Loghound.com

When you purchase RapidBlog you will get the registration code (also sometimes called serial number) both on the final web page of the purchase screen as well as in a confirmation email.

To enter it simply go to the Page Inspector for a RapidBlog page (shift-cmd-i) and click on the 'wrench' icon to get to the plugin settings. From there you can select the registration tab.

The most important tip I can give is to save your work. This is especially important after you 'publish' as the act of publishing may alter the RapidBlog (say there was a entry edited remotely, after a publish it will sync to your RapidWeaver file)

So even though RW may not indicate the need to change anything hid cmd-s after you publish to make sure you save all synced changes.

There are a ton of options in RapidBlog to let you customize it to your hears content. All of the options should have tool-tips (hover the mouse for a few seconds over the item) to get help

Preview mode also works properly and should give you a accurate view of your final pages.

In addition to the options without RapidBlog there are also options with Blogger that might be worth considering changing. While none of these have to be change it's probably worth considering.


First make sure the Title makes sense. This is what will show up in the RSS feed title. Also it's probably a good idea to have a reasonable description. If you dont plan on using the Blogger front end at all you may consider turning off "Add blog to our listings" to avoid getting random visitors or spam.

Finally the post editor (WYSIWG) Compose Mode. Blogger has a really slick editor, that, unfortunately can break valid HTML code. For instance as of this writing it will break youtube videos and doesn't, in general, allow custom javascript. If your needs are simple editing then you can keep it on but you may find if you are doing fancy stuff that your life is easier just turning it off.





Also see "RapidBlog is entering extra spaces' in this FAQ for information about controlling blogger auto-inserting extra spaces between sentences.

Your web host hold the pictures, theme files and any other regular RW pages (e.g. style text, blocks pages, etc.)

Additionally, It will also hold the instruction (in PHP) for how to get the right text from blogspot.

Blogspot.com just holds the text of the post.

So when someone goes to your web site the posts are downloaded from blogspot but the images and theme files are loaded from your web host.

When you publish rapidblog does two things.

1. It will sync with blogger any posts (so any posts you added or modified remotely get added to RW, and any new or modified RW posts get pushed to blogger)
2. It will upload all of the 'other' files it needs (include pictures, assets, supporting javascript, etc.)

From your point of view you should be able to treat rapidblog no different than the built in RW blog and ignore that fact that it actually uses the blogger engine (except, of course, for the fact that if you go online and add a post it will magically show up even though your mac is maybe thousands of miles away)

No, unfortunately RapidBlog requires php which .mac does not support.

You probably have 'summary' view turned on. Due to a limitation in how blogger stores the posts the 'summary' view strips out HTML formatting including links & pictures. Turn off summary view to see them.

If you take a post entry and edit it in RW then Blogger, then RW, then Blogger it may turn out that you loose formatting and it otherwise starts acting strange. RapidBlog works very hard to try to make this all happen automatically but it can get confused. It's best to try to edit only one place at a time. Within RapidBlog you can easily tell if a post was last edited on the web by the 'lock' icon next to the title



You can also enable a warning dialog in the setup panel to help remind you to tread cautiously.

For the most part you should be able to import your old blog and then put RapidBlog in it's place. The two areas that might break are:

1. RapidBlog permalink pages are different than the built in RW Blog permalink pages
2. RapidBlog uses PHP to process the RSS feed

If those two are important to you consider keeping both blogs 'live'

When you hit the 'minus' sign to delete a post RapidBlog takes note of that and will delete it on the next 'publish'.

For performance reasons categories work a little differently than you might expect. At publish time RapidBlog publishes a known list of all categories so they can display (if you enable that option). however if you remotely edit a post or add a new post remotely and create a new category RapidBlog will not show it in the web page until you re-publish.

If you get 'Blogger Down' or otherwise can't see your posts on your web site there is a chance you've turned off the feed.

