Keep on “bloggin’ in the free world”
Greetings and salutations,
From entries passed we’ve told you about two very useful features that were available to the paid version of the blog and suggested ways in which they could be used to post to your blog from email and the many services that use Metaweblog API.
We’ve also increased the number of templates to fifty, which are immediately accessible within your design blog tab. As to housekeeping, we’ve further improved many of the backend services which hopefully will pass by unnoticed 
What can you do with the new services?
Email Blogging:
This feature allows you to email your blog and have the contents post without further interaction to your blog under a default category e.g. Mobile posts.
This can be found under Manage blog, settings, Email blogging and while you don’t need a dedicated email address for this purpose we strongly recommend you use one. You can only post to Quick Blog from an address known to the program. E.g your account email address for user’s of the free blog. Those with a paid blog can accept mail from any email address within their collection of authors with the permission to post remotely. No need to fire up Quick Blog when on the run - email your post, it appears.
Remote Blogging:
With minimal setup users of Quick Blog can create and manage their blog articles using a variety of tools and services that utilize metaWeblog API. And that means? It means you can post direct to your blog from Word 2007, Flickr, Windows Live Writer and Ecto without having to log into your blog.
First let’s enable remote blogging which can be found under “Manage Blog” > “Settings” and select the “Remote blogging” tab. Now create a username and password that’s different from your main blog login (we’ll remind you if it’s not) and save these settings.
This user name and password applies only to the main blog account. Sub Authors can use their existing log in and password. Your blog is now able to receive posts remotely.
In many cases all you need to do is provide your blog’s address and the service can “auto discover” how to post to your blog and will usually require your username and password. If the service doesn’t support this, you have to provide them with the address to post to in the following form:
http://Your.blogname.com/metaweblog.aspx
This is sometimes referred to as your API endpoint, or XML-RPC address, but we try not to . We’ve provided examples within our Tutorials category linked HERE . If there are any services you think should work, yet don’t, please let us know and we’ll look into it. As usual, we welcome your continued feedback, wishes, gripes and observations about Quick Blog.
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I don't think you meant to make:
you have to provide them with the address to post to in the following form:
http://Your.blogname.com/metaweblog.aspx,
... linkable (???)
Hi,
I didn't intend it but some readers/ browsers are going to try to make a link out of it any way
John
Quick Blog Team
something seriously flaked out on sidebars (at least with mine). keeps dropping out entries. some look completely lost, others put to 'hold'. Not happy!!!
Greetings,
It's flaking out because many of the sidebar items are larger than the area that are attempting to fit in. Other than the physical position it can't change the status of the entries in any manner that I'm aware off.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
It looks like the templates are the same ones that have been there for awhile now. Haven't there been over 50 for awhile already ?
Also, are you going to allow custom color schemes anytime soon. Our branding includes our color scheme and it does not really fit in well.
Greetings,
The templates are indeed the same fifty that the paid blog came with and the change was in regards to their inclusion into the free blog. As to the color choices I agree that we have some work to do in that area and hopefully will accommodate that in a future upgrade.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
feedburner forum latest on the feedflare issue is here:
http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?t=6490&highlight=godaddy
sounds like you need to provide us QB's some info on this in this blog. It would definetly help to know the i=
Greetings,
This part would not work with our current templates though I'm looking at ways in which we could expose this functionality to you .
Regards
John
Nice additions. It would still be great to able to add custom meta data to the pages to help improve SEO. Any chances of that coming along shortly. An option to change text color would be great as well.
Thanks and keep up the good work
Greetings,
The addition of items mentioned are both on our list for future inclusion. In the meantime if you have a color in mind to change the text color to I can manually update that for you.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
e-mail blogging appears buggy. I've had it work for some established authors and then not work for them a week or so later. I've seen e-mail sit for days when it should only be 15 minutes or so from a previous response and I'm forced to go post them manually. Is there anything I can look at or do? I've tried calling the help number and while they've been willing to help they didn't seem to be able to and had to wait for other support. Essentially what I need is the ability for people to send e-mails and have them post automatically everytime without my continually monitoring the posts vs. mail received. I have the persons authorized as authors and ensure that the e-mail account recognizes them as valid. Any ideas?
