Making easily Tweetable blog posts from Live writer

Live writer is one of those tools which I don’t know how I managed without. Word has a blogging template and it works, but … I wouldn’t try to write a book in Live Writer, or a business plan, or even a letter. Writer is optimized for a single task in a way that word can’t be. It works against most blog services (including community server, which powers technet blogs, plus Wordpress, Blogger and various others which follow the standard APIs).

One nice thing is that it supports various plug-ins to make it easier to make your blog posts, the plug-ins are just .net DLL files and although most of the come as MSI files you can simply place the DLL in the \program files\windows Live writer\plugins folder and the next time writer starts it “understands” the extension. Jas, who runs the MVP Awards blog let us know that one of our MVPs, Scott Lovegrove, had created a plug-in to add a link to Tweetmeme.  The idea of Tweetmeme seems simple enough posts on twitter are directed @tweetmeme and the service gathers them up and looks for a URL – expanding the various shortening services. It then looks at which pages are being tweeted most.  Scott’s plug-in adds a button to a blog post to make make it easy for you or your readers to tell tweetmeme about it (or just tweet a link).  You need to copy the DLL file he has posted here to the  program files\windows Live writer\plugins  (or program files (x86)\windows Live writer\plugins  if you are on 64 bit) and restart Live writer for it to take effect. Scott has posted the source code to the same folder if you want to see how it to write your own add in.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  I didn’t think I’d give in, but finally, I’ve decided to embrace twitter.  Whilst I can appreciate