Windows Live Writer is the most popular blog authoring tool because of its features. The most unique feature of this tool is that it downloads the blog theme and provide you the same look on editor window so that you can write a post with a preview. But sometimes you may face the problem that Windows Live Writer not detecting and downloading the blog theme and showing the default preview only. We will talk about the different reasons which may troubling the writer to get your blog’s theme.
Home Page Excluding “Uncategorized” Category
If your blog template is such that it doesn’t show the posts from uncategorized category from your blog then Windows Live Writer will not detect the theme of your blog. For detecting the blog’s theme, Windows Live Writer post a temporary post on your blog and delete that automatically after a certain interval, that post goes into the “Uncategorized” category on your blog but since your theme is excluding or hiding the posts from that particular category that’s why Windows Live Writer is not able to write a temporary post over there and that’s why it is not able to detect or download the theme properly.
Solution for this problem:
If you want to provide the webpage link as your home page in “Account” section of your Windows Live Writer then remove the restriction of not showing the posts from “Uncategorized” category. To do that, go to the “Appearance” section of the dashboard of your WordPress blog and click on “Editor”. Select “Index.php” and check whether any restriction like “If” condition (as mentioned below ) above the have_posts() logic is provided over there,
if (is_home()) { query_posts(‘cat=519,183,8’); }else{wp_reset_query();}
Which means the home page is showing posts only from categories with Cat-ID 519, 183 and 8 and any of them is not for “Uncategorized” category. Since Windows Live Writer post a temporary post in “Uncategorized” category, it is not able to do that because of the above mentioned “If” condition. Remove that “If” condition logic and update the index.php file. Now upgrade the account on Windows Live Writer for that particular blog or you can “Refresh Theme” from “View” menu of Writer.
XML-RPC Link Missing From Header
If the problem still exists then you can try to resolve it by adding the below link of code in the “<head> </head>” tag of your blog’s header.php file.
<link rel=”EditURI” type=”application/rsd+xml”
title=”RSD” href=”http://www.myblog.com/xmlrpc.php?rsd” />
Check Error Log Of Windows Live Writer
If you are facing any problem on your Windows Live Writer, check out the error log of the same by a single click. To check the error log of Windows Live Writer, go to the “Help” then “About Windows Live Writer” menu on Windows Live Writer itself. Look at the “Show Log File” link on that window, click over there to locate the error log and then open that to see the list of errors. Most recent error will appear at the bottom of that log file. If Windows Live Writer is not detecting the blog template then the error message of log file will be something like this,
“Failed to download template Framed: System.Exception: Unable to locate blog post elements using most recent post”
“Failed to download template Webpage: System.Exception: Unable to locate blog post elements using most recent post”
Important Locations For Windows Live Writer
Default location of Error log File
On Vista Desktop: C:\Users\User_Name\AppData\Local\Windows Live Writer
On XP Machine: C:\Documents and Settings/User_Name/Local Settings/Application Data/Windows Live Writer/WindowsLiveWriter.txt
Location of Downloaded Template
On Vista Desktop: C:\Users\User_Nam\AppData\Roaming\Windows Live Writer\blogtemplates
On XP Machine: C:\Documents and Settings/User_Name/Application data/Windows Live Writer/blogtemplates
If you are facing any other problem related to your wordpress theme or windows live writer then ask your questions in this forum. Track that forum to get the answer in your mailbox.