I’ve been a fan of using Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer to compose blog posts for quite a few years now, so when it stopped working earlier this year due to Google changing the authentication requirements for Blogger, I was a bit disappointed. The good news was that Microsoft contacted Google and (for once) they extended Live Writer a lifeline to allow it to continue to use the old API until alternate arrangements could be made.

All was good just over a week ago, when a) Microsoft released an open source version of Live Writer – named Open Live Writer, and b) Google finally did switch off the old authentication API. Unfortunately the first new release of Open Live Writer didn’t have a working implementation of Google’s new authentication API, so there was a few days of inconvenience whilst that was finished off. Version 0.5.1.2 came out last Friday and I’m pleased to find that it does work again with Blogger!

The source code is on Github at https://github.com/OpenLiveWriter/OpenLiveWriter, and there’s already an active community contributing bug reports and pull requests.

It’s great to see such a useful application given a new lease on life (or should that be ‘new lease on live’ 😀 )