This Sucks

This sucks.

Issues with Windows Live Writer

First, the awesome Windows Live Writer -- which I'd recently upgraded to the even more awesome Windows Live Writer Beta -- no longer works with my blogs. Every time I add a post using WLW, all the HTML angle brackets get stripped from the code so you get a lot of junk.

For example, if I was to post the following line of text using WLW:
Hello World! Google.com

What would appear on the blog would be:
pHello World! a href="http://google.com"Google.com/a/p

Which, in HTML, would have read:
<p>Hello World! <a href="http://google.com>Google.com</a></p>

So take the HTML version and strip off all the angle brackets that actually make the HTML tags what they are and you get what actually gets posted to the blog.

No one's quite sure why this is happening (though some people have found temporary workarounds) or whether it's a WLW, WordPress, or other technology (e.g. PHP) issue. However the issue itself has been documented on the Microsoft support forums. Here's hoping they find a fix soon because I much prefer WLW to writing blogs posts using WordPress's blog post writing interface.

Issues with WordPress and/or Fantastico

Second, while researching the WLW issue, I upgraded all three of the blogs hosted on the insanityworks.org domain to WordPress version 2.6.3. I do all my blogging platform upgrades through the Fantastico script library system that my web host provides for this purpose and I've never had issues in the past. This time, however, while both Nadia's blog and this blog got upgraded just fine, something went wrong as I was upgrading my professional blog so that's now out of commission. I've contacted my web host's support people for help and they're restoring it to its previous version but this does mean that my ACME blog will be down for at least a couple of days. Which sucks.