The Stardock Blog Navigator feature tour

The Stardock Blog Navigator feature tour - Part IV

Blogging with Blog Navigator Professional - Creating a blog account

Published on September 23, 2004 By Adam Najmanowicz In

The third part of the article already available here...

Reading blogs is one thing, and alot of programs allows you to do that with better or worse results. What makes Blog Navigator unique is among other features (like search article monitors, baskets and search blogs) its ability to both read and write blogs.

Let's setup Blog Navigator Professional to use an account on JoeUser.

There's not much to show really... I'm not sure it could actually be easier. Let me add my JoeUser account to Blog navigator as a first sample:

Adding account from main menu

Now I have the regular dialog like adding any other feed or folder type where you enter it's name and various properties. The most insteresing tab that defines my account access info is the "Account" tab.

I entered my username and the password and selected JoeUser.com from the "Blog Service" combobox. If you do not have an account on a service you want to use, simply click the "Create your blog own here" link below the combo and Blog Navigator will take you to the blogging service site where you will be able to create one.

Now I press the OK button and... that's it!

Since I had articles on that account already Blog Navigator retrieved the last 20 posts and now allows me to edit them, delete and add new articles.

Blog Navigator comes with a handful of predefined list of popular blog services you may select from the list where i selecvted JoeUser.com in my sample. Alternatively you can setup your own custom blog service. All you need to know (or ask the admin of your site for) is the URL (address) of the so called "RPC-XML end point". If you do not know what to ask - just point your blog service admin ad this article and he/she will surely know what to give you.

Still most probably it will be your own service setup on your own server - in that case consult the documentation of the web application to obtain the entry point to the XML-RPC API and the API type the application supports.

Let's setup my Joeuser account the harder way...

I select the "Custom..." blog service from the combo box, which happens to be the defaulty one... but I digress...

I've read in the site documentation... well actually I helped designed it, but I digress again ... that the api the web site supports is the JoeUser.com API (which else!) so I select it from the combo box and...

enter the XML-RPC end point I obtained from my admin - Pat. (actually we've came up with that address while designing the JoeUser.com XML-RPC API, but let's pretend I had to go through the pain of asking Pat for it ).

Well...

Setting up account the harder way - Two accounts?!?!

actually now I'm left with two Blogging accounts pointing to one account in a service - not very practical... but hey! It's possible and Blog Navigator can handle it just fine, so why not.

Actually I can delete the other one - deleting an account does not delete it on server. That's actually different than deleting your posts - Blog Navigator will also delete them on server. It will however inform you and make sure you are aware of the consequences and that this is what you really want to do.

In the next part I'll show you how to write an article to our newly added account.

The fifth part of the article already available here...

Comments (Page 1)

joetheblow

on Oct 12, 2004

ummm... this was posted in December 1899???

Adam Najmanowicz

on Oct 12, 2004

nice... he anticipated my article and commented on it before even computers came to existence!

chiprj

on Oct 13, 2004

Hi! Thanks for posting this series of articles. I recently downloaded the free version of blog navigator and am still getting used to it. Your articles are helping very much. I have a question for you. The computer I downloaded blog navigator to is new, so it's possible that I haven't set it up completely yet (although, I think I may have), so this may be something on my side that I need to change. When I set up a feed for a Korean language news site, I was able to receive articles from that site and read the bodies of the articles in Korean just fine. The problem is that in the left side bar (list of feeds and folders) the Korean appears as a series of ????????s instead of the actual Korean. Also, the tab titles are similar. Neither of these is really a big deal, but the worst part is the top right window (contains article title, date, etc) also has these ????????'s. So, I can' t check an article's content without actually clicking on it and reading the title in the bottom right window.

I guess what I'm getting at is... Is there foreign language support in blog navigator? Do I maybe not have something set up in my regional codings? I have set up the Korean IME for typing in Korean and I have added the Korean language pack for reading the Korean. Any help is appreciated! Thanks!

