The major feature for this release will be integration with major RSS Aggregator applications. If you don’t know what an RSS Aggregator is, then you won’t much care about integration with one. If you do, then you might be interested in seeing what this integration will get you. There’s also a minor bug fix for people that have been using more than one Text Formatting filters and the Preview tab.
I use SharpReader and I mostly use it to keep an eye on a bunch of blogs that may or may not be updated during an average day; I read most blogs through IE because half of the blogs I read have crappy RSS feeds. SharpReader, and a number of other RSS Aggregators, support a .NET-based interface standard known as IBlogExtension. Long story short: I’ve made a plug-in that conforms to this interface that will capture some data from an RSS Aggregator’s screen and start a new Blog entry with it in SharpMT.
Installation: Download SharpMT first and configure it to use your Blog server. This will allow new drafts to be started and set up the registry settings that the plug-in will require. Then consult with your RSS Aggregator to see what set up has to be done for new plug-ins. I’ve outlined what SharpReader requires below.
The Plug-in File: As part of the install there’s now a file named SharpMTPlugIn.dll – this is the plug-in file that your RSS Aggregator needs to be aware of. For SharpReader, it will look for a plugins subdirectory for plug-ins. Drop the SharpMTPlugIn.dll into this directory, restart SharpReader, right click on a headline and you’ll see “Blog This” with “SharpMT” on the sub-menu. When you select SharpMT, #MT will open with some information about this headline in a SharpMT field.
Installation note, part 2: There’s a new file that will be installed into the SharpMT “safe directory” as part of the installation called RSSFormat.txt – this is the file that is used to format how the information will come into #MT from the RSS Aggregator. The available fields for this file are [RSSLINK], [RSSTITLE], and [RSSDESCRIPTION].
Configuration of #MT: When SharpMT is activated through the plug-in it will always create a new draft and by default it will insert the collected information into the Entry Body field. If you want it to be inserted into one of the other entry text boxes, go to the Plug-in tab on the Options dialog and select a different field from the drop down list.
Beyond this, I’ll be able to help users with configuration issues for SharpMT (and maybe SharpReader) but I don’t know much about other RSS Aggregators… you’ll have to talk to the authors of those to get them configured! What I can tell you is that if they support IBlogExtension then this plug-in should work with them. (And nope, Pocket SharpMT is not slated to get the feature!)
Download: SharpMT 2.2 Beta 1
Read: SharpMT FAQ
I use NewsGator, and I’m trying to get SharpMT working with it. I copied SharpMTPlugin.dll to the plugins directory for NewsGator. When I tried to create a new post from within NewsGator, I got an error message: “SharpMT cannot be found”. The one thing that I noticed was that I didn’t see any RSSFormat.txt file in the SharpMT 2 installation directory. Could this be causing the problem? If so, where can I find this file?
Have you run the new version of SharpMT yet? That’s required so the new version of #MT can update a setting in the registry. Also the RSSFormat.txt file will be in your Application Data directory – see the FAQ for more on that. Also if it’s not there then a default is automatically used – it won’t crash.
Yup, that was it. I started up SharpMT once, and then I was able to post from NewsGator. Thanks for the help. :)
I basically have an online catalog of products that I would like to import into a blog.
I have been able to generate what would be the post’s body HTML through an access database and some VBA code.
Could I use the dll to create the posts offline in #MT? How difficult would this be to do?
Well, I’m not sure if I understand the problem… I mean which DLL is “the DLL”?
One thing that it sounds like you could do is make use of the SMT files: Have your VBA code write out a file that is in the format of an SMT file… you could then open that SMT file in SharpMT and post it to the server that way… of course if you don’t do this all that often you could even write it out to the format that MT can use for imports itself and bypass SharpMT all together…