the plug-in, set the target blog to your secondary blog, enable or disable post summary, and enable/disable previewing the post in the secondary blog. If you choose to preview your post on your secondary blog, you'll notice that your main blog has been linked to at the top of the post. Keen!

However, there are some things wrong with this.  For one, you can't cross-post to more than one blog. It won't bother me, but it can be a big deal with bloggers who have blogs for their jobs, families, and hobbies. Secondly, not everyone wants the link to their main blog to show up at the top; maybe the blog author wants the link at the bottom.  And there's no way to customize the wording of the link from the plug-in's options.  Not a big deal, as it can be moved and the wording changed (make sure preview is enabled). Lastly, it can't publish the blogs at the same time. You must publish the main blog first, and then use the "insert cross-post" function.  So all-in-all, this plug-in is for the purpose of grabbing the main blog post's permalink and auto-pasting it into the secondary blog's post.  A little less work to do when using Windows Live Writer for posting to multiple blogs.

The biggest problem many WLW users have had with the plug-in is the inability to install it properly!  This plug-in as been uploaded as is for the masses to use, but WLW is unable to load it.  In this Windows Live Gallery entry, a reviewer of the plug-in explains how he managed to get WLW Cross-Post to load into Writer.  An excellent post, but no one's ever thought of uploading a working version of the plug-in for those who don't have Visual Studio installed on their computers (though you can install VS 2008 Express for free).  Or at least I couldn't find a working version of it.  Srch skillz: I dun haz dem. =(

I decided to share my compiled version of the plug-in.  I didn't change or add anything to the plug-in, so support questions should still go to the author of WLW Cross-Post.  You  can download the WLW Cross-Post plug-in from here or here.