Adam Najmanowicz

on Oct 13, 2004

Indeed Blog Navigator does not support Unicode yet. could you please send me some of those Korean feeds so i could try to add support for them?

chiprj

on Oct 13, 2004

Indeed Blog Navigator does not support Unicode yet. could you please send me some of those Korean feeds so i could try to add support for them?

Can do! This is the only one I have loaded right now. Yahoo Korea has an entire page of feeds but they are mostly, just sub cats of this one. As I find more, I can send them to you if you like. Thanks for the answer.

http://kr.rss.news.yahoo.com/Yahoo_world.xml

Adam Najmanowicz

on Oct 13, 2004

Oh... and thanks for your kind words! I strive to make it the best RSS reader there is. Should you have troubles learning or adjusting to it, i would love to read your comments about how it couls be easier for you, or what potentially I've done wrong. Thanks!

chiprj

on Oct 13, 2004

So far, I'm still getting used to it. It's the first RSS reader I've ever used, so it's all new to me. I like it so far, though. I'll make sure I come back if there are any problems OR good features that I find!

Adam Najmanowicz

on Oct 13, 2004

Great! So far my experience with other software was that the new users in most cases provide the best feedback since they tend to have a fresh look at things and do not behave by their habits. I look forward to your feedback.

chiprj

on Oct 14, 2004

On my path of blog navigator discovery... I've found that I do not have access to adult content articles. I'm fairly certain that this is because I'm on the free version and that makes perfect sense. Without registering my JU account on the professional version, there is no way to veriry age, so I actually think this is an excellent feature (and a very common sense feature). It would appear that I am able to post adult content articles through the browser window part of navigator and that I can view adult content articles the same way, though, so the impact on me really is minimal. I'm guessing that has to do with it being a browser window and my being logged into JU there.

I do plan on buying the professional version. I'm just waiting for the subscription service and I'll do it all at once. I'm looking forward to it.

chiprj

on Oct 16, 2004

OK, I think I've done it... I was changing some language settings in my XP and now I can't run blog navigator at all. I tried changing everything back and it still won't work. I even tried uninstall, redownload, and reinstall. Now when I try to start it up, I get an error that says "Error: '.....' is not a valid integer value". When I click on that error, I get another "error: access violation at address 0051AB18 in module 'blognavigator.exe.'. Write of address 0000044C. Lastly, when I click on that one, blognavigator will open and I will get a repeating error message titled "error while painting ChannelGrid" and 'access violation at address 0051BF37 in module 'blognavigator.exe'. read of address 000000C4".

I'm going to continue trying to work with the language settings and see if I can get it to work. Hopefully, I'll be able to figure it out. But I figured I'd post here since you've been so helpful. Maybe this will make complete sense to you and you'll be able to tell me exactly what I'm doing here. Thanks for your help.

Adam Najmanowicz

on Oct 16, 2004

as to the adult content articles - in Blog Navigator go to www.joeuser.com and login there. You should be able to see everything like it should be. However the articles may still not appear on the RSS feeds. Not sure how Pat implemented it but since RSS has no authentication i believe he may skip those when generating the feeds.

chiprj

on Oct 16, 2004

Yep, that seems to be the case. And I think that's a good idea.

Adam Najmanowicz

on Oct 16, 2004

As to your error. There are a two of sollutions:

1) go to your BN profile - in my case:
C:\Documents and Settings\Adam\Local Settings\Application Data\Stardock\Blog Navigator
and rename the folder. - it should allow you to run it again. you may then try to import the BlogNavigator.XML again (though the result may not be satisfactory).

2) zip and send the folder to adam AT stardock DOT com so that I can look at it and see what have BN done wrong. Generally you should not be able to hurt yourself like this - BlogNavigator should not allow this and this is most probably a problem on my part. I'll lookup the loading process for the data and will try to fix it or make BN fix it on the next time you load it.

chiprj

on Oct 16, 2004

Thanks, I'll give number one a try and email if necessary. Appreciate the help!

Adam Najmanowicz

on Nov 01, 2004

We've resolved the case on email. It was caused by a BlogNavigator's bug and has been fixed.

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