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October 14, 2004

a user guide for reblog 0.9.

For months, people have contributed to the unmediated reBlog by posting to their own blogs or their del.icio.us links. I'd take these posts in through reBlog and add text, images, and reformat links as necessary. Since upgrading to reBlog version 0.9, I've handed over reBlogging duties to a group of eight editors (including myself) who are responsible for reBlogging up to 3-4 posts a week, and hopefully spreading the reblogging love across several people.

Because of this, I've put together a quick "user guide" for reBlog 0.9. It doesn't cover reBlog installation or upgrade, but it does give basic instructions for sorting, editing, and publishing a reBlog.

An incomplete user guide for reBlog 0.9:

The idea of reBlogging is pretty simple:
Find posts of interest from RSS feeds, publish each post to your own blog with a link back to the originating post. You may have to do some formatting changes, add images, or add your own comments along the way.

The way it works is also simple:
Sort through RSS feeds and click "publish" on the posts you like best. This puts them all into a single reBlog rss feed that you then go into Movable Type to import, assign categories, and publish in your blog.

Logging In:
When you install reBlog, you install two components: the reBlog plugin for Movable Type and the ReceSS RSS filtering system. The ReceSS files are the ones you will use primarily to reblog. You can find them in the "recess" directory that you uploaded to your server (unless you decide to rename the directory when installing.) Open a browser and go to this directory: http://mydomain.com/the-directory-you-uploaded-recess-to/

reBlog Control Panel:
After logging in you will be presented with the reBlog control panel separated into two sections. At the top you will see what I call the reBlog Main Menu for viewing new items, adding feeds, and updating the feeds you're already subscribed to. There are a couple of other links up there for viewing your reBlogged RSS feed and getting the feed list as an OPML list but we'll talk about that later.

Underneath the reBlog Main Menu, you'll find a list of all of the rss feeds you're subscribed to, separated into "Feeds with new posts" and "Feeds without new posts."

reBlog Control Panel > Subscribing to Feeds:
If you haven't subscribed to any feeds, go to the reBlog Main Menu and click "add feeds." Here you can add feeds by pasting the URLs of blogs, their feeds, or a list of feeds as an OPML file. A handy tool to have is the "FoF subscribe" bookmarklet just below the reBlog Main Menu. Drag this link up to your browser's bookmark bar. Whenever you come across a blog you'd like to add to the reBlog, click the bookmarklet. It'll take you back to the "add feeds" page and attempt to subscribe to the feed if possible. After you've subscribed to a number of feeds, return to the reBlog Control Panel.

reBlog Control Panel > Updating Feeds:
If there are no items listed under "Feeds with new posts" go to the reBlog Main Menu at the top of the screen and click the "update all" button. This will pull any new posts into the reBlog for you to read through. When it has finished updating feeds, go back to the reBlog Control Panel. You will see a list of new "Feeds with new posts" to read through.

You can read the feeds one at a time by clicking on the red "new" link to the left of each feed or by going to the reBlog Main Menu and clicking "view new items."

reBlogging a post:
There are four actions you can take when looking at a post: publish it, delete it, preview/edit it, ignore it.

publish:
If you like the post and want to reBlog it, click the "publish" radio button. This will send the post to the reBlog rss feed and it will disappear from the list.

preview/edit:
If you like the post but think that it needs editing, click the "preview/edit" radio button. This will take you to a page that will allow you to edit the html of the post, add image links, and add your own comment. (Feature alert: sometimes editing the post before publishing will insert a backslash "\" before your quotations and other special characters upon publishing to the reBlog rss. So check your entries after importing your reBlog posts into Movable Type.)

preview/edit: trimming a post
I will usually trim a post down to about 250 words and create a link back to the originating blog in the form of a "Continued at Originating.Blog" link. I'll snip the post in a way that summarizes the main idea, gives a bit of detail, and ends in a place that will hopefully entice the reader to click through for more.

preview/edit: adding images
If a post does not have an image in the body, I will sometimes go out and do an image search to find an appropriate image for the topic. Once I find an image, I download it, rename it, upload it to my own blog either through FTP or the Movable Type interface, and insert the new img tag in the body of the post. While not necessary, adding images both pretties up your reBlog and allows you to make clever juxtapositions of image and text that readers will appreciate.

If a post already has an image in it, I will usually download that image to my desktop, FTP it up to my own server, and change the code in the post to point to my image instead of the originating image. Serving images from someone else's server without their consent is usually considered bad form, so it's best to copy the image over and have it link back to the originating weblog post. Plus, you never know when that originating image will disappear, so better to have your own copy than have it result in a error 404 later down the line.

preview/edit: adding your comment
If I add a comment to a post, I'll usually put it at the end of the post, in italics, signed, and after a line break to visually separate my thoughts from the original blog post. So if I were adding a comment, the code would look like this:

<br>
<i>(This is my comment. -kc.)</i>

delete:
If you click the "delete" radio button it deletes the post.

Importing your reBlog posts into your blog:
Once you've published a bunch of posts to your reBlog rss feed, go back to the reBlog Control Panel and click on the "rss" link in the reBlog Main Menu. This is your reBlog's RSS feed. Copy the URL to your clipboard and log in to your Movable Type installation.

Once you're logged in to Movable Type, go to the "Entries" page for your blog. Scroll to the bottom of the page. If you've installed the reBlog plugin correctly, you should see a link under "Plugin Actions:" named "Configure your Reblog Source RSS Feed." Click on this link and paste in the URL to your reBlog's RSS feed. Click submit. Return to your "Entries" page. You should find a new link under "Plugin Actions:" named "Import Entries from your Reblog Source RSS Feed." Click on this link. It will import any new entries from your reBlog RSS into Movable Type.

When it is finished, return again to the blog "Entries" page. Your reblogged posts will have been imported into your blog and should show up on your main index page. You may want to go into each entry and set the category for each post.

I'm fairly certain that I've forgotten a bunch of stuff. If you're a reblogger and you've spotted something I've forgotten, leave it as a comment and I'll add it to the post.

For more on The Art of the reBlog check out:
Tom Moody's reBlogging Philosophy.
Tim Shey's thoughts on reBlogging.
Other ideas spawned by tim Shey's thoughts (kottke.org).
Adam Greenfield on the problem of resyndication in the reBlog.
Tom Moody's response to Adam Greenfield (plus some gay furry porn).

Posted by yatta at October 14, 2004 12:01 AM

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Comments

Posted by: Ray at March 17, 2005 2:55 PM