Windows Live Writer and 403 error on Blogger

May 28th, 2009

I was trying windows live writer for the first time, a big applause to Microsoft for providing this too for free. Windows live writer makes the life of a blogger much easier.

Windows live writer allows you to frame your blog post from your desktop or laptop and publish on to the blog using a single click ! This helps us treat blog posts just like a word or power point file, make necessary changes to your post, edit it locally in multiple sessions, while it is saved in your computer locally and publish at once. You need not go back and forth on your blogger or wordpress admin to make drafts and changes, everything is easy using Windows live writer.

Now coming to my issue, I tried creating a post on my wordpress blog (like this one) using Live writer, no issues for me to get it done. Only to make sure we check the XML-RPC publishing protocol on in wordpress writing settings.

Now when I tried posting into blogger, it gave me a 403 error and says could not upload or something like that. The issue was that my post contained images. While posting images into blogger, actually images are saved on to an album in your picasa account. When you post from blogger’s interface, an album matching to your blog name is automatically created. But, while posting from Windows live writer, it actually tries to upload to a ‘Windows Live Writer’ album in your picasa account, which might not be existing. Well in my case it wasn’t existing and that was the root cause for this issue.

I manually created a ‘Windows Live Writer’ album on my picasa account and retried publishing the post from Live writer – Phew ! It worked !

So just in case you are facing the same issue as mine where you are getting a 403 error while trying to create a post on blogger, with the posts containing images, cross check whether you have a ‘Windows Live Writer’ album on your picasa account. If not, add manually and retry. It should work fine.

Let me know if this post helped you in any way !

2 Responses to “Windows Live Writer and 403 error on Blogger”

  1. Thank you soooo much. Every other page about this error mentioned a “Bad Behavior” plug in which I did not have installed. I followed your instructions here and it worked!

  2. Verdana says:

    Great !! thanks a lot for your stuff. Ive been searching everywhere until I find your Post. Now it works Damned blogger pictures !!

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