Diagnosis II: Why Can’t LiveWriter Post from Work?
The remote server returned an error: (403) Forbidden.I’m at working trying to toss up blog post here and there and things are coasting along smoothly with Windows Live Writer when I see this when I hit publish (bonk):
This was working fine yesterday so I’m assuming I’m being blocked by my corporate firewall. OK, let’s confirm that.
I can access blogger.com, mharen.blogspot.com, my dashboard, the post editor…everything’s fine through the browser, just not through Live Writer. I fired up Fiddler to see what LW’s doing and saw the problem right away:
It seems that even none of the blogger/blogspot domains are blocked here, blogger ships its images to http://picasaweb.google.com/, which is blocked. No matter, I asked our friendly IT admin to unblock it. Now I can publish. But did it work?
Sort of. The publish worked but the image wasn’t coming through. It seems that the img src is actually on another domain. e.g. http://lh3.ggpht.com/…. In my case, lh3 is blocked but lh5 isn’t. So I switched the images to lh5 and they all work just fine from within my corporate firewall (for now).