Thursday 23 April 2020

Using Open Live Writer with Blogger

First of all, my apologies to all total no techies (of which count myself of being one) for this post, but it is a tale of tentative persistence!!!!
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As you know, until last year I always used Open Live Writer to create my blog posts as it was such an easy program to use, allowing me to size pictures to fit the text and place exactly where I wanted,  as well as adding frames, watermarks and effects to them. Then around March 2019 things went pear shaped, it’s too complicated to go into, but Live Writer was abandoned by its developers, so that when there was a glitch there were no updates to fix it. So when a problem arose with Google pictures, millions of bloggers all over the world were left high and dry, up  the river without a paddle!  At first I kept posting questions on various forums and progress was made when developers on Git Hub took it up, but soon it all got too technical for me and I just gave up!

The future of both Fiddle Fart and Mums Monkey, you may remember, was in the balance, but even though I have always found the Blogger interface a absolute “beeping” nightmare to use, I persevered and after over a year I have just about got into the swing of things, the presentation of both blogs had to change slightly, but I just had to live with it in order to continue.
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Then, under lockdown, something made me think about looking at Open Live Writer again, just in case any progress had been made, but girding my loins for whatever frustrations that could bring ……… however after about half an hour of following links I happened upon this post ………..


……. and very, very tentatively decided to download the program it included, which, unbelievably, then opened up my old familiar Open Live Writer editing page, I was now terrified that as I started to put a test post together it was too good to be true as ……. it was! The pictures wouldn’t publish as before, but remembering what I had read many times before, I went into Google pictures and changed the name of every single album I had from Open Live Writer to a random selection of four letters just for speed.  This still didn’t work, I now got a new error code “error:"invalid_grant", Description:"Bad Request", Uri:" ………..

What happened next is a bit of a blur, but after trying to publish again I think I got a Google request to allow access to Fiddle Fart (????)  I was reticent, but went for it …….. OMG it worked, I did several test posts and all went straight to the blog.  I then repeated it, still in a haze, with Mums Monkey, I just don’t believe it, still dont!!!

The only tiny issue I have is that it doesn’t open straight into Blogger as it did before, I now have to open Blogger separately, but the posts are there large as life in the drafts folder and just need scheduling.

How long this will last, goodness only knows ……… but what I do know is that my Open Live Writer editing skills are now a bit rusty, so I need to relearn one or two things, but no way am I grumbling ……… HAPPY DAYS HERE AGAIN.