There are two places where this can bite you:


1) Go into the blogger web page settings->site feed and make sure 'Allow Blog Feed' is turned to 'full'



2) Make sure your 'Anyone' can read the blog by going to the permissions tab

If you are trying to replace an built in RapidWeaver blog with RapidBlog and it doesn't appear to be working the problem may be because your old RW Blog is still hanging around. The way RapidWeaver works is it never deletes old files on your server (which is a good thing) so when you change from a built in blog (which might be called index.hmtl) to a RapidBlog (which might be called index.php) you could have a problem because a person going to your site might not specify *which* version they are looking for and (the .html or .php) and the poor web server has to decide. Guess what? It always chooses a .html over a php if given a choice.

The quick test is to make sure that you are getting the url you expect with a PHP ending.

If you get a bunch of 'code' and/or it downloads a file when you view the Rapidblog it's possible your web host doesn't support PHP. Most web hosts do support PHP but a few (very low cost version and things like .mac) do not. A quick way to test to see is to try using the 'contact' page -- if that does the same thing it usually points to a PHP problem.

In general you can go into blogger.coma and muck around with settings. There are a few, however, that will break rapidblog. Specifically:


Site Feed -> Allow feed needs to be kept at 'full'

Don't use custom domains. Publish to blogspot.com

If you get a lot of undefined errors like this

Notice: Undefined variable: HTTP_REFERER in (some path) on line 186
Notice: Undefined index: SCRIPT_URI in (some path)on line 187

The likely cause is your web host has set default PHP warning level too high. To fix it put the following in the 'page prefix' section of the page

<?PHP
error_reporting(E_ERROR);
?>

If you get a bunch of garbage characters make sure you are running RapidWeaver 3.5.1 build 264

The build number is really important. Many people are running build 263 which has a known problem with garbage characters occasionally occurring.

If you get a 404 or "Resource not Found" error the problem appears to be that you have posted too many posts to Blogger. I'm working on a long term fix but here are a few short term suggestions.



1) Go to https://www.google.com/accounts/DisplayUnlockCaptcha?service=blogger And fill out the captcha request.
2) Wait 30 minutes or so
3) Try again.

If that doesn't work then go to the web client at http://www.blogger.com and try to add a post via the web interface. You should be asked for a 'captcha' during the post (which is a random series of numbers and letters). Once you add the post with the captcha wait another 30 minutes and try the post via web -- As long as the captcha is present RapidBlog (or any 3rd party blogger tool) won't work.


If it's STILL not working then you'll need to ask blogger to reset your account and increase your limit. you can do that by going to

http://www.blogger.com/problem.g

Tell them the account is captcha locked and ask them to raise your limit. This usually only takes a day or so.

No:

gdoc/gtable/gform require the use of PHP code execution on the server. For security reasons RapidBlog will not execute remote PHP code and so those commands won't work.

Right now RapidBlog does not have any built in ping services to ping sites like technorati.com, weblogs.com, etc. However there are third party solutions that can do this very nicely.

One nice service is Pingoat With this you can create a list of sites you want to pin and save it as a favorite URL. When you make a change simple visit this URL and you are good to go!

Thanks to the guy in the RapidWeaver forum for this idea.

Put the following snippet in the 'interblog' setting. Make sure you have 'evaluate PHP code' turned on and you should get a nice addthis button. Please replace YOUR WEBSITE HERE with your web (e.g. www.loghound.com is mine)

You can use JS Kit commenting by adding some extra javascript in the 'Interblog' and 'Footer' section To the 'Interblog' add the following PHP code snippit

To the 'interblog' section add the following code, enable after every 1 post(s) and select 'evaluate PHP code'


It should look like this:

To the footer add the following



It should look like this:

note that JS-Kit doesn't work properly in the browser so you may see it act a little funny until you publish.

Yes, to Localize you need to define a dictionary that converts the english word to the "Other" (your) language (e.g. October => Oktober, etc.) Use the table in the date selection to do this.

Blogger is a free service with a very easy to use and administer system that supports everything I was looking for. Blogger is also owned by Google so I expect that over time they will integrate it even more into google services. Finaly it doesn't really matter what the backend is since it just stores the post.