Blogging Problems Sorted

The first of two posts today.

After struggling since Tuesday, with both laptops suddenly deciding I couldn’t publish blog posts from Windows LiveWriter to Blogger, which proved that this wasn’t a Windows 10 issue as I’d originally thought because the old laptop has Win7 on it, I spent some considerable time yesterday, searching for solutions online. Eventually, after reading numerous comments on a forum which contained quite a few useful links, I found a link to this blog, which had a quite excellent step-by-step tutorial on how to resolve this issue.

I am posting about this in some detail, in case there are others out there, tearing their hair in frustration and not knowing where to turn. I hope this post will help someone!

It turns out that recently, Goggle changed the way that people log into their Google accounts, from a one-step to a two-step process (for added security) and this made it incompatible with Windows LiveWriter, Microsoft’s excellent blog post composing software. Thousands of people around the world love this program, as I do, and were endlessly frustrated by the lack of action on both Google’s and Microsoft’s part to resolve the issue – both of the giants were busy blaming each other and sending frustrated customers from one to the other, while issuing airy promises that “action was being taken” and promises that it would be fixed “in a few months’ time,” none of which was any use to the users who required action NOW! There really isn’t an equivalent piece of software that measures up in any way with LiveWriter, and what there is, also experienced the same problem since Google changed its rules, leaving us with only one alternative, to compose our blog posts in Blogger itself. This part of Blogger, I have to say, is total rubbish. The formatting is all over the place, and what you get when you compose the post, is not what appears when you publish it. If you try composing in the LiveWriter html page, and copying and pasting the code into Blogger, none of the pictures are transferred across, and the formatting is again all over the place. Total nightmare.

People were demanding that either Google got its act together and provided us with a decent authoring program attached to Blogger, rendering LiveWriter unnecessary, or that Microsoft honoured its somewhat vague promise of some months ago to release LiveWriter as an open source program, so that the techies out there could get their hands on it and make sure that these problems never arose again – and give us an even better product. Neither of these scenarios looked set to happen any time soon, and we were all left in the lurch.

What I don’t understand is why this didn’t arise in my case much earlier than this, and the only thing I can think of is that starting with Windows 10, it brought it to the forefront, but that doesn’t explain why my old laptop, running Windows 7, also refused to upload blog posts last night.

Anyway, I followed the step-by-step instructions to set up the two-step log-in process introduced by Google, and then added a special password for LiveWriter, which is now permanently attached to it. After I’d done this fix, I tried uploading a test post, and IT WORKED!!

However, when this first happened, immediately after I set up my new laptop with Windows 10, I did some sort of fix – I can’t remember exactly what I did because I tried several things, but I think it was to allow Google to be less secure – something which flagged up a lot of messages from Google, so I set it back to its original state. After this, it wouldn’t work again.

Having read some of the comments following the step-by-step tutorial, where people found that the fix worked to start with, and then reverted to its non-working state again, I am not quite ready to put out the flags just yet. I am hoping this is a permanent fix, until Google decides to change its rules again in its characteristically arrogant and high-handed manner – I am pretty fed up with Google really, because they don’t listen to their users, and they are notorious for publicising our personal info, and they’ve also taken over far too much of the Internet for my liking – if your account goes down, there’s a load of stuff you can’t access until it’s sorted – for instance, Blogger and Youtube. If you try to get help on their so-called “support” pages all you get is multiple choice questions, and if your problem isn’t there, well, you just have to go jump in the lake for all they care. There is no way to contact a real person by email or by phone or whatever, and your only resort is to find some more sensible and generous people on the many forums out there, who have found out how to do things and are prepared to give us the benefit of their wisdom.

Rant over. Let’s hope the wretched thing stays working! I could do without the hassle.