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.

Sharing music online the RIGHT way.

Yes, the title this post is another stab at HHB. I notice that some people were out searching for the HHB blog happened to come across my previous post about it. Behold the usefulness of visitor logs. :D It's only been a couple of people that found my site looking for the now defunct blog, but I expect more, and flames. Oh god, the flames...they cook food nicely. ^_^.

Don't think I care that the place is gone. They deserved to get caught. If Blogger gets the blame for others using their blogging network for illegal purposes, it could spell bad times for everyone who's a member of Blogger. I like being a Blogger member; I don't know if you guys do or not. I invested too much time here.

Seriously why make such a blog public? WTF were you thinking??? You don't make something of that magnitude public on a network where thousands of people can find it. Why don't you try to use your brain for something useful, like finding good music that is so SCARCE, not even Amazon.com would have it. Providing hip hop music that I can buy on Yahoo! Music with little difficulty, not to mention cheaper than most retail, makes you, HHB admin, a waste of good PR.

Alright, no more ranting.

So I found Orb months ago, an application that not only lets you share media with computers in your own home/office network, you can share with people all over the internet. You can stream music, video, and your live TV shows. Very cool. Despite the new leash on internet radio, Orb isn't going anywhere. You want to broadcast your music? Make it happen with Orb. That's what I'm going to do here, so please, don't be alarmed when you hear the music.

I picked an album that my boyfriend shared with me, After Dark: Chicago. He only shared to first disc of the entire album, but it's enough to make a smooth-flowing playlist in here. I'm using Orb to share the playlist, because it's one of the easiest ways to share the music but give visitors control over what songs they here from it. The media player is in the right sidebar. I swear, this is the last layout update I'm doing tonight. ^_^;;

Don't support Hip Hop Bootleggers

Just what I mean too; they're bootleggers. Hip Hop Bootleggers is the name of the blog that posts links to storage servers that host their illegal downloads. I will not support idiots who openly say they're giving away music that they didn't make for free. The blog is here (All posts have been taken down now, but I'm sure that's not the admin's only web site.). Someone posted about it in the Blogger Help Group (in the wrong category of the group too, lol). Obviously not the place to report such things, I reported it directly to Blogger Support via Blogger's Contact page.

Today someone from Blogger Support replied to my report. In the response it says that I must fill out a notice of copyright infringement and send it via fax or snail mail to them. It would be no big deal, if I was one of the musical artists being infringed upon. But I'm not, so I can't send them anything. I wish I took screenshots of the blog, because the proof of copyright infringement was in plain sight. They had nothing but popular rap albums posted there. In the blog's side bar, there were shout boxes where people could request albums for download.

People, don't be stupid. If you're going to supply illegal downloads, promote your crap via newsgroups and use bittorrent. Otherwise, you're going to get the whistle blown on you sooner rather than later, and you better hope it's not me who finds you first. :)

Posting with the new Windows Live Writer Beta 2

Just testing to see if it works. A few people at blogger who are trying to use it say they can't log in. I say they might being trying to enter their account with the wrong information. For the rest out there, please read Live Writer's instructions carefully.

Check the WLW support community for tech support concerning any bugs or problems. Remember, WLW is BETA; it's not going to work right for everyone right away.

Testing Expandable Post Summaries Using WLW

Ok, so the Expandable Post Summaries hack does indeed work using Windows Live Writer. You just can't put this part: "<span class="fullpost">" inside of "<p></p>" tags. Putting the span tag within the paragraph tags breaks the CSS that splits the post and creates the summary. It's recommended that the span tag comes after the "</p>" tag of the first paragraph. Not only that, you must add the span tags in HTML CODE mode ONLY. Don't bother adding tags in any other writing mode in Windows Live Writer; it'll only reformat the tags to show up in your post.

If you have a lot to say, try to keep the first paragraph of the post short and to the point. That's what I try to do to keep vertical scrolling to a minimum. I suppose cutting the main page's post count to 1 or 2 posts will help too. I've already removed comments from the main page. To view the comments of an article, just click "Read More!" to view the article in its entirety.

GRRRR!!! ARGH!!!

I'm sorry, but even for a FTP user, Blogger is getting more frustrating to use by the day. I use Windows Live Writer to write my blog drafts and publish them straight to my web site. Unfortunately, it outputs in HTML, so using Blogger's "expanding articles" workaround doesn't work properly when publishing from WLW. I went to edit the last post so that it wouldn't take up so much space on the page, and Blogger just timed out when republishing the entry. As a matter of fact, Blogger's publishing has been doing that A LOT lately (which is weird, because WLW publishes my blog entries as soon as I press the "publish" button). It's so bad that many people post numerous topics on the Blogger Help Group and bump them repeatedly hoping for Blogger techies to read their cries for help. It's disappointing that FTP users don't get to use the nifty widgets that help create the new layout pages offered with Blogspot hosting, or even dynamic publishing (that's reasonably not supported for non-Blogspot hosts), but it's worse that we can't use the service that's offered to us by default. We can work around using old web site templates, but we as Blogger members that opted to be hosted elsewhere shouldn't have to put up with not being able to publish to our own servers. We don't get all of the glitches and migration problems that Blogspot users get, but if we can't even simply publish our blogs, then what is the point of using this system? Blogger is great when it can actually manage to publish my writing. But I may have to look elsewhere for a blogging solution. CutePHP is looking really good right about now.

Oh Blogger, how unstable you are...

The Blogger migration has set off a firestorm of problems for many users, particularly the BlogSpot-hosted users. Disappearing images, disappearing BLOGS, mass deletions of blogs for supposedly being spam, the list goes on. What makes it worse is that people looking for help idiotically flood the Blogger Help Group with problems that have been posted over and over again already, which makes it worse for people who are smart enough to search first find the solutions to their problems or people who have new problems to add to the group for help. I haven't run into any major problems, but I believe the worst one I could run into now is my blog not publishing to my web host.

Anyone who hasn't been hit by Blogger's instability should now realize the value of BACKUPS. Please take the time to backup your entire blog, template and all. Cheapest and easiest ways to back up your posts is to 1)add your email address to the "BlogSend Address" box under the "Email" tab in Settings so you can get your blog emailed to you; and/or 2) subscribe to your site's own RSS/Atom feed and download the feeds via a news aggregator client like RssReader or adding your feeds via email clients like Mozilla Thunderbird, which can read news feeds. Then there is this way of creating a backup: "How to backup your Blogger blog". It republishes the blog as one page, so at least when users try to import their blog into the likes of WordPress, they don't have to open multiple emails and feeds to cut and paste each and every post. Since Blogger is now revamped, there is no other way to import entries to another blogging service, but at least blog recovery won't be a pain in the ass. 

I don't think anyone can stress it enough. If you're looking for an alternative to Blogger while they get their act together, then make sure you properly prepare for a move. The end.