How To Delete Posts From Windows Live Writer

While Windows Live Writer is a wonderful blogging software that lets bloggers work offline, it is poorly documented. Ironical. On top of it, the Windows Live Writer blog, much like other Windows blogs has no search feature to check for help.

When a blogger posts a blog through Windows Live Writer, it also maintains a copy of the post on the local machine. For regular bloggers, that adds up to a lot of space with time. A “proper delete” through the Open –> Delete makes it clear that deleting a post is equivalent to deleting it from the local machine as well as from the blog.

Some might like the backup, but we won’t mind an option to delete posts from the machine alone, do we? I am currently using a dirty trick to get it done.

All the posts you are working on using Windows Live Writer are stored as .WPOST files in the folder “My Documents\My Weblog Posts” under two sub-folders “Drafts” and “Recent Posts”. Delete the posts you want from them.

There is also a “cache.xml” file in the “Recent Posts” folder. This is the file responsible for keeping posts on the local machine in sync with those on your blogs. It is better left alone.

Please let me know if there is a cleaner way to do this. I am still a beginner user of Windows Live Writer.