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Being one who always tries to be upfront, this guide/review is for the Apple users here. This guide/review is going to show you how to blog from your iPhone on the new 2.0 firmware to your new (if this is your first experience with RapidWeaver) or current RapidWeaver blog.

Applications/services you're going to either need to have already and/or purchase for this guide:

A place to host your site, I use GoDaddy's economy hosting – $4.29/2 Months, or cheaper if you prepay

RapidWeaver– $59

RapidBlog– $14.95, which is plugin we're going to make our blog with

Blogger– FREE, something on here has gotta be free right?

and last, but not least, the iPhone App – LifeCast – FREE, smell that sweet, sweet free app goodness? Mhmm.

First things first, we're going to need someplace to host that infinitely awesome blog of yours. Any host will do as long as it supports remote PHP access, which is what RapidBlog uses to gather your mobile/blogger post. I wont go into detail on hosting, but I feel GoDaddy's has been pretty good to me and is certainly affordable.

Moving right along – for those of you out there who saw this guide/review and thought, "What is that there new fangled RapidWeaver thangy," How'd you manage to get online and have an iPhone? Anyway, for those a little more in the know, but still scratching their heads, RapidWeaver is very powerful and customizable, due to the available SDK,WYSIWYG editor.

You may wonder why I, and thousands of other Mac users use RapidWeaver for our websites and blogs – as far as blogs are concerned there are hundreds of different blogging services out there in the series of tubes we lovingly call the internet. I, personally don't care for most of them, as I'm sure many of you out there don't as well. About a year ago MacUpdate ran special for a bundle that included RapidWeaver, the day I bought it is the day I found exactly what I was looking for – simple, powerful, customizable, and, of course, beautiful in the way only Mac apps can be.

After you've purchased and installed RapidWeaver, head over to RapidBlog and purchase and install it. The .dmg should pop up, if not go ahead and navigate to your download directory and open that puppy up. Double click on the RapidBlog.rwplugin file.

This will open up [URL="http://www.realmacsoftware.com"]RapidWeaver[/URL], install itself and then tell you if you're planning on using the plugin to quit the application, go ahead and do that and leave it alone for now.

Head over to [URL="http://www.blogger.com"]Blogger[/URL] and set yourself up a blog. My blog's name and url are CollegeLifeChicago.com. Being the lame man I am, the best name I could come up for my blog is, you guessed it, MobileCollegeLifeChicago. Click Continue.

Don't do anything here Fancy Pants, leave it alone and hit the continue button.

From the Dashboard, click on Settings, Layout, Edit HTML

Then click inside the edit area and then hit command f, search for "</head".

Paste in the line directly above it "<meta content='0;url=[FULL URL TO YOUR SITE HERE]' http-equiv='refresh'/>" Obviously you should replace the placeholder FULL URL TO YOUR SITE HERE with your URL and not include the quotes (these instructions are paraphrased from the Loghound RapidBlog FAQ).

When this is done, do the obvious and save the template. You can go ahead and close that browser window if you want.

Now here is where the fun begins. Launch RapidWeaver.

This is what your screen should look like, minus the first time splash/welcome page. If/when you get that, close it and get on with things, it'll come back up again unless you tell it not to.

Go ahead and click that plus sign in the bottom left corner, this is the button the creates a new page for your site. Since you've been following this tutorial to the t, you've already installed RapidBlog, it hiding in alphabetical order (it's near the bottom).

See

A new icon has popped up underneath the WEBPAGES tab on the left. Rename that, by double clicking on it, to the title of your blog – you don't want your blog having "untitled page" everywhere do you?

RapidWeaver comes with some awesome themes right out of the box, or .dmg as it were. Most are very customizable, and, honestly, the best way to check them out is just to tinker around with it. Don't be afraid of pressing buttons are changing things, you can always change them back. If none of those turns out to be something you like, well, google for some. A lot of the 3rd party themes will cost you a few dollars, but if you know your way around a CSS editor, feel free to make your own. If you're already thinking about that, a link to their creation and SDKs can be found here

After you've got your theme picked out for your Fortress of Rockitude blog (or whatever you're calling it), in the top right corner there is an icon, the big i with Page Info underneath it. Click on that.

