WetLeather Motorcycle Rider Information

The blog tool I like best for being simple and free and full-featured is Windows Live Writer http://get.live.com/writer/overview. (You may have to overcome your revulsion for the fact that it comes from Microsoft) It's an offline composer that gives you a quite rich and easy to use HTML/Web editing environment. I find it much nicer than the online posting functions anyplace I've tried. It knows how to publish blog posts, and intuitively does the Right Thing to edit/revise published posts. On Windows, for "casual" writing - anything that will be published online without indexes, footnotes or other specialty "serious" publishing stuff - I very, very highly recommend this tool. Easy to just leave it running and type a bit when you feel like it throughout your day. It auto-saves drafts and prevents you from doing stupid stuff. One click and your story is published to your blog (or uploaded but left in non-published state of you prefer).

To set up:

First, find out your user ID number. There are several ways to do this, but the easiest to explain is this: Go to the WetLeather web site and log in. Then click on "My Account" in the main menu at the top left. Now look at the URL in your address box - it will show something resembling http://wetleather.com/user/1  That's mine, I am user ID number 1. Yours will be a different number. Make note of this number.

In the first Live Writer setup page, tell it you have neither Live Spaces nor Sharepoint but "other".

In the second page of setup where it asks for your blog's URL, use
http://wetleather.com/blog/32767 (this is where you use the number you used earlier, in place of the 32767) and give the WetLeather site Username and password that you normally use to log in.

In the third page of setup for "Select Provider", select WordPress for "Type of Weblog" and for "Remote posting URL" use the Double Secret Code URL http://wetleather.com/xmlrpc.php

That's really all the setup you need. Other options are more-or-less self-explanatory.

I tested these instructions by installing the current LiveWriter from http://get.live.com/writer/overview on my Vista laptop and posting this blog entry:

http://wetleather.com/node/557