The ease at which you can post to a blog with Windows Live Writer (WLW) would have seemed like science fiction a couple of years ago, yet here I am doing it right now. Except that, in years gone by, you could easily edit Html in a WYSIWYG editor and quickly FTP Up the results. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I thought I'd post a quick entry in case people are running Blog 3.5, Url Master and would like to use WLW. I found that in configuring the Post Url for WLW, I had a few problems to sort out.
If you haven't yet set up your WLW to post to your blog, it's really easy. Here's the steps:
1) Start WLW, and progress through the first couple of steps, indicating you already have a blog, and that it's with 'Another Blog Service'.
2) Enter your blog Url and DNN username and password that you blog under
3) Select 'MetaWeblog API' as the type of weblog
4) Enter your Blog Posting Url : this is pretty easy to get. Its http://www.yourdomain.com/DesktopModules/Blog/blogpost.ashx?tabid=nn where nn = the tabId your blog lives on. You can get this from the 'Blog Settings' option of the Blog module if you don't know your tabid.
Once you've done all that, there's one more step you need to do if you've got Url Master installed:
5) Go to the 'Friendly Url Settings' screen, and scroll down to the 'Advanced Regex Settings' section. Expand this, and in the 'doNotRedirectRegex' field, add this to the end:
|/DesktopModules/
If you don't already have anything in this field, you don't need the leading '|' character, you'd just enter /DesktopModules/.
This will prevent the blogpost.ashx handler from getting a 301 redirect - this happens because the Url contains the 'tabId' key, so the Url Master code believes it to be of the 'old' unfriendly Url format, and tries to come up with a friendlier version.
The same instructions will apply to those using the iFinity Friendly Url Provider : just put the aforementioned value into the 'doNotRedirectRegex' attribute in your web.config file.
After doing this, you should be good to blog!
Now that I've got this running, I'll have to prioritise the Feature Request to have the Tagger module also talk to WLW. It's a feature request I receive often enough, so I'll look into it.