My last two 10 Secrets posts have garnered a fair bit of attention so I thought maybe it was time for another. These posts document all those little tips and tricks that newcomers to Windows Live products may not know about - I hope they are proving useful.
| If you want to blog about something you are browsing on the web (and if you have Live Writer installed) then click the 'Blog This' button in Internet Explorer's tab toolbar. Live Writer will open up and be pre-populated with information about the web page. | | |||||
| ||||||
| If you want to want to share a file that is on your SkyDrive with the rest of the world then you could provide a boring old URI. Why not be bolder and add a user friendly icon for it instead. The "embed" link provided with each file is all that you need. | ||||||
| A little known fact about Live Writer is that it can be used to update blog entries that you have already posted. Simply open the post from your "Recently Posted" list, hit 'Publish' and let Live Writer do all the work. I don't know if this works for all blog engines but it definitely works for Live Spaces. | ||||||
| If you use Office Live Workspaces at http://workspace.office.live.com then your recently updated workspaces will appear at http://home.live.com. Very handy. | ||||||
| If you have a blog, or in fact any RSS feed, you can build a Live Alert that will send an alert to Messenger and/or an email telling you when a new post occurs at that feed. Go to http://signup.alerts.live.com/brochure/index.jsp to set it up. You'll be given HTML code that produces a sign-up link which you can then embed into any web page. The link opposite sets up a Live Alert for my blog at http://jamiethomson.spaces.live.com |  | |||||
| How often are you in need of phone support from your more tech savvy family members? Well if you're talking to them on Live Messenger then use the 'Request Remote Assistance' feature and let them see your desktop or even control it. Request Remote Assistance can be found on the 'Activities' menu of a Messenger conversation window. | ||||||
| Would you like to keep your Messenger and Facebook statuses in sync? If you add the Windows Live Messenger application to your Facebook profile then any update to your Messenger status will automatically update Facebook. | ||||||
| Do you have friends that don't speak your language? If you're having a Messenger conversation with them then you can add the Machine Translator bot to your conversation and have it translate everything you say. Just add mtbot@hotmail.com as a contact. | ||||||
| Often its useful to track search results to know when new content that you're interested in appears on the web. Live Search enables this by simply appending "&format=rss" onto the end of the Live Search URL. For example, http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=barack+obama&format=rss returns search results for Barack Obama as an RSS feed. |
If you want to read the previous two 10 secrets posts then hit the links here:
-Jamie 
