mo:Blog - The Manual

mo:Blog - Mobile Blogging for Palm..

Introduction

mo:Blog is a mobile blogging tool for PalmOS devices. With mo:Blog you can keep your blog updated from your Palm PDA. With it you can post and edit entries, upload files like images or sound files.

For mo:Blog to work, you need a Palm that is connected to the Internet. It can be a Treo with GPRS or a CSD connection or a Palm equipped with WiFi. You can also use a BlueTooth connection to a GSM phone that makes the Internet connection for you. If you don't have a wireless connection, you can still make a connection to the Internet when your Palm sits in its cradle. For this you need a piece of software on your desktop system that makes an Internet gateway from your Desktop.

If you have a Palm equipped with a camera, or a camera add-on like the Veo Photo Traveler, you can keep your own photoblog with mo:Blog. FOr this to work, your blog server must support the uploading of binary files or you can use FTP.

We support the next blog APIs at this moment:

• Blogger API
• metaWeblog API
• MovableType API

With this we cover the most popular blogging tools like Blogger, wordpress, MovableType, Typepad, Drupal, ... A list of popular blog servers and their type of API can be found in Appendix A.

Configuration

When you run the application for the first time, you'll need to configure at least one blog. For this, choose new from the popup on the right top corner of the screen, or use new blog from the main menu.

Provide a name for this blog and choose the appropriate API for you blog server. Most blog servers support one of the next three APIs:

• blogger
• metaWeblog
• MovableType

In the case of the blogger, the URI will point to the public API of the "blogger.com" service: http://www.blogger.com/api/RPC2

If you use another blog server that supports the blogger API, you'll need to change the URI to the appropriate value. The URI is the url where you find the API interface for your blog server. For example, for MovableType blogs, this mostly ends with mt-xmlrpc.cgi.

Next, you'll need to provide a username and a password that you use to administer your blog.

Once this is done, you'll have to provide the blogid - a number or key that identifies your blog - in the appropriate field. You can do this in two ways; If you know the blog id, you can just fill it in, or if you know how to find the blog id in the URL of your blog application, you can do it that way. Otherwise, press the Lookup button. This will bring you to a form which allows you to fetch a list of all your blogs on that server. Use the Refresh button to refresh the list og blog ids. Clicking on an entry in the list fills in the appropriate blog id into your preferences.

If you happen to use MovableType and you work with categories, then you can follow the same procedure as for the blog id to fill in the category in which to post. This is not mandatory, however, as leaving this empty will post new blogs in the default category. You can choose more than one category. If you now create a new entry for this blog, all the categories you selected in this form will be selected. You can change the list of categories per entry as well.

Next, save the settings for this blog and you're ready to start posting!

If you want to provide a signature for this specific blog, you can do so by pressing the 'Blog Signature' selector. Doing so will popup a form that allows you to provide a signature for this blog only. If you want to provide an application wide signature, a default signature for all blogs you define, you'll need to go to the preferences form.

If you want to use another upload directory for attachments than the default, you can do so by pressing File upload settings selector. This brings up a popup form where you can select the upload directory.

You can use FTP to upload files to your blog. Choose the File upload settings selector, which opens a form where you can fill in ypur FTP server, username and password. You ca also change the default FTP upload directory.

Some Blog APIs provide special settings. You can go the API specific settings by pressing the API specific selector. For example the Blogger API provides a switch to enable a title hack. Alternatively you can provide a title template. This title template will get prepended to your entry and a special wildcard chaeacter (%s) will be expanded by the contents in the title field.

The more selector opens up a form in which you can enable HTTP authentication and a switch to preserve line endings when postings. Be carefull with the second option as it can interfere with your layout on your blog.

Posting and publishing entries

In mo:Blog you can have multiple blogs. You select the active blog on the main form using a popup in the upper right corner of the form.

Once you select a blog, you'll be presented with the posts waiting to be published. Tapping on a post will bring you to the edit form. Clicking on the New post button will bring up the editor, so you can enter a new post.

A blog can have a file attached, this is shown with a small file icon on the right side of the screen. An entry can also be just a file, this way you can upload multiple files in one go.

Once you have created a blog, you can start blogging. Press the New post button. This opens up a new form in which you're presented with a minimalistic HTML editor. Provide your blog with a title and tap in the empty space on the screen. You can select the tag menu to insert some basic HTML tags to format your post.

Save your entry, by pressing the Save () button or go back to the main screen by pressing the Cancel () button.

If you are editing an existing post, you can press the Delete () button to delete the post.

Press the publish button on the main screen to publish the entries to your blog. Selecting the 'sync all' menu item from the main menu publishes all posts from all blogs at once.

If you don't want to save your post, there is a possibility to publish the blog straight from the editor form. once you have typed some text in the title field, or attached a file, you can select Publish now from the Tools menu to publish the post.

You can select, in the preferences form, if you would like to keep the text or if you want to clear the screen after publishing a post. You do this by selecting the Clear/delete publish from editor checkbox. If you previously saved the post and checked the above checkbox, you'll be asked if you want to delete the saved post after being published. Clearing the checkbox will keep the saved post, so you have to delete it manually.

Edit tools.

In the tools menu, you have a few handy options available. The Link attach option makes it easy to insert a link to the attached file. The Image attach option inserts an image tag with the attached file as the source.

The Manage snippets option allows you to manage the snippets - short pieces of HTML to insert in your post.

