Live Writer and Community Server

Published 30 January 07 11:47 PM | andersnoras 

One thing I found annoying with my previous blog was that it lacked support for a meta blog API. This forced me to use the web-based editor. The site had an OK editor, but I envied those who blogged with Live Writer.
When chose Community Server for this blog, one reason was the meta blogging API. Even if Live Writer listed Community Server as supported, it wasn't all plug and play. My first attempt at connection yielded this error message:

"An error occurred while attempting to connect to your weblog:
Invalid Server Response - The response to the blogger.getUsersBlogs method received from the weblog server was invalid.
You must correct this error before proceeding."

After looking further into what caused this fault, I realized that Live Writer always requested a lowercased URL. By default Community Server's meta blog HTTP handler is named MetaBlog.ashx. Because of the URL rewriting bug in ASP.NET 2.0, wrong casing might cause a HTTP 302 to be returned rather than HTTP 200, even if the URL is correct. I therefore renamed the HTTP handler to metablog.ashx and everything worked fine.
I know I've only cured the sympthoms and not the real problem with this renaming hack, but it solved my problem. I hope the next Community Server release will have a better solution for this.

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# Anders Norås' Blog said on February 6, 2007 11:28 PM:

My biggest concern about moving away from a well-known blog site was if I'd manage to get people to read

# ASP.NET said on February 26, 2007 11:47 AM:

My first attempt to connect from Windows Live Writer to Community Server brought me following error:

# groundh0g said on May 14, 2008 1:14 PM:

Thanks for the tip. I just wanted to add that if anyone's having this problem after renaming the file to lowercase, you may want to drop the "www." from the URL as well. My CS install strips the www, and when WLW tried to probe the site, the request and response URLs still didn't match. It's working just fine now, though. Thanks again.

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