On the advice of some colleagues I’ve installed Windows Live Writer, an offline editor that’s compatible with most blog services. Setup was a breeze…
… and here I am writing my first blog post. The editor tried to get fancy by downloading my theme, but it just doesn’t look right so I’ve unchecked the View –> Edit using theme option.
The next important bit took me all of lunch to figure out, but I finally got code syntax highlighting to work. My problem was properly installing the syntax highlighting files on my website. Adding the Syntax Highlighter 2.0 or PreCode Snippet plugins to Live Writer was the easy part, and the results are beautiful:
C# Code:
// Hello1.cs
public class Hello1
{
public static void Main()
{
System.Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!");
}
}SQL Code:
-- SQL Select Example
SELECT column_name(s)
FROM table_name
WHERE column_name operator value
HTML Code:
<!-- HTML Example -->
<html>
<head>
<title>Tutorial: HelloWorld</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>HelloWorld Tutorial</h1>
</body>
</html>Windows Live Writer has surpassed my checklist of features and I don’t think it’ll take long for it to become one of my most frequented apps, thanks for the tip guys!
- Images publish correctly. - CHECK
- Hyperlinks publish correctly. - CHECK
- Text styles publish correctly. - CHECK
- Code syntax highlighting publishes correctly. – CHECK!
- BONUS – In the editor it appears that larger images were automatically reduced to a more manageable size and I’m assuming they will take you to the full size image if you click them. – CHECK!
- BONUS – The editor has some fancy image border/effects options, it’d be great if these worked when published! – CHECK!