Fixing Windows Live Writer errors

As of yesterday this blogs run WordPress 2.7 and this worthless information wouldn’t have ever reached a post unless it broke something. And it did.

Story

Right after upgrading I happily did post on Process Monitor but couldn’t publish it. Windows Live Writer (WLW) started throwing me error mentioning blogger.getUsersBlogs method. Not that self-hosted WordPress has something to do with Blogger, right?

Trying to upgrade my account in WLW settings didn’t work either, giving variation of same error.

Tracing

1. Google stage.

   Quick googling showed that people are encountering dreaded blogger.getUsersBlogs since 2007 or so. Crowd wisdom settled for adding following to .htaccess to fix it:

   <files xmlrpc.php>
   
   SecFilterInheritance Off
   
   </files>

   Did me no good with WLW and crashed my whole blog instead.

2. Logs stage.

   If that terrible Java Runtime bug taught me something it’s gather all logs you know, then find the rest of them . No logs for WordPress side and it was bit too early for panic call to hosting support. Also practice shows I am faster at fixing my problems in the middle of the night than support for any service I use. WLW on other hand writes log to:

   C:\Documents and Settings\[profile]\
   Local Settings\Application Data\Windows Live Writer

   directory. It is also quickly reachable from Help > About Windows Live Writer menu.

Solution

I’ve cleared log file so old entries doesn’t mix in with fresh problem, tried to submit post again and got page of mostly gibberish text in log. With following in the midst of it:

Warning

:  main(/var/www/rarstD/rarst.net/wp-includes/class-IXR.php)
[function.main]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory

Quick check on FTP showed that instead of class-IXR.php I had class-ixr.php in my wp-includes folder. Which are different things under Linux hosting because case in file names matters there (unlike in Windows environment). File renamed, case solved.

Lessons learned

1. Googling does give answers.
2. Sometimes those answers are not the right ones.
3. I wish world stick to lowercase for PHP filenames.