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.
- Go to Ultimate Tag Warrior options page and then check the box next to use embedded tags option.
- 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.
- 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.
- Now in the Tag list HTML Template section add the following code and close the plugin preferences.
- 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.
- 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.
- Go to Ultimate Tag Warrior options page and then check the box next to use embedded tags option.
- 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.
- 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.
K2 0.9 Released, so 3 Column K2 was also released. It got all the features the original K2 comes with including sidebar modules. Its just a switch between original K2 and 3 Column K2. Many thanks to Nybble for pointing me towards the changes for enabling sidebar modules for 2 sidebars. I have removed some extra css I have added in my previous versions and I have written notes for all the css I have added, to make it easy for people to customize or change it to their liking. My last release was 3 Column K2 Revision Six, but this release was named version 0.9. why?. Micheal have posted on the K2 dev blog about the upcomming version numbers of the original K2 and I want to follow them as well.
Version Numbers
* 0.9: No bugs release. A stable release of K2 with no known bugs.
* 1.0: Final release. K2 working as advertised.
* 1.5: Next major release. Major new features are relegated to this.
So the next main release will be the final release of K2 and 3 Column K2 as well. I may release some updates based on svn releases in the mean time, but there wont be any changes to the version numbers. So, grab the 3 Column K2 0.9 and test it and leave your comments, if you find anything wrong. Please check the original k2 forums as well for any help regarding K2.
And regarding my current style, I will be releasing a series of 3 column k2 modifications or styles starting this week (may be today too) and when I finally got no more, I will release my current style on this blog. Ya, I am sorry, you still need to wait for my current style. But it wont be that long, I promise. 
Finally the wait is over. The dev team of K2 lead by Michael Hielemann, released a long awaited stable release of K2, an advanced wordpress theme used by thousands of bloggers. They cleansed all the known bugs, therefore its a stable release. Congrats guys. I will be releasing my 3 Column K2 soon based on this stable release. In the mean time download K2 0.9, test it and discuss about it in the forums. Some useful k2 information for all the K2 users.
Chris J Davis, one of the creators of K2 started showcasing some of the best styles (in his opinion) that are out there for K2 on his blog while he was working on the next version of sillyness. And guess what, currently his blog is sporting the 3 column K2 style and I am out of words. Thank You Chris for choosing mine. Keep checking his blog for the next couple of weeks to find out many styles that are available for K2.
After lot of requests, I finally updated the 3 Column K2 to the latest svn release (svn-406) with some changes to the last release. Now you can use the Live search when widgets are enabled and I have changed the widths of the 3 columns little bit to look better. So, as ususal if you find anything wierd leave your comment here and I will look in to that as soon as possible. Please check the original k2 forums as well for any help regarding to K2.
People waiting for the release of my current style, have to wait a little bit longer. I am sorry for that, but I am really bizy with my other work as you can see from the low frequency of posts in the last 2 months. So, keep checking regularly and I may release it any time along with my new re-design. Till then enjoy this new release. Read More »