Weblog clients

There are times when logging into your Roller weblog to post a new entry can be a tedious process, especially when you have two or more weblogs about different subjects. Let’s say that you have to write stuff in your company’s blog, and you also write in your personal Roller blog. You can open two web browser windows and log into each blog separately, but it would be better to use a weblog client, as I’ll show you in the next exercise.

Time for action – using Google docs as your weblog client

In this exercise, you’ll learn to use Google docs as your weblog client to post entries in your Roller weblogs without having to log in:

1. Open your web browser, go to http://docs.google.com, log in with your username and password (if you don’t have a Google account, this is your chance to get one!), then click on the New button, and select the Document option:
   
2. Your browser will open a new tab for the new Google docs document. Type This is my first post to my Roller weblog from Google Docs! in the word processor writing area, as shown in the following screenshot:
   
3. Now click on the File menu and select the Save option to save your draft in Google docs:
   
4. Google docs assigns the title for your document automatically, based on its content. To change the title of your post, click on it:

   

5. Type Posting to Roller from Google Docs in the dialog that will show up next, and click on OK to continue:

   

6. Google docs will show the new title for your post:

   

7. Now click on the Share button and select the Publish as web page option:
   
8. The Publish this document dialog will appear. Click on the change your blog site settings link to enter your Roller weblog information:
   
9. The Blog Site Settings dialog will appear next. Choose the My own server / custom option and select MetaWeblog API in the API field. In the URL field you need to type the complete path to Roller’s web services—http://alromero.noip.org/roller/roller-services/xmlrpc, in my case. You just need to replace the alromero.no-ip.org part with your dynamic hostname. Then type your Roller username, password, and weblog name, and select the Include the document title when posting option, as shown in the following screenshot:
   
10. Click on the OK button to save your weblog settings, and then click on the Post to blog button in the Publish this document dialog:
    
11. A confirmation dialog will pop-up, asking if you want to post the document to your blog now. Click on OK to continue:

    
12. Google docs will show the This document has been published to your blog success message:
    
13. Click on the Save & Close button at the upper-right part of the screen to save your document and return to the Google docs main page, then click on Sign out to exit Google docs. Now go to your Roller weblog’s main page, to see the post you published from Google docs:
    

What just happened?

See how easy it is to use a weblog client, so that you don’t need to log into your Roller weblog to post a new entry? And if you want to post to a different Roller weblog, you just need to change your username, blog ID, or URL. There are several other weblog clients available that you can use, depending on your operating system, but all weblog clients work in a similar way.

Have a go hero – try out other weblog clients

Go and try out some other weblog clients, to see which one is best for you. In Windows, you can use Windows Live Writer (http://download.live.com/writer) and w.bloggar (http://bloggar.com/). In Linux, you can try out BloGTK (https://launchpad.net/blogtk/).