Open Live Writer Error 400 –> Moving to WordPress

It all started this past Friday.  January 16th 2019.   When I was trying to post a new article to my Blogger Blog, I would get this error.

The remote server returned an error: (400) Bad Request

I went straight to twitter and then GitHub (thankfully, this is an open source project) and quickly learned that I was not the only person having this issue.  Cut to the chase and I discovered that Google had deprecated a critical API that Open Live Writer used to post images to Blogger.  This Picasa API was shut down on January 16th (but allowing extension requests) and will be completely closed in March 2019.

The open source community was quick to issue a temporary fix that will allow users to continue to use OLW with Blogger until March but the community will need to come together to completely rewrite the program to use the new API if OLW will continue to work with Blogger.  This seems like a big ask for volunteers and for me, just highlighted the fact that my blog was still largely out of my control.

I’ve been contemplating the move to WordPress for a long time.  Years in fact but I thought the amount of work involved (and additional cost of hosting) would be too much and not worth doing so I put it off.   For a LONG time.  This whole Open Live Writer fiasco pushed me way out of my comfort zone and made me decide to finally switch over to WordPress.  The main advantage (other than being able to continue to use Open Live Writer) was to have complete control over my blog, its content and its design.  I also wanted to get with the times.  Almost a third of the internet runs on WordPress.  It is the dominant blogging platform by far and just has features and customizations that were light years ahead of Blogger.  I bent that Blogger platform to my will but with WordPress, it would have been so much easier.

Once committed to switching, I made the decision to host my WordPress instance on Amazon Web Services.  I took some diligent notes and in the next blog post, I’ll break down all the steps I took to get 780 blog posts living on a BlogSpot site over to WordPress running on AWS.

Spoiler Alert: You are reading this post on the new site.  It costs about 31 cents a day to run and can pretty much do everything my old site could do and MORE.  Here’s a picture of the old site if you can’t remember (although the way back machine is way fun!)

Before:

After:

Hopefully everyone will enjoy the changes done and the changes coming.

Thanks for Reading!

– Carlo