HowTo: Type in double-quote in Windows Live Writer

A big nuissance in Windows Live Writer is that when you try to type in a double-quote character you get some special Unicode character (“ or ”, at the start and end of a string respectively), other than the classic ASCII character used in programming.

That way people copy-pasting snippets from your blog can get lots of errors. I remember having that issue sometime ago with people copy-pasting (into a .reg text file) a registry script to add Google search engine into Copernic Agent from my blog and not understanding why it wasn’t working as expected.

However, I found a keyboard shortcut to work-arround this issue. You just press BACKSPACE key right after typing in a double-quote character in Windows Live Writer to restore it a real ASCII double-quote.

A new(?) kind of spam in blog comments

WordPress just asked me to moderate a comment saying "of the many video clips that i download, i always watch those that are very funny" (with some emoticon ASCII chars following it). It was a comment on a post of mine about LvS which is related to video, so it looked ok, but the URL of the sender made me suspicious. It was about Rhinoplasty operations (and their page was a classic low budget promotional one), so I search for that text on the web and found out it had been posted (albeit with a different emoticon char sequence at the end) as comment at various blog posts related to video.

Seems we are facing a new kind of (most probably) automated spam targeted at specific blog post comments (probably spotted using search by term and/or popularity ranking). The solution may be for spam filters to filter out commenter’s URL (and maybe also resolve short URLs, not allowing multiple levels of short URLs or even short URLs at all). Also they could contain a database of such comments and being able to detect variations too, but risking to also flag a real user comment.

Windows Live Writer tagging WordPress blog posts

I was delighted to see Windows Live Writer 2011 supports adding a WordPress blog nicely (pretty much automagically) and it even shows for each post a Tags input box at the bottom apart from the Categories option. It wasn’t showing a tags input box when working with Windows Live Spaces since it didn’t support such concept, but only a (limited) number of categories one could define along or replacing predefined ones (luckily Microsoft is migrating Windows Live Spaces to WordPress in a straightforward way for existing Windows Live Spaces blog authors).

Note that WordPress administration panel has online tool to convert existing categories to tags (and vice versa) which is very useful combined with the tag cloud widget, since categories are practically a tree of relations whereas tags define a full connectivity graph. Pretty sad though WordPress doesn’t have option to merge multiple preexisting categories/tags (e.g. Windows Live Spaces used to add localized and english versions for some categories) into one.

Version "14.0.8117.416 el" that I use (Windows Live Writer 2011) is still showing (C) 2009 in the About dialog btw:

And still crashes when selecting some menu options, but you can safely press "Cancel" there and keep on working fine without the app closing down which is very nice since you don’t lose any unsaved work.