How To Post To MGoBlog

One of the downsides to Drupal is the lack of an effective web-based editor. If you want you can construct posts on the web, but they'll be limited like diary posts: all HTML is strictly roll-your-own.

You're sane (or dex) so you want something else. That thing is Windows Live Writer. (Side note: WLW is awesome and you should use it on your own blogs unless you're a Mac/Linux person, in which case Microsoft would like you to FOAD.) Download it at that link. You'll be asked to install a suite of stuff called Windows Live; all you need is the writer.

Once you've installed it follow the instructions for Drupal installation. A couple common tripups:

  1. Use your MGoBlog login information when prompted.
  2. Do not use "mgoblog.com" as the blog address. Use "http://mgoblog.com/node/add"
  3. Make sure the service you pick is "Moveable Type API," not plain "Moveable Type"
  4. The remote posting url is "http://mgoblog.com/xmlrpc.php"

At this point you'll be given a choice of different things to classify your posts as. If you are a contributor this will be "Moderated Story," which publishes your post to the site but does not front-page it. This allows me to do a proofreading/editing run before it goes live. If you are a trusted user (>500 mgopoints), this will be a diary—conveniently the only choice you're given.

In certain situations (like an MGoVacation) you'll be posting directly to the front page and living and dying with the results. In that case you'll want to pick "Story." Unfortunately there's no good way to easily swap between the two; if you want to have both you'll have to set up two entirely different "blogs" that are identical in all ways except which thing you classify the post as.

At this point you'll be able to post stuff to the blog with one major exception.

Caveat: you should go into the Tools/Options/Editing pane and turn "smart quotes" off. Otherwise headlines with quotes and—more importantly—apostrophes break.

war-damn-eagle

Pictures

(WLW has hugely powerful picture editing. The picture at right was cropped, resized, tilted, given a fancy polaroid border, watermarked, and given a sepia tone in 30 seconds without leaving the application.)

To set up picture upload there's one more step.

Click "blogs" on the command menu and select "edit blog settings"

Click the "pictures" tab. There will be a radio button; select the FTP server option and click the "configure FTP server" button.

in this dialog:

1) use mgoblog.com as the hostname

2) use "mgotemp" as the username

3) use "mG0bLog!" as the password; the 0 in the password is a zero.

4) use "/" as the "publish pictures to this folder" entry

5) use "http://mgoblog.com/sites/mgoblog.com/files/images" as the URL field

If you can successfully save and close the dialog you've set it up right. At this point you can post pictures. (Weirdly, Ctrl+L is the picture hotkey and Ctrl+K is the link one.)

Categories

Click "Set categories" right above the status bar and you'll get a dialog; start typing in your tag and it'll narrow down the existing categories. If there isn't a tag you can create one by using the "add tag" button.

What To Tag

All tags should be wholly lower case.

  1. There should be a post type. Liveblog, column-type thing, analysis, actual news, actual research, player profile, etc. If there's already something extant use it.
  2. Any person who's discussed in the piece, within reason. Same thing with teams, which should be just the school name, no nicknames.
  3. Random joke stuff is fine.
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