One day you find a link is broken in a post you wrote 4 years ago about a Halloween pumpkin carved with the Subtext logo, and you want to edit it. But since then you wrote more than 600 blog posts. How can you do it?

Your current options

You have two options:

• you use the rich text editor of your blogging platform, but then you will not have all the nice plugins and preview of WLW
• you open the post for editing using Windows Live Writer and you download all your latest 1000 posts and edit just the one you need (and if you are still using WLW Wave 3 if the post is after the 500th position you cannot even open it)

As you see there are really no an options.

I tried sending emails to the WLW team with my problem and the solution they came up with was just to add the possibility to download “all” the posts, which IMHO is pretty inefficient (you have to download all your posts just to edit one of them).

Fortunately a friend of mine working at Microsoft had the same problem and instead of just emailing the team decided to write a “plugin” to make it possible to edit a post just by having its post id (to be entirely true, it’s not a plugin but a url handler and an executable that calls  some internal WLW API). Without further ado, here are the steps.

Download and install the plugin

Just download the plugin and install it. If you read Italian you can also have a look at the download page of my friend’s blog for updates. Since it’s not a “real” plugin, you will not find anything in the plugins list in WLW, so don’t panic.

Edit your old post

Once installed the plugin you can edit your post just by finding the id of your post and typing in the address bar of your browser a Uri with a custom scheme “wlw”, for example:

Once you hit enter, a window will popup, downloading the post and opening it into WLW for you to edit.

Big thanks to Paperino for making that available to all of us, and look forward to a support for this in the admin of Subtext.

Download the plugin: WLW Post Downloader Plugin