Windows Live Writer, lighttpd, and WordPress xmlrpc.php
I love Windows Live Writer. I use it now for all my blog editing. Recently though, after setting up my new SheevaPlug as my server and using lighttpd instead of apache as my webserver I found that I can’t use it. I got the following error trying to add my blog to my new install of WLW:
An error occurred while attempting to connect to your blog:
Invalid Server Response - The response to the blogger.getUsersBlogs method received from the blog server was invalid:
Invalid response document returned from XmlRpc server
You must correct this error before proceeding.
Doing some sleuthing, I found that this has to do with permissions on the xmlrpc.php file, which you can circumvent by adding the following code to your .htaccess file:
<Files xmlrpc.php>
SecFilterInheritance Off
<Files>
BUT, since lighttpd doesn’t use .htaccess, I’m kind of SOL. In fact, from my internet readings, lighttpd doesn’t really have anything like mod_security.
Things were looking grim, until I stumbled across a blog post from 2006 where the author mentions newlines before <? in php causing problems. Lo and behold, my xmlrpc.php had some newlines before the <?. After removing them I was able to add my blog to WLW, and I’m posting from it right now. I hope the issues I had with uploading photos isn’t still present, but we’ll see once I make my next photo-intensive post.
Comments
smrtinker
has similar issue connecting from the live writer to wordpress - tried removing the preceding and trailing white spaces in several files, changing the paths names in the xmlrpc and reloading into the root folder, as mentioned by many people on numerous blogs. None of that really helped.
For a few hours, I banged my head on to my laptop, pulled my hair till I almost lost all of it, and then suddenly - bang! found the solution...it's actually very simple and I don't the reason why. Anyways, here's what I did.
Just for the heck of it, to give it a try, simply created a new user id with admin rights, that's it, it started working. But, there's another error which I'm getting now i.e.,
"The response to the metaWeblog.editPost method received from the blog server was invalid:Invalid response document returned from XmlRpc server". Haven't yet tried any of the tips/tricks out there...Hope this works!