KDE – Blog from KOrganizer HOWTO
September 27, 2008 @ 01:14
Blog from KOrganizer? What kind of madness is this? Apparently some crazy (but yet incredibly good looking) fool decided to give you the ability to post journals from KOrganizer to your blog. Let’s learn how to do it!
Firstly open KOrganizer.
When it has opened right-click anywhere in the “Calendars” area in the bottom-left (marked with the red ellipse) and select “Add…” from the drop-down menu that appears.
Select “Journal in a blog” (marked with a red ellipse) from the “Resource Configuration” dialog.
Fill in the “Resource Configuration” dialog.
- Name: Choose a descriptive name for your resource, this is how KOrganizer will describe it to you in future. KOrganizer won’t reference this resource as being a blog again so you may want to choose something suffixed with “blog“.
- XML-RPC URL: This depends on your blog but for WordPress and Drupal this is the main URL followed by “/xmlrpc.php“, for Livejournal it is “http://www.livejournal.com/interface/blogger” and for Blogger it is “http://www.blogger.com/feeds/$YOUR_USER_ID/blogs“. For other blogs, consult their documentation or ask me for help and I’ll do my best to work it out.
- Username: This is the username you use to login and make blog posts.
Password: This is the password you use to login with the above username and make blog posts. - API: Use “(WordPress, Drupal <5.6 workarounds)” if you use either of those blogs. Otherwise it is MovableType for Drupal, Google Blogger Data for Blogger and Blogger for LiveJournal. The LiveJournal API is unlikely to work with LiveJournal as it isn’t yet complete. If you wish to implement the LiveJournal full API rather than using legacy Blogger one then please contact me.
- Blog: When you have chosen an API this list will be automatically populated using items from the server. If there is only one entry, it will be greyed out but the entry’s text shown and selected. If there are more than one (e.g. Drupal has one for pages and one for posts) they will be selectable. If there is nothing new displayed then one or more of your XML-RPC/username/password/API are probably incorrect.
- Posts to download: This chooses how many posts the API will download and sync. If you, like me, have made hundreds of posts then you probably want to keep this number reasonably low.
- Automatic Reload: This defines how often KOrganizer will download new blog posts from the server without notification.
- Automatic Save: This defines when KOrganizer will upload new blog posts to the server without notification. You probably don’t want to have this set to “On every change” unless you want it to be uploaded as soon as you hit “Save” in the next view.
You should now see your new blog resource displayed in the bottom-left corner (marked with the red ellipse). Let’s try making a new blog post. Activate the journal view by clicking the journal button (marked with the green ellipse).
We are now in the journal view and you can see on the left-hand pane that KOrganizer has successfully downloaded some of my blog posts. If we want to create a new one then click on the add journal button (marked with the red ellipse).
Fill in the “Edit Journal Entry” dialog.
- Title: You probably want to change the title of the blog post from the default.
- Date/Time: On most blogs selecting the date/time to somewhere in the future means the blog won’t publicly appear until then.
- Content: Write something about how I am awesome, like the pictured example.The rich-text should be displayed on your blog correctly (albeit with slightly nasty HTML).
- Select Categories: This list should have been populated with the ones from your blog and from the KOrganizer defaults. Sadly, I can’t seem to remove the latter and selecting them will do nothing unless they have been created on your blog.
When you click “OK” you may be prompted which resource you wish to save to. Select the resource we just created (marked with the red ellipse).
If you chose “on every change” for “Automatic Save” in the “Resource Configuration” dialog then your post has probably whizzed its way off to your blog already. If not, you can manually save it by right-clicking on your resource (marked with the red ellipse) and selecting “Save” from the drop-down menu that appears.
I hope this was and is useful to some people. If you find any bugs, have any problems or want any other features then please let me know either by email, my posting on this blog or by filing a bug in the KDE bugtracker.
Posted in Software Development
very, very neat. this is a great option for light blogging activities. kblogger is probably a bit nicer for more intensive blogging activity, but there’s a tool for every kind of job, right? (i clicked to this blog entry from plasma’s twitter widget
one thing that looks like it needs to get worked on is the ease of accessing these kinds of features. adding resources is pretty click intensive, and the configuration dialog is really big and has a lot of jargon in it (e.g. “API”). if you’d like some input on making the config dialog a bit more streamlined, feel free to find me (or seele, i’m sure) on irc…
still .. it’s pretty amazing what kdepim can do these days =)
Comment by Aaron Seigo — September 27, 2008 @ 01:37
I spend a lot of time in Outlook daily. I often have to leave general observational notes in the Journal that have both, personal and organizationally-important content. They are personal in the respect that I retain a lot of metadata in my head and in the associated email threads, time stamps. They are organizationally important as they allow my team members to look at my journal through the exchange folder functionality and trace nature or theme of issues I was working on a particular day and understand the reasoning behind some of the decisions I had made in respect to customer / merchant relations.
This is like a lazy-man’s CRM package, where textual blurbs float in a chronological clusters but are loosely linked to specific customer/merchant system/operating procedures-triggered events. The coworkers do however have to go through pain of adding my Journal folder to their Outlook. I have to make sure that objects have right permissions. This extra hustle was always a problem, so the arrangement never quite worked and I always wanted Outlook to publish the Journal to SharePoint or something like that. That way, my “fires of the day” log would be searchable and accessible.
In short: The feature you put in may look insignificant in personal scope. In business team-oriented scope I, for example, wanted to have that for a long long time. Kudos.
Comment by Daniel (Suslik) Dotsenko — September 27, 2008 @ 02:51
Seems pretty fine
Sadly, I can’t make it work with Blogger, but sooner or later I will.
