You see your blog in the browser. You want to add to or
edit it so... You go to some other app or site to do your blogging.
Does this make sense? No. You should be able to edit and save
standards compliant XHTML right there, in your browser, on
your blog page, WYSIWYG style. No fuss, no muss, no fooling
around. Check out our DEMO or our screenshots to see how it works.
That's really cool! How do I set this
up?
Internet Explorer 6 has fabulous XML and text
editing capabilities that are grossly underutilized by most
people. The Adminimizer Toolbar makes it easy for you to take
advantage of them when updating your Blogger, Radio Userland, or Movable Type blog. All you
need to do is install the Toolbar in your browser, make some easy
modifications to your blog template, and copy an XML file onto your
site. You'll be ready to edit in no time!
Blogger Setup Instructions: (Radio Instructions | Movable Type Instructions)
- Install the Toolbar.
You should make sure you've upgraded to IE6 before you do
this. You'll have to close your browser after you do this (some
folks with older Windows OS's may have to reboot) so make sure you
can get back here.
- Modify your Blogger template. (or if you don't want to
mess with this try these options.) You need
to add these two lines just AFTER the body tag (they won't work in
the head tag):
<script
id="AdminimizerScripts"></script>
<xml id="AdminimizerToolbar"
src="blogSettings.xml"></xml>
You need to put this tag where you want to to type in your
new blog entry. Make sure that this is OUTSIDE
the <Blogger></Blogger> tags:
<div
id="editSpace_new" style="width:95%"></div>
And you need to replace your <$BlogItemBody$> tag with
this:
<div
id="editSpace_<$BlogItemNumber$>">
<$BlogItemBody$></div>
and we'd appreciate it if you would place this button somewhere on
your page:
<a
href="http://www.aspmodules.com/at/blogInfo.asp"> <img src=
http://www.aspmodules.com/images/adm_under_the_hood.gif
border="0"></a>
(This is optional. it will place this image: 
on your page and help us to improve our ranking
at Google. [Thanks!])
Make sure to publish your blog after you make
these changes [HELP!] .
- Finally, you need to create a XML file which will tell the
toolbar what it needs to know to update your blog. Just input your
Blog ID number:
Choose "Save the file to disk" and then FTP it onto your blog
site in the same directory as the blog page you want to edit [Hosting on
blog*spot? HELP!] .
That's it! You're ready to blog. Just browse to your blog, press
the 
to
enable editing. Green boxes will appear around everything you
can edit on the page (and an empty green box should appear where
you put the "new" span tag for new blog entries). When
you are done press "Save". It will ask you for your blogger
password and it'll save it directly back to blogger.com via the Blogger
API!
NOTE 1: The current version of the
toolbar now treats special characters correctly when used in
English. If you're use a different language go into the
blogSettings.xml file and change the <CharEncoding> node to
"raw" (no quotes) and make sure you are defining the encoding of
the page by placing this meta tag inbetween your <head>
tags:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
We've had feedback that this works in Finnish, but
we haven't fully tested this in other languages yet. So, if
you're blog is not in English be careful, and
please let us know
what you find!.
NOTE 2: The toolbar produces XHTML 1.0
transitional compliant HTML (thanks to HTML Tidy) but you'll need
to play some tricks to make your page fully compliant. If
you're an XHTML junkie click
here to learn how to make your toolbar pages completely
compliant.
NOTE 3: We've started a discussion
group (Started on 4/2/02 so there aren't many members yet!).
Please join and share your experiences!
Is this Freeware, Open Source, or
what?
It's free for personal blog use, but it's not
open source and it's not freeware. Here's our evil plan for world
domination: Get bloggers using it, once they realize how great
it is they'll want to use it at work in other projects. Their
employers will pay us. We'll be happy, the bloggers will be happy
and their employers will be happy. Bwahahahaha.
Just FYI, the Toolbar is not scumware, adware,
spyware or any other type of ickyware. It doesn't call home or
anything like that, ever.
What other tricks can I do with the
Toolbar?
As you may have noticed in the XML file, the Toolbar is
pretty powerful. It's really meant to be used as a tool to
maintain website content, but it turns out it works great for
Blogs, too. Most of its functionality is explained
in detail on the settings
documentation page, but there are a few things that you might
be interested in:
Image Tool: By default the ImageEditor is
turned off because it requires a custom web page on the
server. If you use a Microsoft server you can use this asp file. To use it you'll
need to change the ImageWebFolder variable in ImageEditor.asp and
you'll need to change the
<PageVariables><ImageEditor><Enabled> node of
blogSettings.xml to "True". If you're on a different type of server
you'll have to build your own ImageEditor file. Basically, all you
need to do is list out IMG tags for all the images
in your image directory. You can then drag them from
the ImageEditor into any editable area on
your Blog.
Tools other than Blogger: The Toolbar
implements the blogger.newPost and blogger.editPost methods of the
Blogger API. Several other services also use this interface and the
Toolbar may work with them as well. We know it works with Radio Userland, but we haven't tried
it with other services. If you try it let us know how it
works!
Coming Soon:
Support for more functions via the metaWebLog
API.
documentation
Use with BLOGGER!
