Previously, I wrote a brief post about BlogDesk, a Windows desktop app that lets you publish to your site without setting foot inside your blog/CMS’s admin section. BlogDesk works for WordPress, ExpressionEngine, Drupal, Movable Type and Serendipity.

Over the next 2 weeks, I’ll be showing you how to use BlogDesk to publish to WordPress and ExpressionEngine.

This week, in part 1, we’re going to look at setting up BlogDesk and publishing a post to WordPress 2.7 (beta 3).

BlogDesk Installation & WordPress Blog

  1. First, make sure you have a WordPress blog set up and configured. Even though this tutorial uses WordPress 2.7, any version of WordPress 2.3 and up will work the same way.
  2. Although not required, it would be good to set up some categories on your blog if you haven’t already
  3. Next, download BlogDesk and install it on your computer (Windows 98, NT, 2000, ME, XP, Vista)

Set Up a Connection to Your Blog

  1. Run BlogDesk and you will see the main application screen—this is where you will write, save and publish your posts. First, though, we have to set up the connection to your WordPress site.
  2. Go to File>Manage Blogs
  3. Click New to start the Blog Wizard. The Wizard will guide you through setting up the connection between BlogDesk and WordPress.
  4. Enter the name of your blog on the next screen. Any name will do—it’s just to help you identify your site within BlogDesk.
  5. On the next screen, you will enter the address of your blog. You don’t have to put http:// or a trailing /—BlogDesk will add them when you click Next if you leave them out.
  6. Next, choose your blogging platform. In our case, we will choose the 1st WordPress option since the version is above 2.2.
  7. BlogDesk will try to guess the location of your xmlrpc.php file. The default should be fine unless you’ve specifically changed your WordPress settings.
  8. WordPress (2.6 and up) does not enable XML-RPC by default, so now is a good time to enable it if you have not already. You will need to log into your WordPress control panel and go to Settings>Writing. Under Remote Publishing, check the box next to Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols and save the settings.
  9. Back in BlogDesk, click the Next button and enter your WordPress login information
  10. The next screen is for your Blog-ID. This establishes a connection to your blog. If you’ve enabled XML-RPC in WordPress, click Get Blog-ID. You should get a success message. Click OK and go to the next screen.
  11. If you have categories set up in WordPress already, the Get Categories button will import the list into BlogDesk. If you have not created any categories yet, you can always import your categories later.
  12. The next screen tests to make sure you can upload images through WordPress (as opposed to using FTP). Test Upload will upload a small badge image. If this doesn’t work, you may have to set up an FTP connection instead later.
  13. Click Next and then Finish to finish and exit the wizard.

Now BlogDesk is mostly set up. There are a few more things, however, we can check before we write our first post.

Check Blog Properties

  1. In the Manage Blogs window, you will see your newly added blog. With the blog selected, click Properties.
  2. The Blog tab lets you see your blog’s details. Make sure your Encoding matches what’s used on your site. For us, we’re going to keep it at UTF-8.
  3. If you could not upload files directly (step 12 above), the FTP & Upload tab lets you add an FTP account. If you had no issues uploading the test image, don’t worry about this.
  4. In the Categories tab, Get Categories From the Server will update the list of categories if you’ve added or deleted any categories in WordPress. If you want new posts to belong to one or more categories by default, tick the appropriate boxes.
  5. In the Publish tab, tick the boxes next to the fields that you want to check for content when publishing posts (think required fields in forms)
  6. If you selected UTF-8 encoding, make sure Encode Special Characters in HTML is unchecked
  7. Click OK to save your settings and exit the Properties window
  8. Click Close to close the Manage Blogs window

Now you should see your blog’s name and a list of categories in the upper right panel on the main program screen. Now let’s write a post for our blog.

Write a Post

The rest is pretty self-explanatory, but here are some quick tips:

  • Use the main window to write your post
  • To switch to HTML code editing, go to View>Source
  • The Extras menu lets you add/edit tags and custom fields, password posts and edit program settings
  • The Save button saves a draft of your post to your harddrive for later editing
  • By default, the Publish button will publish your post automatically. If you want to just upload the post as a draft to WordPress, untick the checkbox next to Publish after Upload, in the right sidebar.
  • You can see your brand new post if you log into WordPress. You can edit the post from the WordPress control panel after you publish it, just like any other post.

Editing WordPress Posts in BlogDesk

In BlogDesk, you can also edit posts that have already been published, whether or not they were written originally in BlogDesk.

  1. In BlogDesk, go to File>Edit Posts Already Published (logical enough)
  2. In the Edit Posts window, select the blog you want to edit from the drop-down menu at the top
  3. Choose how many posts you want displayed, then click Show
  4. Select the post you want to edit and click Edit
  5. Once you have made your changes, clicking the Publish button will save the edited post back onto your site

Useful Tool

BlogDesk looks like a solid program for Windows users or for those who have clients that use Windows. With BlogDesk, you don’t have to give your clients access to WordPress or any other blog/CMS’s control panel.

This could be great for times when you need to write a post, but don’t have access to an internet connection. It can also be used to keep local backup copies of your posts.

More BlogDesk Tutorials

Read Part 2—BlogDesk: Publishing to ExpressionEngine.

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