OpenLiveWriter, Orchard and Cloudflare Basic SSL

In this post, I want to share a small workaround for successful configuration of OpenLiveWriter with blog hosted on Orchard CMS that uses Cloudflare Basic SSL.

First, some background: I use Orchard for my blog last couple of years. I write and publish my posts from OpenLiveWriter (and I used Word and Windows Live Writer before that). I find it very convenient, as it supports “one-click-publish” approach. Couple months ago I opted in for Cloudflare Basic SSL – which provides me with SSL without the need to pay anything for it. As it does not requires anything to be changed on my site, the site is still hosted without SSL but accessible only using HTTPS.

As I recently rebuilt my old Lenovo ThinkPad T420 with latest Windows 10 Update from scratch, I did not install OpenLiveWriter (as you can see, I have not wrote any blog posts in last 4 months). Yesterday, I finally decided to write something, installed OLW from Microsoft Store, and when I tried to configure blog, I received error

Can’t connect to your blog service:

Network Connection Error – Error attempting to connect to blog at: …

MovedPermanently: Moved Permanently

I suspected that was caused by my blog/Cloudflare configuration, but I was not sure how to fix it. After trying to change configuration to use https instead of http URL, I would receive same error.

Workaround

The issue was caused by the missmatch in blog configuration and URL: blog is hosted on http URL, configured for http URL, but accessible through https URL. The workaround was simple: to change blog configuration to the URL accessible from the internet – the https URL configured on Cloudflare. The configuration is on “Settings” page in “Settings” panel (more info). Once I made that change, OpenLiveWriter was able to connect to the blog and properly configure it for publishing.

I hope this little workaround will help anyone that might be faced with the same error.

In case of any questions, feel free to ping/message me on Twitter.