Windows Live Writer and Blogger returned the following error: Notfound: not found

Ah Windows Live Writer--you've been there all along and now you're not working because Google ended support for ClientLogin OAuth 1 (3LO), AuthSub, and OpenID2. Great for Google, no doubt, not so great for the thousands of users still clinging to WLW.

Microsoft insiders (Scott Hanselman) are talking about open sourcing Windows Live Writer, which would be great as the application hasn't seen any major updates since the 2012 product release. Hanselman has also suggested a fix may be a while off--in the hands of the open source community. 

Apparently Google is also considering a fix at their end, which would be great to keep us bloggers running in the meantime: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RickDoyle/posts/GUPJcu5sZHo

Update: a few workarounds have popped up around the web:

1. View source in WLW and copy/paste into Blogger (web). See http://mybeerbuzz.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/blogger-windows-live-writer-blogger.html
2. Configure posting by email. See http://www.hackinguniversity.in/2015/05/live-writer-not-found-error.html

Update 2 (3 June 2015): seems to be working again as expected :-)

If you found this post helpful, please support my advertisers.

Root redirect to www

Something changed in relation to the root redirect I previously had in place and I only just realised (my domain host, Planetdomain, is now owned by Netregistry so I attributed it that change initially but I suspect Google may actually be at fault here). In any case, mediawhole.com was not redirecting automatically to www.mediawhole.com and was coming up with a 404 or something equally boring instead.

I thought I’d need to mess around with DNS records at Netregistry to fix this but in actuality it was a simple as typing “www” into a text box in the Domains section of the Google Apps admin console. Google refers to this as redirecting the naked domain and provide suitable instructions on the process. In my case I didn’t need to configure A records as they were already in place.

The root mediawhole.com domain redirects efficiently, automatically, and as you might expect.

Update: this simple fix stopped working (or perhaps never worked in the first place) and I recently noticed my bare domain was no longer redirecting. Back to Google admin and I followed the instructions to add new A records to the DNS config in Netregistry (specifically, I added four new A records—one for each IP address noted by Google).

The Netregistry UI is awful for this task: Google suggests using @ for the name value but using @ or “.” or anything else in Netregistry didn’t work for me; I ended up leaving the Name field blank and setting only the Host field as the IP address. This created a new record with a “Record name” of mediawhole.com.

Run an internal URL hashing/redirect service with Google Short Links

Google Labs recently made the Google Short Links application available to the Google Apps platform. Short Links is a promising little feature that enriches the Apps system by allowing you to shortcut and/or hash URLs and serve those redirects directly from your Google Apps domain. As a useless example, checkout http://go.mediawhole.com/blog ;-)

Like most things with Google Apps when you’re running your own domain name, setting up is simply a matter of picking one or more hostnames and a creating a corresponding CNAME entry in your DNS server (see my post on how to get setup—it’s easy, I promise!). The choice of hostname is arbitrary; in my case I chose http://go.mediawhole.com and http://bookmarks.mediawhole.com. If you do add multiple hostnames note you still only have a single collection of short links. My line of thinking is to use go.mediawhole.com for public-facing redirection and bookmarks.mediawhole.com for private use.

In addition to creating short, hashed URLs for use in Twitter and other space-constrained applications (print articles/ads/etc), you can also create friendly URLs that may be easier for your visitors to remember. As an example, http://go.mediawhole.com/michael will redirect you to my Blogger profile. Short Links handles both internal and external links (links pointing to pages on your own domain and pages on external domains).

Link administration is simple through the UI: as you might expect, all you have to do is specify the short link and paste in the target URL; alternatively, just pop in the target URL and Google will generate a new hash. You can also make individual short links public or keep them private—presumably for use only by your logged on users. Obviously you need to be careful about deleting a link once it’s been created and published as redirection will be removed for that link and your users won’t end up where they expect—a nice enhancement would include the ability to configure a default short link for cases like this.

Google being Google you can of course search your short links and viewing the list of short links you’ve configured will specify a usage count for each link—providing some rough analytics.

Windows Live Writer for Blogger Rocks!

Thanks to the Mossman (Randy Drisgill) for testing and recommending Windows Live Writer for posting to your blog. After a few years of using the Blogger editor with it’s tiny editor window, limited functionality, and ever-changing formatting, I'm a complete Live Writer convert after two posts. 

Live Writer initially set me up with a new Live Spaces account so once I figured out how to point it at Blogger instead I was rolling. First point of joy: a big, resizable editor! I love how easy it is insert tables and save a draft locally or to your blogging engine of choice. It even sucks down your existing Blogger labels, making the transition that much easier.

I publish using the Arial font and normally change that manually in the Blogger editor. Live Writer defaulted me to Verdana but the font didn’t make its way across to my first draft post. For this post, I changed the font first before my first publish action the font change was propagated. 

I also used to have a footer inserted automatically into each of my blog posts—the Blogger editor would do this for me when I created a new post. Live Writer misses that but a minor complaint; it would be nice if Live Writer offered a template function or something but I see there is an Add a plug-in link so maybe someone’s writing/has written something like that. I could probably also hack my blog template.

Live Writer’s preview function is better than Blogger’s by a mile: it actually previews the post in the blog instead of in some half-way viewer. The source view is also surprisingly clean and readable for a Microsoft product.

Burning with FeedBurner - MyBrand and CNAME and 404

I just decided to burn this blog with FeedBurner. You can now subscribe from http://feeds.mediawhole.com/DirtyWords if you haven't already ;-)

The blog is hosted on Blogger and integrated with the mediawhole.com domain, with DNS provided by everydns.net (thank you, I love you guys!). I've previously blogged about this setup.

The DNS settings allow me to point the default Blogger URL (http://michhes.blogspot.com) to http://blog.mediawhole.com via a CNAME record. When I noticed the MyBrand option in FeedBurner, I naturally jumped at yet another CNAME/mediawhole.com branding opportunity! Sad geek, yes... 

Anyway, the setup was a bit finicky so I thought I'd detail it here. 

To start, I created a FeedBurner account and burned my feed by pointing FeedBurner to http://blog.mediawhole.com. That presumably adds me to the FeedBurner database and syndicates my content through FeedBurner but it doesn't tell Blogspot about the connection so my Subscribe button goes to the default Blogspot address and I get not FeedBurner subscription stats. That's one of the key points for me. 

Next up, I clicked into My Account --> MyBrand in FeedBurner. MyBrand is PRO feature but all their PRO features seem to be free now (thanks Google!?). This page tells you to create a new CNAME record so I did that at everydns.net... Fully Qualified Domain as feeds.mediawhole.com, Record Type as CNAME, Record Value as feeds.feedburner.com. I then entered my feeds.mediawhole.com address into the MyBrand page and activated the service. 

Finally I told Blogger about the change under Settings --> Site Feed. The Post Feed Redirect URL I supplied was http://feeds.mediawhole.com/DirtyWords because the Blogger default (http://feeds.mediawhole.com/feeds/posts/default) was returning a FeedBurner error page complaining about 404. 

As a PS, I then created a new subscribe chicklet in FeedBurner and added it to this blog. It created the subscribe URL using the original URL I supplied when first burning the feed so I updated that manually in the HTML.