Yesterday I was feeling pretty good about how CornerPixel's website and blog are valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional markup. I had just got done posting my entry about Google Analytics when I decided to run the blog home page through the W3C Markup Validation site. 

Ackkkkk! I had 78 errors.  What is up with that.  Well I got to looking and I noticed there were markup errors in the blog posts.  Well I use Windows Live Writer to post my blogs and I do it from several different computers throughout the week.  I hadn't had that problem before, so I decided to start looking through Windows Live Writer settings. 

I didn't find anything in the Tools / Options menu, and I was starting to get a little worried.  I did notice that you can view the HTML (markup) so I figured worse case scenario I could just change the markup, but I didn't want to have to do that with every post.

Finally I noticed the Weblog menu.  Under Weblog there is an option to "Edit Weblog Settings"  If you click that you will get a popup window where you can make the necessary changes.  Once the window is open just click "Advanced" on the left and you will see the section where you can choose the Markup Type. 

There you go.  Now Windows Live Writer will spit out good markup.  Wooo hooo !

I also noticed that when I had an "&" in the title of the post I got 1 XML parsing error and 1 warning.  So for a good valid blog site with Live Writer, don't place an "&" in the title of your posts.

Well I hope that helps for all you blogger's using Windows Live Writer.