Blog

The Blog page allows you to manage a collection of blog entries; recording personal events, thoughts, ideas and more. You may also add audio or video files to a blog entry to create Podcasts. All of these can be syndicated using RSS feeds.

Adding an Entry

To add a new entry to your Blog, just click the [+] button located just below the blog entry list.

The Post Settings area slides out from the right, where we can set up the catgories, tags and other information for this post. The time and date for the post is automatically set to the time you add the entry. However you can change the time or date by typing it directly into the time-and-date field, or set it to the current time and date by clicking the Clock button. Give your blog entry a title and then type your blog post in the Body box, located in the lower half of the page.

The post editing area is a full Styled Text area as found elsewhere in RapidWeaver, allowing you to format the text, and add links, HTML, movies and images. You may also use the Page Assets feature.

Smileys

In each blog entry you can use smileys just like in iChat. The Blog page style supports 8 different smiley emotions. For example, entering :-) in your blog, RapidWeaver will convert it into a graphic.

Listed below are the smileys supported by RapidWeaver:

Smiley:	Text Equivalent:
Smile	:-)
Laugh	:-D
Sad	:-(
Wink	;-)
Gasp	:-o
Embarrassed	:-[
Angry	:-|
Foot-in-mouth	:-!

Permalinks

A Permalink is a permanent link to a specific blog entry so that visitors may return to it even if it has been archived and moved off the main Blog page. When enabled in the General tab of the Blog’s Setup area, RapidWeaver will automatically create a Permalink for each blog entry. If you’d like to create a custom Permalink for a specific blog entry, click the ‘Custom Permalink’ checkbox and type in a unique word or phrase (e.g. ‘my_first_post’) into the Permalink field. When RapidWeaver publishes your blog page, it will create a Permalink based on the word or phrase you have entered.

Tip: RapidWeaver will automatically append the file extension (.html or .php) depending on what extension the page you’ve used in the Page Inspector.

Podcasting

RapidWeaver allows you to easily add Podcasts to your blog entries. Podcasting is a standard that allows audio or video files (most commonly in MP3 or MP4 formats) to be published online in a way that allows Podcast capable applications such as iTunes to automatically subscribe to them and download the media for playback at the listener’s convenience.

When you add a Podcast to your blog entry by clicking the ‘Add Podcast...’ button, RapidWeaver presents a Podcast sheet that allows you to drag-and-drop your Podcast media-file into your blog entry. The file needs to be in a QuickTime compatible format such as MP3 (audio) or MP4 (video and audio). Once the media file is dragged in, you can specify custom tags, to help iTunes to correctly categorise your podcast. The custom iTunes tags (and subtitles) are controlled on an episode-by-episode basis using the iTunes Tags tab.

Figure 1: Adding an episode

Over-riding the defaults:
If you wish to refer to existing online content, do not drag in any media to the initial podcast drop- box. Instead go to the ‘Custom RSS Tags’ tab and check the ‘Over-ride default Podcast settings’ option. Simply enter the full URL to the media (perhaps stored on a service such as Amazon S3 or LibSyn).

Be sure to enter the full data for the size (in bytes) in the sizebox and specify the correct MIME type. Podcast ‘enclosures’ can be in the following formats:

• .mp
• .mp4
• .m4a
• .m4v
• .mov
• .pdf

For further information on iTunes Technical Specs, please visit the Apple website.

Figure 2: Configuring iTunes tags for a podcast episode

Category:

This is the category which iTunes should categorise the podcast under. It should be just a single category, such as Comedy or Technology.

Keywords:

This allows you to be more specific than a category. Think of them as tags, allowing you to refine the description of the episode -- so perhaps Mac, OS X, RapidWeaver would be considered Keywords of a Technology-centric show. Keywords should be comma and space separated.

e.g. Mac OS X, RapidWeaver, manual

Author:

Simply enter your name, or the company name you wish to associate with the show. It will appear in the iTunes source list and over-ride the email address defined in the blog’s RSS setup.

Enter the subtitle you wish to show for the episode.

Summary:

If you want to add more in-depth show notes specifically for iTunes, perhaps detailing the entire content of the show (such as topics covered, guest appearances, etc), you can enter it here.

