I think Windows Live Writer is the best tool available out there for Blogging on Windows Platform. I’ve been using it from the very first beta version and have seen it improve a lot since its inception. One of the features I like about WLW is ability to go to any past post and modify/add content in it. Also, the UI is designed in such a nice way, it makes it very simple to open recent posts using Live Writer main menu. Internally the way this feature works is, all recently posted blog articles are saved as *.wpost files in C:\Users\<user name>\Documents\My Weblog Posts\Recent Posts folder. It is a very good feature. But as we use more than one machines in our day to day life, recently posted article on one machine doesn’t get available to another machine. There is an option to open recently posted items from Open menu but its little bit time consuming.
Anyways, ideal solution according to me would be that anytime I post a blog article, wpost file for that article should be there on all my machines. Well, I’d like to use Dropbox to sync wpost files to all my machines but the problem is Windows Live Writer does not allow you to customize the folder where it saves those wpost files.
I recently found a hack while reading a forum that there is a key which if you set, you can customize the folder where writer will store/load the wpost files. The Registry location is as follows,
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Live\Writer
Create a string “PostsDirectory” and set the value to path where you want to save wpost files (In my case, I’ve set it to a folder in my Dropbox folder)
Next time I want to modify or add content to any of my previous blog post, I just need to open wpost file for that blog post from my dropbox folder. No matter what machine I want to do that from!