When you purchase RapidBlog you will get the registration code (also sometimes called serial number) both on the final web page of the purchase screen as well as in a confirmation email.

To enter it simply go to the Page Inspector for a RapidBlog page (shift-cmd-i) and click on the 'wrench' icon to get to the plugin settings. From there you can select the registration tab.

The most important tip I can give is to save your work. This is especially important after you 'publish' as the act of publishing may alter the RapidBlog (say there was a entry edited remotely, after a publish it will sync to your RapidWeaver file)

So even though RW may not indicate the need to change anything hid cmd-s after you publish to make sure you save all synced changes.

There are a ton of options in RapidBlog to let you customize it to your hears content. All of the options should have tool-tips (hover the mouse for a few seconds over the item) to get help

Preview mode also works properly and should give you a accurate view of your final pages.

In addition to the options without RapidBlog there are also options with Blogger that might be worth considering changing. While none of these have to be change it's probably worth considering.


First make sure the Title makes sense. This is what will show up in the RSS feed title. Also it's probably a good idea to have a reasonable description. If you dont plan on using the Blogger front end at all you may consider turning off "Add blog to our listings" to avoid getting random visitors or spam.

Finally the post editor (WYSIWG) Compose Mode. Blogger has a really slick editor, that, unfortunately can break valid HTML code. For instance as of this writing it will break youtube videos and doesn't, in general, allow custom javascript. If your needs are simple editing then you can keep it on but you may find if you are doing fancy stuff that your life is easier just turning it off.





Also see "RapidBlog is entering extra spaces' in this FAQ for information about controlling blogger auto-inserting extra spaces between sentences.

Your web host hold the pictures, theme files and any other regular RW pages (e.g. style text, blocks pages, etc.)

Additionally, It will also hold the instruction (in PHP) for how to get the right text from blogspot.

Blogspot.com just holds the text of the post.

So when someone goes to your web site the posts are downloaded from blogspot but the images and theme files are loaded from your web host.

When you publish rapidblog does two things.

1. It will sync with blogger any posts (so any posts you added or modified remotely get added to RW, and any new or modified RW posts get pushed to blogger)
2. It will upload all of the 'other' files it needs (include pictures, assets, supporting javascript, etc.)

From your point of view you should be able to treat rapidblog no different than the built in RW blog and ignore that fact that it actually uses the blogger engine (except, of course, for the fact that if you go online and add a post it will magically show up even though your mac is maybe thousands of miles away)

No, unfortunately RapidBlog requires php which .mac does not support.

To have just a comment window show up (not the rest of the post) in the popup window make sure you go select the "Pop up window" for comment form placement in the commeting section of blogspot.com (you do this online at blogspot -- not in rapidblog)

Starting with release 1.1 of RapidBlog there is support for both Blogger style comments and HaloScan. What you pick is somewhat a matter of personal preference but here are a few things to consider

Haloscan let's you theme the comment page to your liking and also offers a nice popup window that currently doesn't work with Blogger. On the other hand Blogger comments are integraetd into the blogspot engine so when you are editing posts online you can see all of the associated comments.

Ultimately it's a personal choice, fortunately with RapidBlog you can choose which one works bets for you.

Yes -- Select the 'JS-Kit' comment type from the setup menu.

If you have the 'ajax' feature turned on (in settings under 'general' for Archives & Categories) try turning it off -- This feature doesn't work for every theme.

If you get the following on a RapidBlog page


Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in xxx on line 1


Where 'xxx' refers to a path on your system then you probably have 'Use XML Declaration' enabled in the page inspector. It's located in different places for RW3.5 and RW3.6



Simple turn it off to make this error go away

The way RapidBlog is currently implemented it queries the blogger service every time a page view is requested. This can result in a .25 to 1 second delay in viewing pages. The best way to control how fast pages come up is to limit the number of pages to a reasonable number (say less than 10). The other good way to control the time it takes to bring up is to not enable 'show number of comments'

RapidBlog supports multiple authors using the blogger author feature. To use it invite your friend to your blog. It is strongly recommended that you make all authors 'admin' otherwise RapidBlog gets very, very confused if you try to edit each others post.

For the most part RapidBlog should sychronize things quite nicely but there are situations (like if you sync and don't save) where it's possible duplicate entries can show up.

RapidBlog includes an automatic process to find & delete duplicates, simply arrange the posts with duplicates in adjacent entries and your most desirable version on top and go to the 'setup' menu and select 'delete duplicates'. RapidBlog will mark for deletion any posts that It thinks are duplicates.

When you hit the 'sync' button in the setup menu it does a 'deep sync' -- This means that it pulls ALL of your posts from blogger and compares them to the post's in RW. If you find that somehow you are out of sync then this will fix that.

What the sync button doesn't do it push up any graphics so if you have a post you've written that includes a picture the sync will push it onto blogger but the graphics won't be uploaded to your server so it'll be a dead link

In general you shouldn't have to use the sync button in the setup menu.

If you don't see any posts another possibility is that your web host does not allow 'external access' by PHP scripts. The way RapidBlogger works in contacts blogger to get your most recent posts. If your host prevents that access then RapidBlogger won't work.

This is a fairly rare occurrence and usually only happens with 'free' type accounts.

To test if this is a problem or not download this file:


php_external_test

Publish it to your web host and then visit the page. To see what a 'working' version is you can visit my working version here to see what it should look like. If yours doesn't display anything after the initial text then you probably can't access the internet from your web host.

Check your settings in blogspot.com. Specifically in the settings -> site feed area.

Blog feeds should be set to full and unless you really know what you are doing leave the other two blank (the other two can be used for things like feedburner but it can cause a lot of problems if you input them wrong)

If you get a bunch of 'code' and/or it downloads a file when you view the Rapidblog it's possible your web host doesn't support PHP. Most web hosts do support PHP but a few (very low cost version and things like .mac) do not. A quick way to test to see is to try using the 'contact' page -- if that does the same thing it usually points to a PHP problem.

