I’ve been using Windows Live Writer (WLW) to write my blog articles since my blog platform has supported it, and I have installed as one of those “must have” tools on 2 of my PCs, my laptop and my main desktop. If you do not use Windows Live Writer, then stop reading this post and go download your copy, set it up, then by all means come back and finish reading.

The problem I have had, has been the fact that the two instances of WLW on each of my PCs know nothing about the other. If I start writing a draft blog post on my laptop, I cannot go and finish it from my main desktop. Windows Live Writer, by default, stores the “drafts”, and “recent posts” on the local computer on the user’s documents folder, such as: “C:\Users\<username>\Documents\My Weblog Posts\”

Once I figured where WLW stored these files I quickly got this sinister desire to store them in a location where they could be shared. Windows Live Mesh, Network Shared Folders, and/or other cloud solutions came to mind. What a concept!

In my case, I use a service from SugarSync (which is a great service, in my opinion). It syncs whatever is in a “Magic Briefcase” folder to the cloud.

Now that I had a “plan” of action I just needed to execute it. I figured that WLW would have some setting somewhere that would allow me to easily modify where its files are stored – well, I was wrong! This is where this post comes in handy.

Symbolic Linking

I decided that the simplest approach to reaching my goal was to create a “symbolic link” between WLW’s default’s folder location and the location where I was it to store the files in – that is what the NTFS mklink command enables you to do.

For a more scientific explanation of “symbolic linking” here is what Wikipedia has to say:

In computing, a symbolic link (also symlink or soft link) is a special type of file that contains a reference to another file or directory in the form of an absolute or relative path and that affects pathname resolution. Symbolic links first appeared in the 4.2BSD release of Berkeley Unix (1983). Today they are supported by the POSIX operating-system standard, most Unix-like operating systems, Windows Vista, and to some degree in Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

 

Full explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link

Enough with the mumbo jumbo already, tell me what to do!

Okay, I agree, this is turning into a dragged out blog post for such an easy process. Here is what you need to do:

1. Copy the contents of “C:\Users\<username>\Documents\My Weblog Posts\” to the new destination folder. In my case it was: “C:\Users\<username>\Documents\Magic Briefcase\Personal\My Weblog Posts\”
   
2. Delete “C:\Users\<username>\Documents\My Weblog Posts\” – This part is important, otherwise the mklink command will not cooperate – just make sure you have backups before doing this.
3. Open the command prompt with administrator privileges and run the mklink /D command as follows:

   mklink /D "C:\Users\<username>\Documents\My Weblog Posts" "C:\<your new folder location" 

   
4. Hit enter – you should now see a message similar to the following:

At this point WLW is setup to use your new folder location, by way of this newly created folder link. My 2 PCs(and potentially more) are now all synced up auto-magically.

Disclaimer: Although I have tested and verified that this process works well on machines running Windows 7 and Windows Vista I do not guarantee that it will work on your system. I also do not take responsibility for any loss of data or productivity that may be caused by this procedure.