I’m pretty happy with Microsoft’s Live Writer program, I’ve found it to be a surprisingly powerful & flexible blogging client, despite Chris Pirillo panning it. While it has all the usual WYSIWYG bells & whistles, the best part about it is the fact that they’ve provided an open API to allow plugin development. This is great, and there’s a few really handy ones already written, Insert Code & Multiple Tags, which is part of the Windows Live Writer Plugins project on Codeplex. There’s a list of plugins on the Windows Live Gallery & on Codeplex. There’s also the Windows Live Writer Plugins blog, which has a lot of great content on how to use Live Writer.

So I’ve written up a plugin to insert bible verses into Live Writer.  It’s utilising the excelent ESV web service. It works so well for the Verse of the Day WordPress plugin, so why break a trend? Actually, I’d very much like to add other versions to this plugin, but it’s difficult to find decent bible APIs, which is a great pity. If anyone knows of any other publishers providing a web service interface to their text, please drop a comment my way. I’ve designed this plugin to accommodate multiple bible versions, it’s just turned off in this release because there’s only one there!

You can download the installer program from here, but all it does is drop one file into the Live Writer plugins folder, so you can skip the installer and just grab this zip file and extract the plugin file into c:\Program Files\Windows Live Writer\plugins (assuming that’s where you installed Live Writer).

Once installed, the plugin will add a new item on the right-side Insert menu called ‘Insert Bible Verse…’. Clicking this will bring up the plugin’s window (see image). There are 2 reference fields for you to enter the bible verse(s) you want.  They will auto-complete book names as you type them and accept all the usual verse formatting options (1:1, 1:1-4, etc.).  The second (end) reference field is just there if you want to use it to span multiple books, it isn’t needed otherwise.

There are then a few options you can select from:

• Include link back to verse will put the reference at the end of the quote with a link back to the ESV page for the verses you select. This is on by default.
• Include verse numbers will prefix each verse with the verse number, as it appears in most bibles. This is off by default.
• Display verse as: has 3 options, paragraph (this is the default), Inline quote & Blockquote.  This changes how the text is formatted when it’s inserted into the post. Paragraph just wraps the verse(s) in <p> tags, and maintains any line breaks in the original text. Inline quote wraps the verse(s) in <q> tags and suppresses all line breaks, so that you have a continuous line of text returned. Blockquote is the same a Paragraph, execept it wraps it in <blockquote> tags. This image shows the three different formats as they’re returned:

Please grab this plugin and give it a go.  As always, any & all comments are welcome.

[tags]Live Writer, Microsoft, ESV, Bible, Plugin[/tags]