The Publish now posts from within the editor, and is a short-cut if you are in a hurry.

The Set date allows you to set the date for this post. This allows you to place a post into the past, or keep it from publishing until the date arrives. Check your blogging server to see how it behaves with dates set in the future. Wordpress keeps the post from showing up until the date arrives. Be aware of clock skew between your blog server and your Palm device as well, when you use this feature.

If you want to show a post in more then one blog, you can use the Add blog option. This menu option show a form in which you can choose the blogs to which you want to post this entry.

You can also select one or more categories for this entry to appear on. This will override the default categories set in the blog configuration form.

Working with snippets.

Although some basic tags are included in the Tag menu, like <br> and <b>, you probably want to define your own snippets of text. The snippets feature allows you to do just this.

A snippet can be a simple piece of text or it can contain some sophisticated piece of HTML. To create snippets, you'll need to tap the Manage snippets menu item in the Tools menu on the edit form. Alternatively, you can choose New snip... in the snippets pupop box. In the snippets form, you'll need to provide a name for the snippet - up to 8 characters - and the actual content. The snippets you create are shared over all blogs, even if you create them in different blogs.

You apply a snippet by positioning the cursor in the edit screen and selecting a snippet from the snippet popup.

The original selected text will be replaced or expanded by the selected snippet ...

A nice feature of snippets allows you to provide a wildcard. This wildcard will be expanded with the selected text when you apply the snippets. Instead of positioning the cursor, you can select a piece of text. A snippet with the wildcard will place the snippet around this selected text. A snippet without the wildcard will just replace the text with the snippet.

To create a snippet with a wildcard, you need to use the '%s' identifier. For example, we will create the snippet called 'home' that contains a link to your home page. This snippet can look as follows ...

<a href="http://server/you.html">home</a>

Imagine you want to make the 'home' dynamic, sometimes you want to call it 'my home page'. You can do this by replacing the word 'home' by the identifier %s. Now it looks as follows:

<a href="http://server/you.html">%s</a>

Every time you select a piece of text and apply the 'home' snippet, the link tag will be placed around the selected text.

Another nifty feature of the snippets comes from the '%a' wildcard. This text will be replaced by the attached file. If you run a photo blog, this makes it easy to make custom image tags with your own preset attributes.

Adding files

If you want to upload a file to your blog, then you can select a file in the HTML editor screen by pressing the Attach button. This presents you with a file browser on your flash card. Now you can select a file that will be uploaded to the server when you publish the blog. Note that this only works for blogs that support the metaWebLog and MoveableType API. Otherwise you'll need to have FTP access to your website and configure mo:Blog to use FTP for upload.

You can define a default Volume (flash card) and directory to upload your images or other files from. Use the preferences panel for this.

If you want to upload a file without entering a complete post, then you just need to create a new post but leave the title and body empty. Only selecting a file tells mo:Blog to only upload the file on the next publish.

To make it easy to use the attached file in your post, we have provided two menu items under the tools menu. The first function img attach inserts an img tag pointing to the attached file. The second function file attach inserts a a tag pointing to the attached file.

If you want to use FTP instead of the blog API to transfer files to your blog, choose the upload settings. Here you can choose to use FTP and provide the FTP server name, username, password and upload directory.

Preferences

The preferences screen allows you to select the directory and flash card on which you keep media files. If, for some reason, your internet connection needs to pass trhough an HTTP proxy, then you can also configure this. The timeout field lets you choose the timeout for the network functions. this is preset to 20 seconds, so, unless you are on a real slow connection, this should be tolerant enough.

The signature field can be used to define a default signature used for all blogs. If you desire to have different signatures per blog, then you'll need to edit the signature field in the blog's preferences form. You can leave this field blanc if you don't want a signature.

The Clear/delete publish from editor checkbox allows you to set the behavior when publishing a post from the editor form. If you leave this unchecked the editor screen will not be cleared or the published post will not be deleted from the Palm. Which of both happens depends if you are editing a new post or if you are editing a previously saved post. If you check this button, then theeditor screen will be cleared or the post will be deleted from your Palm. Actually you'll return to the main form as well with this setting.

If you have a PalmOS powered PDA that with support for flash cards, then you can select a volume and a directory that contains the media files you want to upload. Select the desired volume from the drop-down box. Choose the desired volume and directory by clicking on the Lookup button.

Appendix A: Blog API XML-RPC endpoints

Appendix B: License code

To be able to use mo:Blog, you'll need to obtain a license key. This license key is based upon your HotSync name. One you obtained your license key you can enter it in the register form by selecting the menu item register on the main screen.

Appendix C: Contributors

Design, implementation and original idea by Johan Van den Brande.

Many thanks go to Mike Slocombe (www.urban75.com) for the excellent graphic design and numerous UI usability ideas.

Also, many thanks go to all the beta testers who had to live with most of the errors and who did a fine job at hunting down bugs.

Appendix D: Copyright

mo:Blog © by Tektonica BVBA. For more info, direct your enquiries to info@tektonica.com.

Graphics © by Mike Slocombe www.urban75.com.

Appendix E: Disclaimers

TEKTONICA BVBA MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES ABOUT THE SUITABILITY OF THE SOFTWARE, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, OR NON-INFRINGEMENT. TEKTONICA BVBA SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES SUFFERED BY LICENSEE AS A RESULT OF USING, MODIFYING OR DISTRIBUTING THIS SOFTWARE OR ITS DERIVATIVES.