Thanks for your post!
Comment by Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer — September 27, 2008 @ 04:23
Aloha Mike.
This instruction is nice, I think I can work myself through it despite being a nontech user, however, when I rightclick in step one, the “Journal in a Blog” option is not there, so I’m stalled right from start. I guess I need to install something?
I’m using a dist-upgraded Sidux (Debian Sid)
KDE 3.5.9
kdepim-kresources 4:3.5.9-5
Comment by Ava Odoemena — September 27, 2008 @ 06:00
This feature is only available in kdepim >= 4.1, not 3.5.
Comment by Kevin Kofler — September 27, 2008 @ 07:55
Why does it make sense to put this funtionality into a calender tool? Where is the relation to date and time management? Wouldn’t it be better to put it into kate or some other editing (content related) application?
Well, I am not a blogger. Nevertheless it is looking cool.
Comment by gttt — September 27, 2008 @ 10:08
Thanks for your post Mike.
I tried using korganizer before and my journal gets populated by my blog entries but as soon as I try add a new entry and save it I instantly get an error messages saying “Unable to save journal”.
I tried different APIs since wordpress does support several but I have the same problem with all of them.
Strangely enough I can edit older posts from with the journal and they get updated on wordpress too.
Comment by Thomas Beinicke — September 27, 2008 @ 11:37
I think you need KDE 4(.1?). Look at the List, there is Akonadi, so its kde4
.
Comment by allo — September 27, 2008 @ 11:44
@gttt This is in KOrganizer because it supports “journals” which are very similar to blogs.
@Thomas, @Lisandro: I’ll email you and we’ll try and get it working.
Comment by Mike — September 27, 2008 @ 12:15
Brillian post man.I like the fact that most things can now be done form one interface from the linux desktop. However I’m using kontact on KDE 3 and There is no entry for “journal in a blog” I waas under the impression that it would be similar or basically the same as kOrganizer but apparently not. Do you have any tips or thoughts on how to achieve the same results in kontact and KDE 3 ? I shall be glad with any help I can get.
Comment by Parlotti — September 28, 2008 @ 08:03
parlotti: this feature is only in kde >= 4.1
maybe kblogger is available in kde3?
Comment by Chani — September 28, 2008 @ 18:31
Has anyone been successful using blogger.com with korganizer?
I can’t seem to get it to download my posts 9only 2 so far) or to upload to my blog
Comment by claydoh — October 7, 2008 @ 16:15
Thanks! I was able to download blog posts, but sadly I cannot save the entries to a blog. I am using KDE 4.2.2 now, and my blog is WordPress 2.7.1… any hints? Thanks again !
Comment by Eduardo — May 16, 2009 @ 19:41
Thanks for adding this feature to one of the best pieces of KDE software!
I signed up for Blogger, via my Google account just to give this feature a try. I’m not having any success posting to it from KOrganizer though.
I’d also like to see my friends’ LiveJournals in KOrganizer if possible, but I understand if LiveJournal support isn’t done.
If you see this and have time to help me please do.
Thanks again for this great feature!
Comment by Angel Blue01 — June 1, 2009 @ 21:42
[...] from here at Mike Arthur’s [...]
Pingback by Post your blog from Korganiser - Joar — July 19, 2009 @ 13:23
How does $YOUR_USER_ID differ from the username, for the Google Blogger API?
do the quotes matter when entering the info for the XML-RPC URL? If this is a consistent address for various blogging sites, perhaps a drop-down would be better with the option to enter the info manually?
“Blog: When you have chosen an API this list will be automatically populated”… doesn’t seem to be working for me, but I am not sure if I have the rest of the information correct yet…
A very nice looking way to blog, but I need some poking at it to get it working at this point. Thanks for the great work though!
Comment by lefty.crupps — September 8, 2009 @ 16:37
http://imagebin.ca/view/9ShqyCA.html
Apparently the $YOUR_USER_ID is a long number rather than a username etc; accessible by clicking “About user ____” and copying the number in the browser’s URL.
However, I still cannot get this to connect.
Comment by lefty.crupps — September 8, 2009 @ 16:55
I’m unsure about the Google Blogger Data API, I haven’t tried it in a while but other posters have said they’ve had problems with it. Can you run KOrganizer from a terminal a paste the output into a bug on KDE’s bugzilla?
Comment by Mike Arthur — September 9, 2009 @ 18:00
> Can you run KOrganizer from a terminal a paste the output into a bug on KDE’s bugzilla?
I tried this but once KOrganizer (and Kontact, either one) launch with some very basic feedback, there is no more terminal output. So when I try to edit or enable that Blogger.com resourcce and I get feedback telling me, “Error while loading MyBlog”.
And now, KMail launches outside of Kontact, and I don’t know why this happens
Comment by lefty.crupps — September 11, 2009 @ 21:19
Oh, no debug output, sucks. I’m afraid I can’t do much to help then until I give it a go myself.
Comment by Mike — September 11, 2009 @ 21:45
One thing that I’ve found on Blogger’s help forums is this. The XML-RPC URL is supposedly your domain/feeds/posts/default (for example http://patscompservices.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default) but it still doesn’t get my blog in the “Blog list”.
Have you had a chance to update this at all?
Have a great day:)
Patrick.
Comment by PatrickDickey — January 25, 2010 @ 02:21
I’ve not had a look at it I’m afraid Patrick, I’m not even using Linux on any of my machines as the main OS any more so it might take a while. Sorry, I do plan to get to this and port it to Akonadi at some stage.
Comment by Mike — January 25, 2010 @ 09:52
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