Configuring Radio Userland to mirror posts to Blogger.com

The Radio Userland Atom Bridge Tool is designed to allow anyone using Radio Userland an easy way to mirror posts to any Blogger.com or Blogspot.com blog, using the Atom API. This tool is based on prior work from other developers - Dave Winer and Steve Hooker - who wrote the ManilaBloggerBridge and xManilaBloggerBridge respectively.

The installation is straight forward and should require very little effort overall. There are a few key points to understand about how this tool operates:

• Once it is installed, you will configure the tool using the Radio Userland Tools link on the Home Page.
• The tool will not mirror posts from your blog home page to Blogger ... only posts to categories are mirrored. This is on purpose so that you can selectively post to your Blogger blog by using categories. If you want a post to go to your home page, and to a Blogger blog, then simply create a category and always check both your home page and that category when posting.
• This tool ought to work with any other Atom API compliant server. Give it a try, if it fails then come back here and comment or complain. If you provide enough information I'll see if I can take a look at it and get it working.

Ok ... so how to get started. First, go and download the RadioAtomBridge Tool. Once you have it downloaded, copy it into the Radio UserlandTools folder on your computer. On Windows systems, this is usually the Program FilesRadio UserlandTools. I'm not real sure where this folder is on a Mac. When you copy the tool into this directory, give it a minute or so and the tool will be installed.

Next, you'll want to go to the Radio Userland Home Page, and then click the Tools menu. You ought to see a new tool called the RadioAtomBridge. Make sure that the checkbox to the left of the name is checked. If it is not, then check the box to enable the tool and Submit the page. If the tool is enabled then the name RadioAtomBridge will be a highlighted link ... click it.

You will now be presented with the configuration page. You will see each category and a checkbox where you can enable that category to be mirrored. The first three configuration fields are already configured for Blogger.com, so you only need to update the Blog ID, your Blogger username, and password.

To get your Blogger Blog ID, go to Blogger.com and log in. On the Dashboard, click on the name of the blog that you want to configure in Radio. If you now look at the URL in the address bar of your browser you will see a URL like: http://www.blogger.com/posts.g?blogID=99999999

... your Blog ID is the number at the end . Your Blogger username and password ought to be obvious.

Lastly ... do not check the box about Manila sites. I'm probably going to remove this option as it is an older feature of the ManilaBloggerBridge.

Once you have entered all of these settings, Submit the page and your changes will be recorded ... and you'll be ready to start posting. Go back to your home page ... write a post ... check the category that you configured. After you have posted, go to the Radio Userland Events page and look for the indication that the post to Blogger occurred. You can also go back to the RadioAtomBridge page and scroll down to your category. There should now be some statistics about the post, and possibly an error message if there are problems.

So far it works for me ... I'm going to keep testing and might have some updates. Good luck and I hope that someone finds this valuable!