Explicit:

iTunes allows you to ‘flag’ any content that may contain any explicit content (such as profanity). To flag this individual episode, simply check the ‘Explicit’ box for this episode.

Once you’re done with this episode, click OK. At the next publish, RapidWeaver will attach the correct files to the blog post, and publish the necessary enclosure tags for the post to ensure that podcast clients will know to download the episode from the server.

If you wish to edit the settings for an entire podcast, perhaps mark all episodes as Explicit by default, then the Advanced tab of the Blog plugin’s settings tab > iTunes can be edited to apply settings to the whole blog. You can also specify a custom show logo there, which will be displayed in iTunes as album art, and also in the iTunes Store if you submit your podcast there.

Blog Settings

Before you can syndicate your blog or broadcast your Podcasts, you must first configure your blog to use RSS feeds, set your default Podcast tags and customise your blog page’s options. Click the ‘Wrench’ icon below the Page List to show the Blog Settings.

The Blog Setup area has five main tabs:

General	Set Archiving, Permalink and Commenting options.
Categories	Enable and create blog categories.
RSS Feed	Configure the RSS feed for your Blog page.
Date Format	Configure the format of your time and date of blog posts.
Podcast	Set the default iTunes tags and Custom RSS Channel tags for your Podcasts.
Ping	Enable weblog directory/tracking services to keep track of recent changes in your blog page.

When you first click the ‘Setup...’ button, the pane will default to the ‘General’ tab. Click the desired tab to expose the contents of its pane.

General Settings

Figure 3: General Blog SettingsThe top section of the General tab (shown in Figure 3) contains the archiving options for your blog in which you can customise the archive behaviour, if used. By default, archiving is active. Disabling it will cause RapidWeaver to keep all of your blog’s posts on the same page, growing longer with each blog entry you add. If enabled, archiving will move all your old posts to separate pages, keeping only the current week’s or month’s posts on the main page, as selected in the ‘Archive by’ popup menu. You can also set the minimum number of posts that must appear on the main blog page before older posts are archived, and whether or not to show gaps in the list of available archives.

The middle section of the General tab allows you to enable Permalinks in your blog and to set the Permalink’s link title. If you use summaries in your blog entries, you may choose whether the Permalink points to the summary rather than the blog entry itself by clicking the ‘Include Summary’ checkbox. When published, the Permalink will point to the summary, which will include a ‘Read more...’ link to the full blog entry. You may also change the ‘Read more...’ link’s wording by typing a word or phrase of your own choosing. This will become the system-wide link phrase when used in summaries in your blog.

The bottom portion of the General tab allows you to enable Comments in your blog entries, allowing visitors to post feedback for your blog posts. To enable blog comments,
simply check the 'Enable' button.

RapidWeaver supports a few different commenting services. Currently Disqus is a free service and can be selected by clicking the 'Provider' button. Once you sign up with Disqus you will need to enter your Disqus 'Site Shortname' (which Disqus provides when signing up).

JS-Kit and Haloscan are legacy commenting systems that RapidWeaver can still use - however, it is important to note that these services now require signing up to paid plans. More information on all the blog commenting services can be found on their respective sites:

• http://disqus.com/
• http://js-kit.com/
• http://haloscan.com/

Categories

Figure 4: Catgeories SetupBy default, categories are enabled in RapidWeaver allowing you to set a category or classification of your individual blog entries. If categories are not desired, you may disable them by unchecking the ‘Enable’ checkbox. If enabled, you may also choose to display the number of blog entries in each category in the sidebar by clicking the ‘Show Post Count’ checkbox.

You can create additional categories for your blog by clicking the (+) button at the bottom of the categories list and typing the name of the new category. To remove a category, click on its name and click the (-) button. You may also arrange the categories in the list by clicking and dragging a category into a new position. At the bottom of the Categories pane, you will find a Separator field. RapidWeaver uses the characters in this field to delineate the various blog entry details such as the date, category, and permalink elements (located below the blog entry’s title in your blog). The default separator is a ‘pipe’ delimiter (‘|’) with a space character before and after it for balance (e.g. ‘ | ‘), but you can use any character you wish.