In general you can go into blogger.coma and muck around with settings. There are a few, however, that will break rapidblog. Specifically:


Site Feed -> Allow feed needs to be kept at 'full'

Don't use custom domains. Publish to blogspot.com

If you get a lot of undefined errors like this

Notice: Undefined variable: HTTP_REFERER in (some path) on line 186
Notice: Undefined index: SCRIPT_URI in (some path)on line 187

The likely cause is your web host has set default PHP warning level too high. To fix it put the following in the 'page prefix' section of the page

<?PHP
error_reporting(E_ERROR);
?>

If you get a bunch of garbage characters make sure you are running RapidWeaver 3.5.1 build 264

The build number is really important. Many people are running build 263 which has a known problem with garbage characters occasionally occurring.

If you get a 404 or "Resource not Found" error the problem appears to be that you have posted too many posts to Blogger. I'm working on a long term fix but here are a few short term suggestions.



1) Go to https://www.google.com/accounts/DisplayUnlockCaptcha?service=blogger And fill out the captcha request.
2) Wait 30 minutes or so
3) Try again.

If that doesn't work then go to the web client at http://www.blogger.com and try to add a post via the web interface. You should be asked for a 'captcha' during the post (which is a random series of numbers and letters). Once you add the post with the captcha wait another 30 minutes and try the post via web -- As long as the captcha is present RapidBlog (or any 3rd party blogger tool) won't work.


If it's STILL not working then you'll need to ask blogger to reset your account and increase your limit. you can do that by going to

http://www.blogger.com/problem.g

Tell them the account is captcha locked and ask them to raise your limit. This usually only takes a day or so.

No:

gdoc/gtable/gform require the use of PHP code execution on the server. For security reasons RapidBlog will not execute remote PHP code and so those commands won't work.

Blogger let's you use Custom Domains -- As of release 1.79 of RapidBlog you can chose a custom domain by entering the full url to it in the setup menu (including the slash)

So for instance if you have a custom domain set up with blogger for http://mydomain.com you would enter "http://mydomain.com/" in the blogger setup (just above your username & password)

Put the following snippet in the 'interblog' setting. Make sure you have 'evaluate PHP code' turned on and you should get a nice addthis button. Make sure you mark the text as 'ignore formatting' (cmd-.) to avoid RapidWeaver from inserting bits of html (that's what the light pink background means)



And in the "Footer" section add this bit of javascript

Similar to JS-Kit comments you can insert JS-Kit ratings.

In the interblog text insert the following:



and make sure to enable 'Evaluate PHP Code' as well as set the posts to show up every '1'. You might also want to mark the code as unformatted (cmd-.) It should look like this:




To the footer add the following



Which should look like this:



Please note that JS-Kit comments & Ratings will look funny (or not work at all) until you publish so don't depend on preview to check that they are working.

Blogging via e-mail is super easy using Bloggers 'Mail-to-Blogger' address.

From the web go to settings -> Email and create a 'secret' email address. Whenever you send an email to this address it will get posted

To create custom summaries from the blogger (web) interface you need to add a tiny bit of custom html. If you use summary view RapidBlog will look for an element wrapped in



You can easily add this by editing the HTML for your post and putting the code around the area you want as a summary.

By default Blogger inserts pictures that 'float' -- This means that they will tend to flow content to one side which will cause them to overlap multiple posts. Some themes handle this fine but some don't.

Fortunately there is a simple fix. Adding the following custom CSS to your RapidBlog page -- It tells the page that when you get to comments make sure that any 'floating' elements are clear (e.g. put the comments below the pictures)


                .blog-entry-comments {
                 clear: both;
                }

If you want to export your site locally and preview it you need to view it through the mac built in web server. There are a few steps but it actually works great and is a nice way to preview your site without uploading the entire thing to a server.

First turn on PHP support in the supplied apache web server.  A good resource for this is

http://the.taoofmac.com/space/HOWTO/Enable PHP on Mac OS X




Then you will need to make sure personal web sharing is enabled.  Now you can just export to your 'Sites' directory and then view it by going to http://localhost/~short_user_name/exported_path

Where short_user_name is your short username and exported_path is the directory you exported.

That little "Lock" icon means the post was last edited by Blogger. If you edit it within RapidBlog you may loose formatting. You can have RapidBlog automatically warn you before editing these post by selecting that option in the setup menu

Simple: Use the 'interblog' feature found in the "Header/Footer' tab

Just copy the google adsense code into the interblog -- Take care to delete the starting 'HTML comment' string otherwise it won't work

RapidBlog requires that your blog be 'public' so that it can display it. There is a way, however, to provide limited access. It's important to note that anyone who is motivated enough could probably figure out a way to see it but it makes it unlikely that people will fine it.

First you need to change your blogger template. You can go here to see how to change it to a redirect page (or just leave out the redirect and it becomes a dead link)

Then put your blog behind a Lockdown page and give your friends a username and password.

At this point if they go to the blogger page they get either a blank page or get redirected to your password protected page. What's important to realize is that the 'feed' of the blog is still available. It's not advertised anywhere but it's available and someone who was really motivated could possibly figure out how to view the posts -- it's not terribly easy but it is possible.

RapidBlog includes a fairly complete post editor but if you are away from your mac there are a few options



1) You can use the Blogger web interface. For fairly basic stuff it works ok.
2) You can set up a 'secret' email address. Again for basic stuff this is OK
3) You can use a external blog editor.

For #3 I personally recommend MarsEdit. It's a clean, lightweight solution for editing your posts that works great with RapidBlog