Several blogger colleagues have raved to me about how they love blogging with Windows Live Writer. Every time I’ve tried (until now) I gave up because my personal blog’s themes use dark backgrounds. When trying to use Live Writer it was impossible to write or edit. Here’s a screen shot of this blog’s default dark background.

I found the answer in a Windows Live Writer Forum thread titled Theme Not Showing Up Properly. Flora MSFT answered with the following advice:

“One of your screenshots is our plain editing surface, which we fall back on if template detection fails. You can choose to edit in this mode by going to View menu and unchecking "Edit using Theme".”

The change to not edit using my theme changed my post background to the default off white (blue-ish) color and has made blogging from Live Writer much mo’ better!

If you are looking for some free first person shooter games check out the 3 summarized in this post. With all three games available for Windows and Linux, these deathmatch open source alternatives offer a lot of characters and weapons with a healthy on-line community playing on numerous Internet servers. If you do not want to battle other players on the Internet, 2 of the 3 games have the option to also play locally against bots. These games also offer mods such as Capture the Flag and Team Deathmatch. (more…)