New Favorite Tool: Windows Live Writer Backup

If you’re blogging and not using Windows Live Writer to write your blog posts, stop reading NOW and go get it. Seriously. Just stop.

OK. Now that that’s taken care of, if like me you rely on Windows Live Writer and the various plug-ins that are available for it (I use the Text Template plug-in for recurring posts, as well as the Twitter Notify plug-in to update my twitter account when I post), and you need to move to a new machine, how do you make sure that your writer environment is set up the way you like it?

Enter Windows Live Writer Backup, a nifty tool that backs up settings, plug-ins, themes, and draft and recent posts, and allows you to easily restore them to another machine. Since I’m transitioning to a new laptop for my main work machine, I gave it a try, and it worked spectacularly. The only hitch that I ran into was that the Text Template plug-in was throwing exceptions on the new machine, but it turns out this was because I had customized the icon for one of my templates to use the icon for VS2008, which is not (yet) installed on my new laptop.

Quick, painless, and thorough. Just how I like my utilities.