Category: Wordpress

Setting up Windows Live Writer–rename xmlrpc.php

Well, this evening has been my second attempt at setting up some offline blog publishing software for use with my WordPress sites.  I’d tried both Blog-Desk and Windows Live Writer before given the quality of reviews both have been getting, but do you think I could get either of them configured?  Hell No!

Let’s start with Blog-Desk.  Everything is fine with the setup right up until it asks you for the Blog-ID.  It wouldn’t accept a sausage instead returning me a nice 403 Error for my trouble.  So I gave up on it.

So I thought I’d try Windows Live Writer.  Like Blog-Desk, it installed fine with no errors.  Go to setup my blog using the wizard and all is fine and dandy until it asks for the exact path to xmlrpc.php.  And everytime it would return that it couldn’t find the URI (Universal Resource Identifier).

Nothing worked until I happened upon this forum post here   Thanks to fullphaser, I changed the name of xmlrpc.php file to blogdesk.php, and as he said “it now works”.

And the weird thing is, it works in both Blog-Desk AND Windows Live Writer.

Don’t forget to back up your xmlrpc.php file before you try this (as always)

Setting up Windows Live Writer for WordPress Procedure:

    1. Rename your xmlrpc.php file to blogdesk.php

    2. In Windows Live Writer, from the File tab select Options

    3. Select Accounts from the next window that opens then select the Add     button

    4. Select Other services, when asked “What blog service do you use?

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    5. The next window will ask you to Add a blog account.  Insert the web address to the site where you WordPress install resides, followed by the Username (don’t use admin) that you use to post on your WordPress blog and the password.

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    6.  Next you’ll be asked to Select a blog type.  Most WordPress sites these days will select WordPress 2.2+ as the type of blog.  Then in the Remote posting web address box place the full web address to where your blogdesk.php file resides.  Don’t insert myblog.com/public_html/blogdesk.php if that’s where your file resides.  You’d instead use myblog.com/blogdesk.php.

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Windows Live Writer will configure itself from here on in.

How this worked for me given that the very first step asks me to do something contrary to the type of blogging site I have; I’ve no idea.  But for some insane reason it’s worked for me and it’s also worked for someone else as well.

Hopefully this helps someone.

Transfer Multiple WordPress Posts to Another Author

I encountered a situation earlier this afternoon and after a bit of searching found the answer courtesy of Pizdin Dim here

I recently restored our Sox N Dots site from backup and because I’d only created an admin account, all of our posts had been migrated onto that account.  Not ideal and of course, WordPress doesn’t provide the facility to bulk transfer posts to another user.  I knew at this point that I’d have to find a MySQL solution though my knowledge of SQL is limited to such simple commands as SHOW, CREATE and SELECT.

That’s when I happened upon PizDin Dim’s forum post to use the following:

update wp_posts set post_author=NEWID where post_author=OLDID

Place your new author’s ID (Not the name, the ID number) as the NEWID and obviously the other is old author’s ID number.  Did the job, and it did it properly too.

Don’t forget to backup your database first.