NewsGator Inbox – Options (Post to Blog)

Today I tried the Posting Options within NewsGator and I have to say I was a little disappointed. Before I get into what I experiences, let me first explain a little bit about what you will encounter when you are configuring NewsGator to post to your blogs.

First as always you will select the NewsGator Inbox dropdown and select options. The Posting function is found at the bottom of the options menu. In my case when I select the Posting Options button an error appears (it happened on both the Dell and the Gateway and this could be what the problem is and is limiting my ability to post from NewsGator Inbox) that says NewsGator cannot find a part of the path for the plugin. When I select “OK” the Posting Options screen appears. Make sure that the plugin is selected in the drop down list. You will also find 3 additional check box options, one that will strip out the font face and size, one that ensures clean HTML and one that quotes the existing posts in line format. If you are like me you are asking yourself, what the heck does that mean? Well the first one takes out the information that says what font type and size the post should be when it arrives at your blog. If you select this, the blog settings will determine how the post will look. The next option, clean HTML, will basically remove the formatting and convert the information you are sending into Unicode so that there are no errors based on the format of the post when the blog updates. On the last one…I am really not sure what this does.

So the next step is to select the configure button that is located at the end of the dropdown menu. This will launch the setup wizard. After you click next you will be asked to select your blogging service. This was a rather limited list but it included most of the popular blogging services, like Blogger.com, LiveJournal, Wordpress.com, etc. Being addicted to blogging, I have various blogs for different purposes and in different formats, with that, I tried several of the options. The only one that I could get to work was my Wordpress.com blog. The others returned a remote server error stating (404) Not Found. If you are lucky enough to your blog to configure another window comes up. This new window will tell you that the login was successful and will have the specifics for your blog such as the name and url. You can also set how NewsGator publishes the post in your blog. By this I mean it can publish directly, post as a draft or you can set it to ask you if you want it to publish or create a draft each time. After you select how you want it to publish and you click next, a new window pops up and allows you to select the category that you want these posts to publish with. After that select next and the wizard will tell you that the configuration is complete and you can click finish.

Once you have completed the configuration, the Blog Manger screen will open. From here (if you can get it to configure more then one blogging service) you will see a list of all of your blogs. When you select a blog from the list the configuration info will populate on the right side. You can also make changes to your configuration for here. For instance, if you start out with the posts automatically publishing to your blog, then you can change it to publish to draft or to ask first. You will also be able to add or delete Blogs from your list by clicking on the + or – at the bottom of the Blogs list. If you click the + it will launch the setup wizard. You can get back to this screen by going to Options, Posting options and then click configure.

Although I was disappointed by this tool, I will try again to get this to work with more then just Wordpress.com. Next time I will spend a little more time reviewing this tool.