whateverblog.

I love photography. And I’m not afraid to admit that I also love photo gear. My family has long since figured that out, and I recently celebrated a milestone birthday (hint: it begins with a 3).

Bring on the glass!

My brother surprised me with a Micro-Nikkor 60mm f/2.8. So far, I’m thrilled with this lens. I’ve always read that a 60mm macro is not ideal for shooting insects, but for flora and portraits, it’s wonderful. Sharp, contrasty, colorful, and a nice balance of heft and compactness. At $370, it’s a decent value if not quite a screaming bargain.

The ubiquitous Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 D is a bit sharper and a true bargain ($110!), but I often find myself hitting the minimum focus distance with that lens—not a problem on the Micro-Nikkor, that’s for sure!

All of the following are directly off the card—no edits other than RAW to JPEG conversion (courtesy of Lightroom) and one crop. My wife shot the second and fourth ones. She’s quickly surpassing me in her photographic abilities.

I often hear it said that great photographs are the product of great photographers, not great equipment. That may be true, but boy, having a D300 and a Micro-Nikkor 60mm sure helps a lot!

The other new lens I received was the Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 super-wide. More on that later, after I get the chance to take some decent shots with it.

I recently realized that this blog has become little more than a place for Windows Live Writer announcements and tips. The last seventeen posts—I just counted—have been about Writer.

While I’m happy to share this information, I didn’t start this blog to be just a Writer knowledge base and news page. I started it because I wanted my own blog, and I intend to start treating it as such. So get ready for the signal-to-noise ratio to drop!

Several users in the Windows Live Writer forums have reported seeing “Error 400: Bad Request” when publishing to Blogger with images:

This happens when some values are missing from your Windows registry—specifically, the content types of .jpg, .gif, and/or .png extensions. I don’t know exactly how they are getting removed, but it’s almost certainly a buggy uninstaller from some other application.

In any case, you can fix this problem by running this .reg file. No need to reboot or restart Writer.

Since the first release of Windows Live Writer, we’ve had a Blog This add-on for Firefox. Currently it’s marked as compatible with Firefox 1.5-2.0, which means beta versions of Firefox 3 won’t load it. Turns out it works fine with Firefox 3 as well, if you mark it as such:

1. Start Notepad
2. Open this file:
   C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\BlogThis\Mozilla Firefox\install.rdf
3. Change the line
   <em:maxVersion>2.0+</em:maxVersion>
   to
   <em:maxVersion>3.0+</em:maxVersion>

When we get the chance, we’ll update the add-on so this isn’t necessary.

If you encounter any problems using Blog This with Firefox 3, please let me know in the comments.

We just released another patch for Windows Live Writer, via Microsoft Update. This one mainly benefits Blogger users who upload images to Picasa (which is the default setting).

The full details are in KB951125, but the important points for most Writer+Blogger users are:

1. Clicking a thumbnail image no longer pops up a file download dialog (example).
2. We now gracefully deal with our Picasa album hitting the 500 photo limit.

The new build number is 12.0.1370.325 (see Help | About Windows Live Writer to check yours). If you didn’t get it applied automatically, I think you can visit Microsoft Update (or on Vista, your control panel) and check for updates manually.

Last night, Microsoft announced some of the APIs that are coming for Windows Live. Most interestingly, AtomPub will be the foundation of most of the Windows Live APIs going forward.

Tim recently asked what happened to Web3S. Well, now you know. AtomPub won.

More commentary available from Dare.

(In case there’s a messed-up character in the title, it’s supposed to be a heart: U+2665.)

Some of us on the Windows Live Writer team have been debating some tweaks to the UI, and a question has come up that we’re not sure we know the answer to.

Do you use Normal view, and if so, what for?

Better yet, does anyone out there use both Normal and Web Layout views on a regular basis? If so, why?

Leave me a comment if you do–don’t be shy.

A couple of months ago, some users on the Windows Live Writer forum reported that whenever future publish dates were used, the post would be held until the correct date but the incorrect time. If your time zone was GMT -8, the post wouldn’t appear until 8 hours after your desired time. (And yikes–if you were at GMT +8, the post would appear 8 hours before you requested!)

I’m told the fix was pushed out early last week, so if you’ve started up Writer since then, you probably already have it. (If you need to be sure, [re]start Writer, wait fifteen seconds, then restart Writer again.)

Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused!

I’m hoping Google users will find this post if they search for the following Windows Live Writer error message:

An unexpected error has occurred while attempting to log in:

Blog Server Error - Server Error -32700 Occurred

parse error. not well formed

A malformed XML-RPC request can cause this error, but I don’t know of any way that can happen with Windows Live Writer 2008 Final. A more likely and sinister cause is what Gordon Dewis discovered:

Googling wordpress.net.in revealed a number of pages, including a blog entry by Avice De’vereux that described the symptoms and said they were caused by a spam injection hijack by wordpress.net.in. I think the hijack was supposed to insert ads in the page footers, but I don’t recall seeing anything there.

The solution seems to be to replace the modified files with fresh copies from WordPress.org and harden your WP install from future attacks.

It’s not clear to me how the files are getting modified in the first place. Are there malicious themes/plugins that are trojans, or is there an exploitable hole in WP or PHP? Most of the users who reported this to me lately have been on WP 2.3.2, the latest. If you have more information, please comment or pingback… thanks!

(In case there are client implementers who are reading this, another way to get some WP installations to cause this error is to create very large XML-RPC requests, such as those containing large Base64-encoded images, and format the XML without any line breaks. Under some versions of PHP you’ll get the error. The solution is to add line breaks.)

There’s an issue that will bite you, hard, if you have a *.blogspot.com blog that you post images to using Windows Live Writer, and then later take that blog to a non-blogspot.com domain (either by opting for the FTP publishing option, or through Blogger’s own custom domain hosting). You’ll find that all images that were posted by WLW to Picasa and referenced from blog posts will appear broken.

I’ll describe the cause in detail below, but first, the solution.

1. Download and run this tool to repair your old posts. You must save the .exe to your hard drive, not run it right from the browser, or else you’ll get security errors. It’s a good idea to spot-check the first couple of posts it repairs, before letting it rip through all the rest of your posts. (The tool is supplied by me as an individual, not Microsoft; no warranty expressed or implied, use at your own risk, yadda yadda.)
2. Open Writer and switch to the Blogger blog in question. Go to Weblog | Edit Weblog Settings | Update Account Configuration. Replace the old *.blogspot.com homepage URL with your new custom domain URL, then step through the wizard.

Going forward on your non-blogspot.com blog, your images will be effectively limited to 800×800. If you have a web host, you can avoid this constraint (and the ever-annoying "clickthrough image downloads instead of displays" problem) by using FTP for image uploads instead. That option is under Weblog | Edit Weblog Settings | Images.

Details after the jump. Buckle up–it’s going to get a little bumpy.

Continue reading ‘Broken Images with Blogger, Picasa, and WLW’