I’ve been wanting to get Lightbox installed on here since I started using the new blog engine. I found René Kuss’ Lightbox Extension which adds the Lightbox 2 code to the blog at runtime. He also wrote a Thumbnailer extension that will autogenerate a thumbnail if you put some glop in the img src attribute.

But since I’m a Windows Live Writer user, I didn’t like having to tweak the image URL every time I posted. A bit more digging uncovered Jesse Foster’s Lightbox Extension that is specifically designed for WLW, but it used old Lightbox 1 code and I wanted to use the new 2.0 fanciness.

Then today I discovered the Technical Preview of the next version of Windows Live Writer. Lo-and-behold, it now supports adding the rel=”lightbox” tag to images! Perfect.

UPDATE 2008-12-01: The Beta is out and it has the Lightbox features. Keep an eye on the LiveWriter blog for up-to-date release information.

Here are a few pics of my kids to confirm that it is working as expected.

To enable this, I installed René’s Lightbox Extension for BlogEngine.net (see above) to get the scripts and such into the HTML stream. Then just I simply use WLW’s new Link To dialog for images to enable Lightbox for the image.

The “Group” field will make it a Lightbox group, which lets you use the arrows to scroll from within the Lightbox popup.

EXACTLY WHAT I WANTED! Thanks Windows Live Writer Team! Now if only I could talk you guys into using standard (or configurable) keyboard shortcuts for typical formatting, we’d be golden.