Windows Live Writer and Community Server 2008
I’ve been having an issue with my blog since we upgraded to Community Server 2008. CS2008 uses a new filing system on the server and when posting entries containing images, the new filing system is confusing Live Writer, the result is that old images get overwritten, so old blog posts suddenly have their images changed. If you look back over my last few blog entries you’ll see the problem. I’ve tried hard to raise the issue with both the Live Writer and Community Server teams but I’m not sure how effective that will be. We just have to wait in line and see if this gets fixed.
The problem is this: in Community Server 2007 blog images were uploaded to a folder called
/blogs/<blog-name>/WindowsLiveWriter/<entry-title>/Image_N.<ext>
where N is a sequence number that starts at 1 for each new blog entry and increments for each new image. In Community Server 2008 there is a new way of storing blog files, the new upload folder is:
/filestorage/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/<blog-name>/Image_N.<ext>
As you can see, the folder structure is much flatter and results in all images ending up in the same folder. Remember that Live Writer always resets its sequence number to 1 for each new blog entry and it should be clear that the generated file names are no longer unique. This results in old images being overwritten, a data loss condition.
It is not clear whether this is a Community Server problem or a Live Writer problem, but Community Server was the variable that changed and broke a working system, so I reckon they should probably take responsibility for fixing it.
One happy accident that came out of investigating this is that I discovered a new technical preview of Windows Live Writer that was released back in June. It has some nice new features like auto-linking to items in your link glossary and the ability to crop and rotate images. You can download the preview. I wonder how many of my previous posts this image will ruin?