Greetings John,
You are correct in saying that it's roughly fifteen minutes between remote mail being received/ posted and waits of two hours should be unusual. We did notice that the service was stopped around the time of your call and had been restarted and the backlog took a little time to clear. In the above scenario there's no practical action you could have taken other than notifying us.
Currently we are set up only to allow posts from email addresses already known to the blog which you've noted as being the case, if these posts are received and processed it should be an entirely automatic process provide the author has permission to post directly and you have your remote mail set to "uncheck" require moderation.
I'll take a look into the delivery delays meanwhile.
Regards
John
Quick Blog Team
I have had what appears to be the same issue. I am new to blogging and wanted to set up email blogging for one author in particular. I believe I set it up in the manner prescribed and about 2 hours later it was still not posted. I know it was sent to the email account, since when setting up the account I set it to Cc: to my email address.
I want to moderate the entries. Should I receive an email from the blog notifying me of this? Should I see anything different when going to manage the blog about an entry waiting to be published?
A bit confused ...
Greetings,
Firstly the emails must arrive from an address known to the Blogcast, e.g the main author's email or any of the sub author's email as any other mails are rejected. Two hours is certainly longer than it should take, the server requests mail every 15 minutes for remote blogs, so there's something else amiss.
You can indeed moderate these entries and a new article confirmation should be sent to you when a sub author post if not we can certainly work with you to get that up and running
Regards
John
QBC team
I've recently upgraded my QuickBlog account to a paying account just so I could post remotely to my blog. I have installed Microsoft Live Writer to my computer, and have recently found and installed a Pocket PC application that allows me to post from my handheld.
I am thrilled! I can tell already that posting to the blog from Live Writer is going to save me HOURS of work and reduce my overall frustration level....because I am a perfectionist, it often takes me longer to get my blog entries the way I want them than it has to actually write the entries themselves. This has been sheer tedium and made posting to the blog a real trial! With Live Writer, I now have a larger window to work with, more formatting options, and ....well, I'm still figuring all the rest out.
I am also excited to find a pocket application (that is free no less!) so now I can post from just about anywhere.
I can honestly say it is worth the few dollars a month to upgrade from a free Quick Blog to a subscribed one just to be able to use Live Writer and to post remotely.
One question: Is there any way to create an excerpt for each blog entry remotely? I find that I still need to log into QuickBlog to add this piece to my blog entries.
Thanks! Julie
First, thanks for upgrading! Second, the remote blogging is supposed to be available in the free version but there was a mistake (all mine, I'm afraid) that made it possible to set it up but impossible to post to it. That is fixed in the upcoming release. I can't express my embarassment at that oversight; if that's the only reason you upgraded, then stay tuned and you can downgrade once the release is out there.
To answer your question, there is no way presently to do so. The MetaWeblog API, which Quick Blog implements, does not support excerpts. However, there is an extension to that API called the MovableType API that does allow for excerpting and the nascent Atom API has a summary element. That's probably more information than you need, but it does mean that you can gain that functionality as soon as we implement either of those interfaces. Windows Live Writer currently supports the MovableType API and will support Atom in the next version (or right now with a plugin).
Thanks! Bill
Hey i looked for a better place to ask this question, but here it is. Is there some way in Quick Blogcast to have emailed (read mobile posts) images automatically resized? I couldn't find a way. A friend using another unnamed blogging software has that feature. Sending images from my phone inserts them much too large.
Also, i've had the same delay problem that John had a few comments back... email posts taking a day or two to show up. Any help with this would be much appreciated!
Greetings,
Presently there isn't that feature within the program to resize images that come in remotely though we do that for people when we bring in images from their online photo filer. Yep it makes sense for us to resize these and I'll get that into our plans for a future edition.
The mail system through email blogging is currently under diagnosis to locate issues such as those reported a couple of days back. These should only take fifteen minutes or so normally and I hope to have that restored to normal soon.
