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.

Google returns 497,000 results for the search “Microsoft jokes”. It is justified by experiences like this. I haven’t tried Windows Live Writer until recently. It is a wonderful blogging software that makes lives of bloggers simpler, but installing it can be a daunting task.

A search for “Live Writer” in the Microsoft Download Center took me to this page. It is an old page from which I downloaded the 2.3MB installer and tried to install the required software. Thrice. It gave me hell, with the installation hanging at 99% each time.

I then googled for a direct setup file of Live Writer and landed here. When we press “Download” button on this page, it redirects us to a funny page while the download of a new 1.1MB installer starts.

The installer worked, thankfully. But take a look at the funny page I just mentioned. It is common knowledge that Microsoft likes to treat its users as dummies. But what can any dummy make out of a page which has three empty screenshots that look like an idle artist’s doodles and three messages which start with “If you see a message asking if you want to…” and are followed by non-keywords? And which responsible website of such great importance not update itself even when a later version of installer is available?

Very helpful again, Microsoft.

Image Source: Microsoft Windows Live Writer download page.