And, convert blog pages to posts.

Cool tricks with Windows Live Writer.

In your haste to get the information into your blog, then information goes down without thought to the structure. (Sorry, this is quite a long post – there are a few steps involved,and it’s essential that they are carried out otherwise you’ll have strange errors and mysterious problems )

The introduction of drop down menus of pages for some of the wordpress.com themes now lets you change the way you want to present the information. The built in editor in WordPress doesn’t make this easy.

(Sorry, this is quite a long post – there are a few steps involved,and it’s essential that they are carried out otherwise you’ll have strange errors and mysterious problems ) 

What’s the benefits? (These answers apply to WordPress – I haven’t tried them with other platforms)

Posts – allow you much greater control of the information you add related to the post – as this display from Windows Live Writer shows.

Some of these help the blog visitor (categories, tags) and some help your blog to be found more easily and accurately on the internet (tags and excerpts).

Pages – allow your information to be published in a structured, managed way. In addition, as your blog develops, you may find that information you placed in ‘time based’ blog posts is better served in organised pages. This is particularly true now that stacked menus are available in wordpress.com.

So – you (yes, and me!) – need to make the change over – how do you do it?

 

Windows Live Writer to the rescue

Firstly – prepare the Windows Live Writer way of working and knowledge of your blog. You must be online for this.

 

It’s essential that Windows Live Writer knows the current settings for your blog. Since you last ‘synchronised’ Windows Live Writer with your blog you may have renamed pages, blogs and restructured drop down lists.

In the Blogs menu (left) – ensure that your required blog is ticked then click on ‘Edit blog settings …’ 

 

 

On the next menu – click on the ‘Update Account Configuration’ button – this will now make Windows Live Writer aware of what your blog now looks like.

Windows Live Writer Options

On the tools drop down, select options and select single window as shown here

The reason for this is that you’ll be opening Windows Live Writer a few times, and you will move material between different Windows Live Writer ‘instances’. This works okay on my installation on my Windows XP Pro PC.

 

 

At last – something starts to happen!

Now – start Windows Live Writer again – important – make sure that you do NOT have your blog open in the admin page in your browser. If you do, you may receive the user error messages from hell. On your task bar you should see

Let’s copy a chunk of a post into a page .. (I’ll make a new page in www.mikemcsharry.com called ideas and I’ll start it with a post from my www.eolat.wordpress.com blog).

So – Open the blog post from eolat in one instance of Windows Live Writer

 

 

And make a new page called ideas in www.mikemcsharry.com in the other instance

The page title in the blog will become the title you enter on the header line. When you ‘save draft’ this goes to your computer, and you can see the change on the bottom bar of Windows.

Now – go to the ‘donor’ Windows Live Writer instance – in this case the blog post in eolat. Place your cursor somewhere in the body of the text and press ctrl-a to select everything. Then press ctrl-c to copy it to the clipboard.

Next – go to the ‘receiver’ Windows Live Writer instance – in this case the blog page in mikemcsharry.

>>>>>> Place tour cursor in the text space – not the header bar! <<<<<<<< and click ctrl-v to paste it all back!

In this situation, don’t save the ‘donor’ blog

You may need to do a small amount of tidying up. Then publish your new page. Like this – http://www.mikemcsharry.com/ideas/

Has this post helped you? Have you tried this trick with other bloging platforms? Did it work?