I have been showing you reasons why to use Windows Live Writer, and in the last article we examined the installation and configuration process. Now that you are all setup and posting basic articles it is time to take a look at plugins. What are plugins you ask? Plugins are programs that extend the functionality of Windows Live Writer. You can enable and disable Plugins using the options > Plugins dialog box. If you want to find plugins go to tools > options > plugins and select the Add Plugin link at the bottom. If you don't feel like going through all of that just click here. Now that we know why we need plugins and what they are used for let us take a look at some of my favorites.

Insert Video
Insert a video from MSN SoapBox, Google Video, YouTube, MySpace Video, Yahoo! Video, muveeMix and now myvideo.de videos and BrightCove Videos. Usage is easy, just click on the Insert Video link, then copy and paste the link into the text box. Alternatively, you can now just paste the video link into the blog entry and the plugin will do the rest.

Flickr4Writer
Flickr4Writer is a plugin that enables interaction with the Flickr(tm) services. You can browse by tags, photosets, or a simple photostream. After browsing, the plugin enables inserting the image reference into a post. A Flickr(tm) account is required.

[having issues with my Flickr Login at the moment but this one is self explanatory]

Screen Capture Plugin v.1.1.0.0
This will load the URL and take a screen capture of the web site as it appears in Internet Explorer. It will then load the image into your blog posting. You can click on Insert Screen Capture and it will ask you for the URL. You can also just drag and drop the URL from your browser into the Live Writer Window.

Insert Code for Windows Live Writer
Insert Code for Windows Live Writer will format a snippet of text in a number of programming languages such as C#, HTML, MSH, JavaScript, Visual Basic and TSQL.
Special thanks to Jean-Claude Manoli (http://manoli.net/csharpformat/) for providing an excellent C# formatting library.

   1:  SELECT salary
   2:  FROM (
   3:  SELECT row_number() over (order by salary) as rn,
   4:  salary
   5:  FROM employee
   6:  ) x
   7:  WHERE rn between 1 and 5
 
 
This is just the beginning of what I am sure to be a great community of plugins. I grabbed these from the community site so I am sure that there a bunch more out there. In my world I need access to some kind of ColdFusion code support so I will be on the search for that and keep you all informed. If I can't find anything maybe I will try and whip up a plugin myself. If anyone knows of anymore useful plugins besides the ones on the gallery site please let me know.

 

This entry was posted on June 29, 2007 at 3:38 PM and has received 3879 views. Comments 0 | Print this entry.