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Altering Windows Live Writer Themes
I just put a new “Magazine Style” theme on Mobilitysite.com this weekend. When I refreshed the style properties for the blog in Windows Live Writer, the excerpt list of the most recent articles took over as the layout for Windows Live Writer. What this did was make the theme look really skinny. The WYSIWYG aspect of Windows Live Writer is rendered useless with this layout. The frontpage only shows a 335px wide excerpt of the 10 most recent posts (above left). When you actually read the article though, you have a spacious 610px to work with (above right). The problem is that the 335px view that is present in WLW now makes formatting the post guesswork. There has to be a way to fix this. Here’s how I did it.
The solution is quite simple really. You have to alter the theme on your local machine. This might seem like a pain in the ass, but if you want to be able to benefit from the WYSIWYG aspect of WLW, you are going to have to do this. (or change themes) I am not changing themes, so this is what we have to do to get where we want to be in this.
The 1st step is finding your local template files for Windows Live Writer.
- XP: C:\Documents and Settings/User_Name/Application data/Windows Live Writer/blogtemplates
- Vista: C:\Users\User_Nam\AppData\Roaming\Windows Live Writer\blogtemplates
- Win 7: C:\Users\AppData\Roaming\Windows Live Writer\blogtemplates
This directory will look something like this:
As you can see, there is no way of knowing which blog is for which directory. The way I suggest is to update style and go with the most recent “Date Modified”. Once you determine the directory, you will drive down into that directory and you are greeted with more uncertainty…
I am not too sure why there seems to be two instance of each one, but I found that the more recent directory contained the CSS file that affected the way Windows Live Writer presented the style.
What I did was opened up style.css and made changes to the style sheet to indicate the proper width. Each theme works differently, so I can’t tell you exactly what worked for me, but with a little knowledge and some tweaking you should find your groove too.
What I am doing with the folks that write for my site is taking the style.css file I made work on my machine and sending it to each of them to add to their directory. Instead of guessing, I am going to ask them to add this file (overwrite the existing file) to each of the 2 directories.
I hope this is helpful to someone!
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