Open Live Writer – Graves On SOHO Technology

Open Live Writer: Goldilocks and the Three Bears

July 31, 2025
Michael Graves
Computing

This blog has been in existence for some 19 years. For most of that time the various posts have been written in Open Live Writer. OLW is the open source successor to Windows Live Writer, which was a free Microsoft app. Last time I wrote about it was ten years ago when the Dot Net Foundation assumed the project and cast it into open source. As in many things, I am anomalous. I still use it routinely.

I was reminded of how anomalous I am when I recently had a problem posting to my site. This has happened periodically. Lightningbase, my long-time host, has various protections in place to keep people from doing nefarious things with the XML-RPC process that OLW relies upon to access WordPress. Occasionally, I have to ask them to tweak the host protections to allow me continued access from OLW.

December 10, 2015
Michael Graves
Meta

OLW Launched As mentioned yesterday, I have long enjoyed using Windows Live Writer as my offline blogging tool. I appreciate its simplicity. It’s purity of purpose. It’s lightweight, just enough tool to get things done.

It’s not perfect, but it has some great features. It’s simplicity has allowed its functionality to be extended by the user community. For example, there’s a nice trick that uses DropBox to sync WLW drafts between systems. This has proven very productive as I move between desktop & laptop.

I also appreciate the way that it will automatically insert web links to a library of phrases. This kind of auto-linking, previously done server-side using a WordPress plug-in, was a constant source of problems in the past.

Sadly, Microsoft has largely ignored Windows Live Writer in recent years. It wasn’t even included in the Windows 10 RTM. There was a trick initially required to get it installed on Windows 10.