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).

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