Windows Live Writer is a desktop blog writing program, for writing and previewing posts, either with or without an Internet connection.
To preview posts in the format and style of your blog, Windows Live Writer needs to download the blog theme by publishing a temporary post. This temporary post is supposed to be deleted right away, without appearing on your blog, so your blog visitors should not see it.
But, some users may experience an error where this temporary post is not deleted properly, so that the temporary post shows up in your blog’s RSS feed, even though it may not appear on your site.
Here is a solution to this Windows Live Writer theme detection problem for WordPress users.
Problem: Temporary Post Used For Theme Detection
First off, this is a problem that does not affect your blog content online, but can affect your blog’s RSS feed by adding extra junk to your feed whenever you download and update your theme using Windows Live Writer. So, your subscribers will see these unnecessary and unintended posts on your blog’s RSS feed.
So, when you need to update Windows Live Writer to use the latest version of your blog theme (by clicking “Update Theme” in the “Preview” tab), Windows Live Writer asks you the following:
Would you like to download the blog theme by publishing a temporary post? The post will be removed immediately after your theme is retrieved.
This will let you see what your posts will look like online while you are editing.
Answering “Yes” to this will start the theme download, and a temporary post will be published and deleted on your blog.
The problem is that sometimes the temporary post does not get deleted properly, so that the temporary post is viewable in your RSS feed, even though it may not appear on your actual blog.
If you do have this problem, then when check your blog’s RSS feed, you’ll find these temporary posts with the title: Temporary Post Used For Theme Detection. This title is followed by a long string of letters and numbers in brackets.
The text content of the temporary post is:
This is a temporary post that was not deleted. Please delete this manually.
This text is also followed by a long string of letters and numbers in brackets.
While these temporary posts do not appear on your blog, but you can find them in your WordPress account online, in the trash.
Solution: Use Ultimate Category Excluder Plugin
In WordPress, since these temporary posts are all under the category “Uncategorized”, then using a plugin such as Ultimate Category Excluder in WordPress can hide them from your blog’s RSS feed. Note that the default post category will need to be “Uncategorized”, as set under your blog’s Writing Settings.
After you install the plugin, go to the plugin settings page in WordPress, then exclude the “Uncategorized” posts from the Main Page, Feeds, and Archives. This will make sure the Windows Live Writer temporary posts will not appear anywhere in your blog or blog RSS feed.
If you use the “Uncategorized” category for other posts on your blog, then you could create a new category for those posts so that they are unaffected by the plugin.
While this solution won’t actually prevent the problem from happening, it will make it so your blog content and RSS feed content are unaffected.
You may still see these temporary posts in your WordPress trash, but now your blog visitors and subscribers will not see these temporary posts anywhere.