Creating and editing your weblog
From pixyWiki
First, you login to pixyBlog. What happens next depends on the number of weblogs that you have. If you have one weblog, you'll be taken directly to the New Entry page for that weblog. If you have more than one weblog or none at all, then you'll be taken to the Main Menu page where you can pick which weblog to edit and/or create new weblogs.
The main menu page lists all of your weblogs and for each, shows you links to its New Entry, Edit Entries and Settings pages.
Contents |
Creating and editing entries
To create a new weblog entry, go to your weblog's New Entry page, enter a title in the Title field, enter the your post in the Content text area, choose a gallery from the Gallery combo, and hit the Post to Weblog button. As soon as you do that, your weblog entry is posted to your weblog for the world to see.
Use the Preferences:Settings page to pick the weblog editor page you'd like to use. Let's cover the fields on the page:
- Title: this is the title for your post, it is required.
- Galleries: You can pick one or more galleries for your entry. You can change the list of galleries available in your weblog by using the Photos > Galleries page.
- Pub Time: You don't need to set this unless you want to post at a specific time in the past or in the future. The best thing to do is to leave it blank as it will be set for you when you click the Post to Weblog button to publish your new entry.
- Tags: (optional) Enter a list of one or more tags that describe your weblog entry, separated by spaces. As you type, pixyBlog may suggest tags that you've used before.
- Status: This field displays the status of your weblog entry. The possible values are Not saved, Draft and Published.
- Photos: The photo(s) to upload.
- Content: This is where you put the body of your weblog entry.
Below the weblog entry fields are the Other Settings
- Comment Settings: Click on the little plus-sign plus (+) to expand the Comment Settings control, where you can enable/disable comments on your blog entry.
- Plugins to Apply: This control allows you to pick which plugins are to be applied to this entry. For example, if you want ;-) smilies in your text to be replaced with smiley-face images, choose the emoticons plugin. You can set which plugins are to be applied yy default on your weblog's Preferences:Settings page. Here's the current list of plugins included in pixyBlog:
- Convert Line Breaks
- Topic Tags
- Textile Formatter
- Acronyms
- Bookmark Linker
- Email Scrambler
- Emoticons
- Misc settings: Here you can control misc. settings like text right-to-left and, if you're an administaror, you can "pin" an entry to the top of the front-page of the site.
- MediaCast settings: This control allows you to specify the URL of a file to be included in your blog entry as an RSS enclosure, also known as a podcast. See the next section for more information on podcasting with pixyBlog.
Below that is a row of buttons:
- Post To Weblog: Don't click this button until ABSOLUTELY SURE you're ready to publish your weblog entry for the entire world to see.
- Submit for Review: If you only have limited blogger rights in the weblog, you won' t see the Post to Weblog button because limited bloggers are not allowed to publish directly. Instead, you'll see a Submit for Review button. Click this button when you are ready for the authors of the blog you are working in to review your work and either publish or save it as a draft and ask you to revise it.
- Save as Draft: Click this button to save your post as a draft entry for editing later.
- Preview: Click this button to see what your post will look like when displayed in a browser. Not that preview is not exactly like what you'll see because you weblog may have different font and style settings than the edit weblog page, but it will be pretty close.
Finding and editing entries
Galleries
pixyBlog's galleries feature allows you to organize your photoblog posts into galleries. For example, you might setup a gallery called "Nature" for your nature related posts, a gallery called "Architecture" for your architecture posts, and a gallery called "General" for everything else. When you write a new photoblog post you must decide which, if any, galleries to place it in. On the Create & Edit:New Entry page, there is a combo-box that allows you choose galleries for your post or to change the galleries when you edit an old post.
RSS Feed for Each Gallery
Your weblog's main RSS newsfeed includes all galleries, but users can choose to subscribe to specific galleries.
Adding, Renaming, and Removing Galleries
You can change the names of your galleries, add new galleries, and delete galleries using the Photos:Galleries page of the pixyBlog Editor UI.
Using a blog client with pixyBlog
NOTE: the blog client is currently experimental.
A blog client allows you to post to pixyBlog remotely, from your desktop or from some other web site. For example, desktop applications such as Ecto, MarsEdit and BloGTK can post to pixyBlog and so can the photo-sharing web site Flickr. This is possible because pixyBlog supports the standard Blogger and MetaWeblog APIs.
Configuring a blog client for use with pixyBlog
First, make sure to enable Blogger API support in your weblog via the Preferences:Settings page. Next, start your blogging client, find the preferences or account setup dialog. You'll need to set the following parameters:
- Username: your pixyBlog username
- Password: your pixyBlog password
- BlogID: the handle of your blog
- URL: the URL of pixyBlog's XML-RPC endpoint
Note that you may not need to enter your BlogID because some blog clients will login to pixyBlog and then present you with a list of the weblogs that are available to your user.
An example
For example, if your username is fred and your blog's handle is fredsblog (i.e. your weblog's URL is http://fredsblog.pixyblog.com), then your parameters would be:
- Username: fred
- Password: (your password)
- BlogID: fredsblog
- URL: http://www.pixyblog.com/roller-services/xmlrpc
You may not need to enter your BlogID because some blog clients will login to pixyBlog and then present you with a list of the weblogs that are available to your user.
Posting from Flickr
Flickr supports postings photos as blog entries. It's easy to get your Flickr account set-up to post your photos to your pixyBlog, just follow these steps:
- Login to Flickr and go to "You > Your Account > Extending Flickr"
- Add a new blog using either of the following options:
- BloggerAPI Enabled Blog
- MetaWeblogAPI Enabled Blog
- Enter your pixyBlog information as described above.
- Don't worry about pressing the "Test Post" button (see below).
- Customize your Flickr Layout (see below).
- Go to one of your photos on Flickr and you should now have a "Blog This" button... try it!
NOTE: "Test Post" button on Flickr will fail. This is OK, because the test post from Flickr doesn't contain an image, which is required by pixyBlog.
Customizing Flickr Blog Layout
Flickr has a number of templates used to add additional formatting to your blog entries. Because your pixyBlog already has it's own theme, we're not interested in getting the additional formatting information, so we recommend you create a custom layout. From "Your blog list" in Flickr, choose "Layout", select any of the templates and then select "Customize" and use the following code in your template:
<img src="{photo_src}" />
{description}
NOTE: Flickr currently only supports photos up to 500 pixels in size for blogging.