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!

Iam writing this post from my Blackberry 8800. I was able to log in to the web dashboard using the Blackberry browser. Previously I could only log in, but then my phone browser would hang at “running script” while waiting for the WP dashboard to load. A single setting change on my phone eliminated the javascript / php that appears to have been the issue.

From the Blackberry Home screen:

1. Click Options
2. Click Advanced
3. Click Browser
4. Change setting to “Internet Browser”.

I’m not sure if this works on other Blackberry models too. Let me know if you try it!