Regard
John
Quick Blogcast Team
I am having the dreaded problem with emails not being posted to my blog. I just set this up yesterday and it is not working. I have the free account, currently, but am willing to upgrade if that is the reason for it not working. Please advise...appreciate any direction anyone can provide.
Thanks,
Kim
Greetings Kim,
I did a quick check of your account and saw that you appear to have this set up correctly. You are using an email address from one of your authors plus the mailbox appears to be set up correctly and I can see 4 attempts made that the blog hasn't picked up. What I can't tell is that the password is correct. Now this may be an oversight on our end but you have yet to set up any categories within the blogcast and I'm taking a look at whether that will prevent a post from being added.
Meanwhile please go into your mail settings, select a default category to upload to , save this, send another mail and wait up to 30 minutes. Please let me know if that works for you.
Regards
John
QBC Team.
I checked again this morning and all of the emails that I had sent did indeed post! YAYAYA! Thanks John, for your help and whatever you did it worked.
I am very thankful!
-Kim
It appears there are again problems with the emails posting to the blog. This was working for awhile, but now seems to have stopped working. I am going on a trip and was really hoping to utilize the email method of posting to the blog so I wouldn't have to use expensive Internet minutes (from the cruiseship satellite) and log onto the admin tool. Could this have anything to do with the upgrade? Are others having this problem?
Thanks,
Kim
Greetings Kim,
Thank you for your comments on the email to blog system. It's working but very slowly so the posts can take several hours. This is an issue that we're aware of and have been working towards an improvement for quite a while.We'll be putting out in an upcoming release. The main issue people have had ,when it's not working at all follows. The email account you post to your blog with must be "known" to the blog. E.g it must either be the owner's email address or that of one of the sub authors.
Secondly the account you send it to check to see that the post has arrived and is in the inbox, if it's been filtered to spam or directed to any other folder we can't retrieve it.
Regards
John
QBC team
I verified that both my email is 'known' and that it is sitting in the inbox folder and not any subfolders. I waited about 15 hours and it still had not posted, so I deleted those emails and resent one at 6:06pm PST and it has yet to post, as well. Since I have successfully posted via the email method before, and haven't made any changes, I am pretty sure it isn't me...unfortunately. Do you think it would do any good to perform a manual post using the admin interface and see if that doesn't 'kick' things?
Greetings,
With regards to the posting of a mail it's a separate area that should have no effect. I'll follow up in the morning to see what's occurring to prevent your mails from posting I'm pretty sure now it's not you
Regards
John
QBC Team.
No offense, but I ain't loving the web interface at https://app.quickblogcast.com so I googled for metaweblog api and came up with the ScribeFire plug-in for Firefox. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to auto-recognize when I enter the address of my blog mainpage, and it doesn't seem to let me log in using my remote username and pw when I specify my blog mainpage url plus metaweblog.aspx as you describe in this article. Have you any pointers on how to get that working? It tells me password error.
Ooops. Just figured it out - I was using the wrong pw. Hey, it works! You folks rock!
Greetings,
Phew, I was about to launch into a set of things to check when I reached the last line. ( Maybe I should read backwards) Scribefire is a great tool and unless I have comments to reply to rarely log into Quick Blogcast. It's not because I don't like the interface but mainly it's a time save not to do so. Please let me know what bugs you about the interface and what it's preventing you from doing that we could address.
Regards
John
QBC team
I have just launched my free quick blog. Very nice service, works fine. My question is can I move the GoDaddy display banner at the top to someplace else on the site. I put a link to my blog on my website and it looks bad when you're transferred to the new page with the advertising on top.
Thanks,
Greetings Patti,
Thank you for the kind words. I'm afraid on the free blog the location of the display banner is fixed as there's no practical place to reassign it to a location that would be seen and that brings me to the removal of the banner. The banner goes away if the account is upgraded to the paid version , we do add a lot more space and bandwidth in that case , so it's not all bad news.
Regards
John
QBC team
I appreciate the quick reply - no surprise!