Windows Live Writer Plug-ins

• 2007-08-26
• 5 minutes to read
• edit

I’m a big fan of Windows Live Writer and use it almost exclusively to write my blog posts. As a result of this, I’m always on the lookout for new and useful plug-ins. Since I have accumulated quite a few of them, I thought I’d share my favorite plug-ins. These are listed in no particular order.

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	[SkyDrive Embed Plugin](http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=27545581-4b54-4f6d-9007-ed3b168dab43&bt=9&pl=8)	Allows you to easily embed a file or folder from your public [Windows Live SkyDrive](http://skydrive.live.com/) account. You can specify 3 different embed formats.
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	[Paste MSDN URL](http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=8576830b-48cc-4213-8953-2b24ced08e1f&bt=9&pl=8)	Allows you to paste a URL from any of the MSDN web sites and have the culture removed from the link. This allows the reader to be automatically redirected to the MSDN content in their preferred language (if available). This plug-in can also retrieve the page title automatically to use as the link text. **This is a great plug-in, but it isn't compatible with the "Insert Quick Link" plug-in, which will always take precedence, so you'll need to decide which functionality is more important to you.**
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	[Insert Quick Link](http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=208df1ab-1349-48b0-b4c2-45713cc14763&bt=9&pl=8)	Allows you to paste a link from any website and automatically bring up the link options dialog. **This is a great plug-in, but it isn't compatible with the "Paste MSDN URL" plug-in. This one will always take precedence, so you'll need to decide which functionality is more important to you.**
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	[Insert Video](http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=65584500-3bd3-404b-818a-2cdec6304892&bt=9&pl=8)	Allows you to easily insert video from MSN SoapBox, Google Video, YouTube, MySpace Video, Yahoo! Video, muveeMix, myvideo.de videos nd BrightCove Videos.
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	[Code Snippet plugin for Windows Live Writer](http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=d4409446-af7f-42ec-aa20-78aa5bac4748&bt=9&pl=8)	Allows you to add syntax highlighted code snippets to your blog post.
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	[Insert Amazon Details](http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=82b772ae-6ed9-412d-9f3f-fe83eb4f8549&bt=9&pl=8)	Allows you to insert a thumbnail and details about an Amazon.com book. It does require you to know either the ISBN or ASIN number, but the plug-in gets the rest of the details. It also supports using your Amazon.com affiliate Id.
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	[XFN Link Editor](http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=217b89d0-30cb-4370-958e-f22307173ae0&bt=9&pl=8)	XFN™ (XHTML Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. In recent years, blogs and blogrolls have become the fastest growing area of the Web. XFN enables web authors to indicate their relationship(s) to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding a 'rel' attribute to their tags. This plugin allows you to easily work with XFN compatible links.</td></tr>
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	[Now Playing](http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=8e766d66-65a2-40b5-9e54-2517166101f1&bt=9&pl=8)	Now Playing is a Windows Live Writer Plugin that inserts the currently playing title into your blog posts. Now Playing comes with support for Winamp, iTunes and Windows Media Player out of the box. Now Playing itself can host other plugins that query services Amazon, Last.fm and Music-Map to extend the metadata of a track. This information can then be used to create a template as the base for the content that will be inserted in the blog post. Developers can extend Now Playing by writing custom plugins for other media players and services to enrich the metadata even more.
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	[Event Plugin](http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=9751e563-1408-4fc3-8028-bd4351edb1fb&bt=9&pl=8)	Create your own events or find existing events through intergrated search of the Eventful.com website. Format the event, add a picture, edit the description, customize what data is displayed. The published post included correct hCalendar microformatting. The plugin also enables pastes of Live Clipboard copied events and Blog This of events from the Eventful.com website.
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	[Acronymns Plugin](http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=908829d1-f935-4084-bbe4-5e84afa784dc&bt=9&pl=8)	This plugin lets you search for an acronym description and insert it the acronym with the description in the blog post.