In this window you can change all of he guts of your blog (or website if you wind up making an entire site later on). To keep things quick, if that is still an option in this lengthy guide, lets just skip that and go straight for the icon at the top right corner, the Page button.

This will invoke all of the options specific to RapidBlog. Click on Registration and put in your code. Then from the Blogger Acct tab fill in your Blogger account information.

This is the point where current and new RapidWeaver users are going to split. If you already have a RapidWeaver blog and would like to save all of your posts and still have them be online then go read the next paragraph, Preserving Old Posts, if you are new to RapidWeaver, or don't care about all of those posts you spent hours slaving over, then skip it and go on.

Preserving Old Posts: If you already have a blog set up with RapidWeaver and would like to have all of your posts (photos, videos, and text) included in your new iPhone ready blog, we're going to need to import them. It is a really straight forward process click on import, read the warning, click on the blog you'd like to import if it isn't already selected in the drop down window and click import.

Once you've imported all of your posts we need to make a decision. We can either delete your original RapidWeaver Blog from your site, or, and this is what I have done for a safety net as there is no export of blogposts from RapidBlog, leave the original blog. I assume you're capable of deleting things, so to cover my preference were going to need to right click on the new RapidBlog page and tell RapidWeaver that this is now the sites homepage.

Then right click on the original Rapid Weaver Blog and click on the top option – Show Page Inspector, and then from the General tab uncheck Enabled.

EVERYBODY JOIN BACK IN THE FUN HERE: If you're coming over from Blogger to this on computer client then you can either hit the manually sync button or just wait until we publish this blog here in a minute. Write yourself a post, enjoy it. Come back to this guide when you're done.

Alright. You're back – lets go ahead and publish your first post from your new blog. Click on the Publish button at the top right.

If you haven't done so already RapidWeaver is going to prompt you to save your blog. Do the obvious and save it. Now were going to need to put in all of your server information. DO NOT DO NOT DO NOT!!!! put "ftp.YourURL.com" this only leads to many frustrating minutes of trying to figure out why your site wont publish, instead just type in YourURL.com. Next fill in your username and password (and directory if necessary) and then click on Publish.

Okay now that we have everything up on the server we can get on the AppStore and download our blogging app – LifeCast. You can either click on it here and download it from iTunes on your computer or navigate to this guide on your phone and be taken to it via the MobileAppStore.

Once you've got the app installed we're going to need to set it up to use your Blogger account. Go ahead and tap the Post Events to A Blog button and then select Blogger from the Blog Type Menu. Fill out the rest of the info on the page now. For some reason this release doesn't play nice when configuring and if you go to the Blog type menu it will erase what your input. I've alerted the developer of the issue and hopefully it will get resolved in the next release.

Hit the familiar symbol at the bottom right to create a new post. Make your post and then hit done.

If you'd like to geo-tag your post hit the other familiar looking symbol in the center of the bottom bar, then the final familiar looking symbol to publish your post.

My personal thoughts on LifeCast is, as many applications at the AppStore are, full of potential, but it leaves some things to be desired. At this point one still can't post pictures to their Blogger account, as well as a few other things such as not being able to delete or "draft" posts (although you can save them in LifeCast they're just not editable online or in RapidWeaver. Overall I think this is a great, relatively easy way to blog while you're on the go to one of the most powerful blogging engines around.

There is another iPhone app you could do this with called CellSpin, but you have to create an account on their website, give them authorization to get into your Blogger account, and then set it all up on the phone. It is a little bit more feature advanced at this point but considering the extra work and whatnot to go along with it, I've decided not to use it. If you'd like to use it you can follow all of the same steps except use CellSpin instead of LifeCast.

If RapidWeaver out of the .dmg isn't quite it for you I would highly recommend poking around their site's Add-ons page. They link to hundreds of different plugins made with their SDK that are absolutely phenominal – Blocks to name one of my personal favorites – and even themes.

UPDATE: LifeCast has just been updated. There are several other improvements, but the biggest one solves my major complaint about the application – you can now post photos to a blogger account, which of course means we can post photos to our mobile RapidWeaver accounts!