One of the nice things about upgrading to a newer version of Drupal is the far more powerful web-based editor. However some of you still like to use blogging software like Open Live Writer, the successor to Windows Live Writer.

Once you've installed it you can set up the blog. Some common trip-ups (these have changed from the old site):

1. Use your MGoBlog login information when prompted.
2. Do not use "mgoblog.com" as the blog address. Use "https://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 “https://mgoblog.com/xmlrpc”

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 us 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.

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

Downloading the Theme

You want your Open Live Writer to look like the posts you’re writing, but for reasons beyond my understanding the standard method doesn’t work (it also posts an annoying temporary article that will end up in feeds if we don’t catch it quickly).

Instead there’s a simple PC fix using your registry editor.

1. Run regedit.exe as administrator
2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\OpenLiveWriter\Weblogs\[somelongnumberandtextstring]
3. Inside that there is a key called "HomepageUrl" that has defaulted to “http://mgoblog.com/users/username”. Change that to simply https://mgoblog.com
4. Back in Open Live Writer go to the “Blog Account” tab and click “Update theme.”

Pictures

OLW 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. You no longer have to set to FTP to upload images, either.

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.