Windows Live Writer Tips: Deleting Drafts and Blog Templates

Some tips for those who still use Windows Live Writer which is still my top offline blog post editor for sites like WordPress even though it doesn’t have native Featured Image support and there are no new extensions and Microsoft won’t be updating the software anymore.

Live Writer Delete Blog Templates

Some of the things I often have to do are clear out template files to download new templates, and while this can be done file by file, sometimes it is easier to clear Live Writer templates by wiping out all the template folders at once.  In order to delete your Live Writer template files you simply open up your %appdata% folder.

• Open a file explorer window
• in the navigation bar enter “%appdata%
• then navigate to the “roaming” folder
• then open “Windows Live Writer” folder
• under that you will see the “blog templates” folder

Here you really won’t easily know which template belongs to which blogs unless you navigate into each folder and open the index.html file showing you the blog you are looking at.  Wipe out the folder and then have Live Writer reconnect and download the latest template files for the blogs.

Live Writer Delete Recent Drafts

Another odd thing about Live Writer is that if you save drafts, but you later finish a draft and publish it, it will leave the orphaned local draft still on your disk.  It seems to lose track of your drafts and published articles and you periodically have to clear and delete your stale local drafts in Live Writer.

You can do this the old fashioned way of 1 at a time, clicking File –> Open Local Draft, Select Draft and Click Delete.

But if you have a lot of draft files, then you will want to do a mass deletion of all drafts.  To do this you navigate to your Live Writer draft folder on your disk.

• Open up your Documents Folder
• Open up your “My Weblog Posts” folder
• Then your “Drafts” folder

Here you will see all of your draft .wpost files which fortunately have the titles of your drafts if you remember to type a title, if you didn’t type a title it will list as untitled post and you should open it to confirm.  Just select the wpost files you want to delete and wipe them out.  Note, Live Writer should be closed or some of the drafts could be locked won’t delete if they are open in Live Writer.

The same goes for recent posts, if you want to clear recent post history you can go into the Recent Posts folder and wipe out this folder as well.

I don’t know why it calls it Recent posts, as I had hundreds of posts dated back 3 years in this folder. This folder had over 1,800+ items in it from 3 years, so calling it “Recent Posts” is kind of a mislabel isn’t it?

Is more like every post you ever published since you started using Live Writer instead.

Hopefully this will help you keep your Live Writer drafts, templates and recent posts folders clean.  What other tips do you use or need for Windows Live Writer?