# TextRouter Help

Intro

| TextRouter is a weblogging client that you run on your desktop; it is used to interact with Content Management Systems such as Blogger and Manila. This document explains each part of the app; what it is for and how it works. For more info on the concept of TextRouter see the 'readme.txt' file.

The Main TextRouter Window

At the top of the main TextRouter window is a one-line high text field; this text box is for entering the subject of email's, and the title/subject of any Manila stories which you edit. Below this is a large text area (known as the "buffer"), two buttons, and two radio-groups. The buffer is where you type in text you want to "route" (send) to Blogger, Manila, etc. The two buttons - "Clear It" and "Get Clipboard Text" - do exactly what you'd expect, they clear the buffer and place text from the clipboard in to the buffer respectively. They exist purely for convenience - convenience is what this app is about.

| The two radio-groups are for specifying the current Input and Output mode. These are explained below.

Input/Output Modes

| If the behaviour of TextRouter seems quirky it is probably due to the "Input Action" and/or the "Output Action" radio-groups at the bottom of the display.

| The "Input Action" radio-group lets you specify how input operations are handled. An input operation is any operation which results in text coming in to TextRouter; this includes pasting text, reading in files, getting previous Blogger posts and getting the current Manila homepage.

| If the "Input Action" is set to "inserts" things will probably behave as you would expect; incoming text will be inserted at the current cursor position. If a chunk of text is selected, this text will be replaced with the incoming text. This is the default mode.

| The the "Input Action" is set to "appends" then incoming text will always be appended to the end of the buffer, even if there is an existing selection. If "Input Action" is set to "replaces" then the incoming text will replace completey what text there was in the buffer, even if it wasn't selected.

| The "Output Action" radio-group is more simple, it lets you specify what text is "routed" when you send/process text. So if you have three paragraphs of text in the buffer, but you only want to blog one to your Manila/Blogger website, you can just select that paragraph, check "selection", and blog away. If "all" is selected, then all the text in the buffer will be output.

| It's worth noting that the Input/Output modes also apply to internal operations. So if you want to strip the HTML from only one paragraph, you can simply set the output mode to "selection", set the input mode to "inserts" and hit "Strip HTML". This will replace the selected paragraph with a HTML free version of the same text.

The Main Preferences

| The main textRouter preferences, accessible from the 'File -> Preferences' menu, holds settings such as auto save config, paragraph width, number of undo levels, and your proxy settings. All of the preferences here (and in all Preferences windows) have little "?" buttons, which when clicked will display some pop-up help for that specific preference.

| The only thing to note regarding these preferences, is that if you change the proxy settings, you will need to restart TextRouter for the changes to take effect.

The "Route Text To" Menu

| The "Route To" menu is how you quickly route text to some place, Blogger, Manila, an email address, etc. All the items on the menu have quick key combinations to make things faster for these common functions.

The "Blogger" menu item simply takes the current output text (either all of the buffer, or just the selection, depending on the mode) and blogs it to the currently active blog. The "Manila" menu item by default does the equivalent thing, it add's the output text to the homepage. However, it is possible to alter what this menu item does depending on how you work. You can either have it ADD text to the Manila homepage, you can have this menu item SET the current text as the homepage (overwriting what was there), or you can use the OPML setting which means 'Route To Manila' will upload the OPML document (outline file) associated with your Manila account direct to the Manila server.

| The "Email" menu items let you send the output text to an email address, either a predefined one (think mailing lists) or one you enter there and then. The "RSS File" menu item is not currently implemented but will eventually route the text to an RSS file on the local disk.

The Manila Menu

| The Manila Menu is where you define and setup your Manila accounts. Most items are fairly straight forward. The preferences allow you to setup things like auto-logging in, etc, the "Accounts" menu items allow you to define your accounts. The "Jump To URL" menu lets you fire up a browser with your Manila homepage or one of your statistics page in it.

The "Get Homepage" item will download the current homepage, and "Flip Homepage" lets you flip the homepage performing exactly the same operation as the browser based "Flip Homepage" button. Two other menu items - "Add To Homepage" and "Set As Homepage" - are available from this menu, but it is envisaged that you will assign one of these functions to the "Route To Manila" menu item and use it from there (where it has a quick key combination).

| The "Set Homepage From OPML" menu item uploads a specified OPML file direct to the Manila server. The OPML file (outline file) is specified in the Manila accounts setup section. It always uses the same file for convinience.

| The "Story" menu items let you download, edit, and then upload stories from and to the Manila server. The "Upload Picture" menu item is also fairly self explanatory.

| The "Set Story as Homepage" menu item will set the contents of the current homepage (the content listed under today's date) to be that of the story you choose. Note:, this doesn't automatically Flip The Homepage, so you'll need to make sure you do this manaually if required.

The Blogger Menu

The Blogger menu is the Blogger equivalent of the Manila menu. It allows you to define your Blogger accounts and preferences, choose your active blog, get the list of previous posts, start editing a previous post and delete previous posts. You can also get and set the Blogger HTML templates from here too, this is especailly useful for downloading the template and then firing up an external HTML editor (Emacs :) to edit it with.

The 'Fetch Previous Posts' menu item is available so you can force textRouter to refresh it's cache of old posts. If you want to edit an old post, you can either 'Insert Previous Post..' (which will automatically download the last 10 posts, if they haven't already been downloaded) or you can use 'Get Post by ID', using the later, you will need to know the numeric ID of the post. At the moment, these ID's are not logged to a text file, so you'll have to look them up manaully, but this will be changed soon.

| Once your editing a post though, you simply use 'Update Post' to save the changes to the server.

The Email Menu

| This is where you define your email settings and any predefined email addresses you'd like to use.

The Utilities Menu

This menu provides a few utility functions. They are not particularly polished functions yet, but may still be useful. External editor fires up an external editor loaded up with a temporary file which contains the contents of the current buffer. Text Auto-Scroller brings up a window which allows you to have the current text of the buffer auto-scrolled for you, so there is no need to use scroll bars to read down a long page.

| The third option on this menu applies a "filter". Filters allow you to define a program which accepts a standard input stream and which outputs a standard output steam, i.e, a pipe. The current output text (the selection or all, depending, as always, on the current output mode) is feed in to the pipe and the output from the pipe is feed back in to the buffer.

| The "New Shortcut" and "Remove Shortcut" items simply define shortcuts which you can use in your text. A shortcut is simply a small piece of text you type in quotes which is then expanded to it's full version when the text is sent to Blogger. You can use shortcuts to define short names for URL's, for links, or for any lengthy piece of text you type often.

| The shortcuts file is automatically loaded at startup, if it exists, and by default it is automatically saved at shutdown. In future, there may be functionality to automatically merge two shortcut files, etc.

Comments to Simon Kittle. Last Updated: Tue, 27 Nov 2001 11:24:19 GMT
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