Open old posts in Windows Live Writer

Have you ever wanted to edit older posts in Windows Live Writer than the 500 most recent? I have and rather edit the post in WLW than in Bloggers editor.

An Italian programmer with the blog A Ovest di Paperino.COM (West of Donald Duck) made a solution for the problem. Windows Live Writer Post Download Plugin. I tried it out but found that it didn’t work for me so together we worked it out and now there is a new version available that works for the Blogger platform as well. Now I can even edit posts from 2004 within WLW if I wanted to.

Here is one way to open up any blog post in WLW.

Open up the post in your web browser.

Then replace http with wlw and press Enter.

Here is how to modify the Quick Edit icon if you use Blogger.

Locate this part in the HTML template source. Remember to expand widget templates.

<a expr:href='data:post.editUrl' expr:title='data:top.editPostMsg'>
  <img alt='' class='icon-action' height='18' src='http://img2.blogblog.com/img/icon18_edit_allbkg.gif' width='18'/>
</a>

Then replace it with this code. Or you can add it below and use another icon for it.

<script type='text/javascript'>
  var str=&quot;<data:post.url/>&quot;;
  document.write(&#39;&lt;a href=&quot;&#39; + str.replace(&quot;http&quot;, &quot;wlw&quot;) + &#39;&quot;&gt;&lt;img alt=&quot;&quot; class=&quot;icon-action&quot; height=&quot;18&quot; src=&quot;http://img2.blogblog.com/img/icon18_edit_allbkg.gif&quot; width=&quot;18&quot;/&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#39;);
</script>

When I’m logged in to Blogger I can just click on the icons to either edit the post in Blogger or WLW.

Windows Live Writer 2009 has a problem where the post that is posted shows up twice in Recently posted list. (I can live with that)

I tried with the WLW that is part of Windows Live Essentials beta 2010 and it didn’t have this problem. In the 2010 version it is possible to open posts older than the 500 most recent but it takes a lot of time to retrieve the posts so this plugin is a real time saver.