Thursday, May 28, 2015

Google Cuts Off Live Writer from Blogger

 UPDATE: As of June 2, everything is working again. That was an amazingly fast fix given how low priority Blogger has been to Google and Live Writer to Microsoft. Didn't see an update to Live Writer, so I suspect that this is Google's initial fix.

Original Post:

As of May 26, Google changed the login method for external software to access Blogger, cutting it off from all offline editors other than Blogger's default browser editor. Since many of us use Microsoft's Windows Live Writer 2012 to create our posts, this has been a disaster. If you are like me and use a lot of inline images, this is especially problematic since the default editor is terrible at handling images.

Google blames Microsoft:

7:51 AM

Nick - Google Guide said:


Hi everyone,

We appreciate you coming here and letting us know about this issue. It looks like this error is a result of an authentication problem between Google and Live Writer. A long time ago, we announced we were deprecating our old authentication system and we encouraged developers to move to the new one (OAuth 2.0). It seems that Live Writer is still using our old system, which is causing the issue. We are currently looking into it, but we suggest that users also reach out to Microsoft to report the issue.

Thanks,

Blogger Suport Team

p.s. please disregard the previous official announcement.
Edited

However, all other blog editors are affected, such as Raven, Blogjet, and BlogFire. Until one or more of them change over access methods, posting to Blogger will be a great deal more difficult given the Microsoft ceased development of Live Writer in 2012.

In my case, it may prevent the movie review I finally finished writing today from ever being posted, since I can't get the images to work properly with the default editor. Short of learning to hand code HTML image sizing, it isn't happening for me.

So I have to wait for some kind of fix from somebody. If that doesn't happen, it will be time to explore Wordpress to see if it can replace Blogger for me.  Otherwise, I may stop blogging altogether.

This is more than annoying.

2 comments:

Static Variable said...

There is another way out. You could compose your post using your mail editor/outlook and simply mail them to blogger...

For details: http://bit.ly/1KC0OUC

Patrick D. Boone said...

Unfortunately, that did not work correctly for me when attempted. It has to do with the way I have two thumbnails side by side that the default editor keeps altering even after using the email and HTML copy/paste method. Three hours of fighting with it just trying to get two images to work the way I've formatted for years was a futile effort last night.

Time for me to learn HTML hand coding so I can understand just what is going wrong there.

There is good news however, both Google and Microsoft have now committed to fixing the problem with a temporary fix from Google first and the full fix later from Microsoft. Now it is just a waiting game.