Tags

Tags could be considered Sub-Categories, describing more accurately a blog post’s content. To enter a tag for a post, simply click in the tab box above the entry, type the Tag you wish to add, and hit Enter. The tag will turn to a ‘Token’ field and be applied to the post if tags are enabled.

RSS

Figure 5: Configuring an RSS feedAlmost every news website and blog allows users to subscribe to their content using a technology called RSS (Really Simple Syndication). RSS readers can help you keep up with all your favourite weblogs by checking their RSS feeds and displaying new items from each of them. NetNewsWire, Vienna and NewsFire are among the many popular news aggregators on the Mac, and Google Reader is a popular choice as an online news reader.

So that RSS news aggregators (including Podcast receivers such as iTunes) can subscribe to your blog page, you must enable RSS feeds for your RapidWeaver-created blog page. You may also configure your blog page so that it generates RSS entries only for the indvidual blog posts that appear on your main blog page, and not for any archived blog entries, by checking the box ‘Generate entries for main page only’.

You may specify how many words from each of your blog entries should be included in your RSS feed (from one to fifty words) by selecting the checkbox labelled ‘Summarise text in RSS Entries’ at the bottom of the pane, and moving the slider left or right as needed. The number of words will be shown to the right of the slider. If your blog entries use summaries, the number of words included in any blog entry’s RSS feed will be less than the length of the blog entry’s summary or the
number of words set here.

Advanced

Date Format

You can customise the way the date and time are shown by selecting the ‘Date Format’ tab in your Blog page’s ‘Setup...’ area.

On this pane, you can specify how the date and time are displayed, including separators. As you make changes to the settings, an example is displayed in the lower portion of the pane. To localize the language to that of the one being used by your Macintosh, click the ‘Localize language’ checkbox.

iTunes

You may create default values for your iTunes tags and any custom RSS channel tags used in your Podcasts. The values entered here will become the default tags for all of your Podcasts, but you may override these values in any Podcast if desired by using the iTunes Tags and the Custom RSS Tags tabs in the Add Podcast pane.

When you click the ‘Podcast’ tab in your blog’s ‘Setup...’ area, two sub-tabs will be visible: ‘iTunes Tags’ and ‘Custom RSS Channel Tags’. The default view is the ‘iTunes Tags’ sub-tab pane.

To set the default iTunes tags to be added to your Podcasts, click the ‘Enable Custom iTunes Tags’ checkbox and edit the fields on the Podcast: iTunes Tags pane. If you wish to add default custom RSS Channel tags to your Podcasts, click the ‘Custom RSS Channel Tags’ sub tab.

Channel

Use the Custom RSS Channel Tags sub-tab to add any tags not addressed using the iTunes Tags sub-pane, or to add any new Channel tags that may be added to iTunes in the future. As a rule, this should be unnecessary, but the ability to add custom RSS Channel tags remains available if needed.

Ping

As blogs have come into widespread use across the Internet, blog referral and tracking services have come into being. Companies like Technorati, Postami, BlogPulse and Google follow blogs and keep track of the most important stories being blogged about at the current time.

You can configure your blog to ‘ping' these blog directory services every time your blog page is updated. To add a service to ping, click the (+) button, type the name of the service and the URL to its ‘ping’ page (the page on the service that accepts pings) and click the ‘Ping the following blog directories’ box. You can also send a ping immediately to any newly-added service by selecting its entry in the list and clicking the ‘Ping Now’ button.

Other

• Movable Type Import

  RapidWeaver allows you to import a Movable Type blog and bring the content into RapidWeaver. Clicking the import button allows you to point to a Movable Type export file and migrate your posts into RapidWeaver.

• Dynamic PHP Sidebar

  If you have got a lot of tags and categories, this will save you plenty of time. By taking advantage of PHP Includes, the sidebar is dynamically added, and there is no need to export each page every time the tag cloud changes. For those with large tag clouds, this will be likely to reduce publishing time dramatically. This advanced feature requires a PHP-compatible host, and does not work on MobileMe due to MobileMe not supporting PHP.