OK, this is a bit of a technical post, but one which will come in handy for somebody down the road. Windows Live Writer is, so far, the best blog client I have found for either Mac or Windows. If you are running Windows and are a blogger, I highly recommend you download Live Writer. It is a freebie.

One of the things Live Writer will do is detect your blog’s style and then allow you to write your blog post in true WYSIWYG - as it would look on your site. The program will submit a test post to your blog, detect and download the theme, then automatically remove the test post.

Nice, except that Live Writer doesn’t always get it right. Several times, I have had it detect the theme and the end result is a crappy representation of my blog. For example, when used to detect the theme of PCMECH itself, it has me typing a blog post into one of the small sidebar tables on the right of this site.

So, sometimes you just have to manually edit the theme for Live Writer so that it is right. And actually it isn’t that hard to do.

Edit the Custom Blog Theme

In C:/Documents and Settings/[USERNAME]/Windows Live Writer/blogtemplates/, you will find folders for any blogs you have set up with WLW. Now, the folder names are incredibly cryptic. So, you may need to go into each, manually open up the index.html file in Notepad and view the source to see which blog goes to what. Or, you can have WLW manually update the style again, then look for the most recent “last updated” timestamp on the folder name.

In the appropriate folder, you’ll see an index.html file. The index file may have a number appended to it. Again, you’ll need to look at the source to see which is which. Any supporting files for your theme (such as stylesheets) will be stored in a sub-folder, again with a cryptic folder name. Look at the source of the index.html file to see which sub-folder it is using for stylesheets.

To make changes, you first need to close Live Writer if it is running. From here, you can manually edit the index file using any HTML editor you choose. In my case, I had to manually correct the file so that it was using the proper DIV layers so as to make my editing interface look correct when typing a blog post.

To see if the changes you make are correct, reopen Live Writer and create a new post. You will be able to tell immediately if it looks right.

Edit The Default Theme

Live Writer does have it’s own default theme for editing. The files for the default them are in:

C:\program files\windows live\writer\template

You will see a default HTML file and a corresponding stylesheet that you can edit to your heart’s content.