Picture blogs

It looks like I have to say goodbye to my much beloved LiveWriter after many many years of good service, not because there is something wrong with LiveWriter, but simply because it looks like I am just never going to be able to include pictures in my blog posts while using LiveWriter. This is an issue on the Blogger side, and I am not sure how to resolve it – and, quite honestly, I just haven't had the energy to investigate much deeper other than finding I am not alone in this issue.

 

I have contemplated moving my blog over to another platform, but that will be a lot of admin and there are some complications that, again, I simply do not have the energy for.

 

But, I have found a work-around.

 

I can post pictures to my blog via email posts.

 

And that got me thinking. I set up a Microsoft Flow workflow last year to automatically cross-post my Instagram pictures to Twitter, because the native Instagram/Twitter integration is a piece of garbage that doesn't actually post the picture. The flow extracts the picture from Insta, and then posts it, with the caption, as a tweet. It has been working beautifully.

And so, I extended the flow to post the same to my blog. It took a few tries to get it right, but I am pretty happy with the results now. I still wish I could have a slightly better way of setting the blog title, but it is also not completely hideous now, so I think I will keep it like this for a while.

 

This works well for very lazy me, as it means I can update all my feeds with one action, which makes me very happy. I have now also added a filter to the flow to exclude certain posts if I add a specific hashtag, so I can exclude certain pictures from being posts and so still curate my blog content while allowing the occasional junk post to Insta 😊

 

While I am glad to have found a work-around, I do miss using LiveWriter for this kind of post, and may, at some point in the future, troubleshoot the issue a little deeper to see if I can find a solution.

 

[Picture included because I can, and because I am missing the beach today]