Windows Live Writer Becomes Open Live Writer

Last week, Blogger turned off their workaround from June 2015, that was allowing Windows Live Writer, and other third party editors and auxiliary Blogger services, to access Blogger.

All week, we saw various reports of problems, reminiscent of the problems that we saw in June 2015, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue. Yesterday, Blogger Engineering provided a status announcement.

We would like to let all users of Windows Live Writer know that Microsoft has made the application open source and it’s now a different application called Open Live Writer (you will need to download it here).

A few months ago, the Windows Live Writer and Blogger integration stopped working for a few days due to improvements in Google’s authentication systems. We agreed to keep the old authentication systems for a few more months but starting December 11th, they will be retired and Windows Live Writer will stop working.

The Open Live Writer team is now working on making OLW use ClientLogin aka OAuth 2.0, to access Blogger.

Windows Live Writer is now Open Live Writer - and the OLW team is now making OLW able to access Blogger.

The final version of WLW will never use the upgraded Blogger client login.
Scott Hanselman notes, in his blog,

Soon, Google and Blogger will finally shut down this older authentication system. Blogger will use the more modern OAuth 2 and Open Live Writer will be updated to support OAuth 2. Windows Live Writer will never support this new OAuth 2 authentication system, so if you use Blogger, you'll need to use Open Live Writer.

We will now have to wait until OLW uses the upgraded Blogger client login.
Blogger having shut down OAuth 1.0 last week, Windows Live Writer is now out of service for direct use with Blogger. Blog owners who wish to use Live Writer will now have to wait, until OLW is upgraded to support Blogger Login.

OLW is a pretty complex project - and it has a number of open issues, which we can observe. Issue 63 is Blogger login.

If you try using OLW, and it does not work, check the open issues log. You'll probably find your problem - and maybe a solution - in there.

Some blog owners may try a workaround which uses WLW and email.
There is a possible workaround, to use WLW to compose post content, and then use email to actually send content to Blogger. Other than that possibility, we'll all have to be patient.

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(Update 12/16 17:00): We're told that OLW has been updated for Blogger, and is now available for download, at http://openlivewriter.org/

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