Alpha Release: Windows Live Writer Feed Insert Plugin

written by josh ledgard on Saturday, November 03 2007

I've published an alpha release of a Windows Live Writer plugin that makes it easy to pull multiple RSS or Atom feed items into a blog post.  Let me know what you think.

The download link is here:

http://evolvingwe.com/files/FeedInserterAlpha.zip

This download includes an installer that will also install the source code underneath the Windows Live Writer plugins directory. 

Instructions

After installing this plugin you should see a new option in your insert menu.

image

If you choose this then you'll get a pop-up that asks for the URL of a feed to insert.

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Click OK.

The contents of that feed will be inserted in your post and the feed will be kept in the feed history for the plugin.

image

Thanks

I'm about to head over to www.codeplex.com and contribute some fixes I had to make to the http://www.codeplex.com/FeedDotNet project.  I'm including this as a dependency and should probably give them attribution in addition to the contributions to the source.  :-)

Thanks to the Windows Live Writer team. This was easy since the SDK was decently documented and came with good samples. 

Notes

  • This has been tested against Windows Live Writer (Beta) 12.0.1277.816.  I can't promise it works against any other version.
  • If the install succeeds, but you don't get the "Insert Feed Content" menu item then it's likely you have a non-default install location for windows live writer.  You'll have to go to the "c:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\Plugins" directory and manually copy the files out of there and into your real \plugins directory. Hey, it's an alpha, it's not supposed to be easy.

TODO

  • My goal with this was simply to have a way to insert my shared google reader feed items into one post in a format I liked. This means that there are no alternate feed templates available.  Next on my todo is to support multiple templates so that you could, for example, insert shared items one way and flickr feeds another.
  • The code has not been factored nicely. Enter the source at your own risk.
  • Fix bugs. There is little to no error handling here and I'm willing to bet this will crash while inserting your favorite feed for some inexplicable reason.  Umm, it's an alpha. :-)
  • Create a codeplex project. I should probably have some sort of source control for this. :-)

Enjoy and let me know what you think below!

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Comments

  • Kathleen Anderson on on 1.29.2008 at 10:13 AM

    Kathleen Anderson avatar

    Hi Josh:

    I know you can't guarantee this will work in any version other than Windows Live Writer (Beta) 12.0.1277.816, but I'm writing anyway in the hopes you have a solution. I am running Version 2008 (Build 12.0.1367.1128). I ran the .msi file and it did add the Insert Feed Content option, but when I add a feed, I get the following error message: Failed to get information: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

    Is there any way to fix this?

  • Josh on on 1.31.2008 at 5:13 PM

    Josh avatar

    Hi Kathleen. It's great to have users. :-) I verified that my version works with the same MSI so I'm guessing that the bug has something to do with how I'm handling the feed you are pointing to.  Could you let me know what the feed is and whether or not the feed for my blog works for you?

    Thanks,

    Josh

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