I think we’re missing a light bulb moment here.
When you use Blogger and Freeway, you are doing two things. The first being that you are creating a single template which is going to be used over and over and it’s just a single page with certain items (the Blogger actions) on it. Further more there isn’t any other pages you create, it’s just one single page. All the other pages are automatically going to use that template and you have no choice over that. So focus on ‘the one template to rule them all’ template concept.
Secondly you’re ‘dropping’ (a.k.a ‘Inserting’) these Blogger actions onto the page so the guys and gals at Blogger know where to fill in the information when you post a new blog. All the hard-work has been done for you by the people at Softpress and it all connects with the guys and gals at Blogger when done correctly. So this means that when you get to the end of the template design and you’re ready to post then when you add a ‘title’ for the post it’ll swap out the ‘Post Title’ with what you wrote and then underneath that you have ‘Post’ which is all the text you write in there and they’ll then be replaced in your template. If you’ve heard the acronym CMS thrown around, this is essentially how those work. Now all of this ‘posting’ is done in Blogger (using the web interface when you login) so don’t think you can change any of that in FW. SkipII and I ran through it today and I think we got through from point A to point B very easily.
What seems to be confusing for people is this ‘hosting’ situation I talk about. How the Blogger system works is that you sign up for a FREE account, but you don’t get any storage space to store anything like images, etc. There’s no free space to put your images or any content what-so-ever. So, if you want to use custom graphics, special CSS, or anything like that you have to find a place to put it. If you have a hosting account, like Swimmer35 does, then you’ll have to connect the template (‘web address’ step in FW) to those files. Think of it as splitting up your FW site in two places and you need to have your template in Blogger (we’ll call it site A) connect to the images for that template on your remote server (we’ll call it site B). Once the two connect it’s magic. Now to set this, in the tutorial it’s step number two, you want to put in the URL of where those files are going to be at. So for instance you could put in there:
http://www.mydomain.com/blog/
(Don’t forget the / at the end of it)
Then when Blogger went to load your template it’d look for your Resources folder (and/or css depending on your setup) and then proceed to load the images and what not from Site B’s web address into Site A’s template.
Now when you get done with your template design and you’re all ready to go and this remote server situation fits what you’re trying to do, you simply have to go to where you Publish your site locally on your hard-drive and you’ll want to copy the Resources (and/or css depending on your setup) to the remote server either through FTP or through some other means (File Manager, cPanel, etc.) I’d encourage you to create a folder called either ‘blog’ or ‘blogger’ first and then proceed to copy these files into that. Then double check the ‘Web Address’ field in your ‘Document Setup’ to make sure that it is properly connecting the Resources (and/or css depending on your setup) with your template. This, in the tutorial and web terminology, is called the BASE HREF which is highlighted in the last photo of the last step on the bottom of the tutorial. This is essential for a functioning template.
So let’s say you created a folder on your server called ‘blogger’ and you proceeded to copy the Resources and the css (depending on your setup) into the ‘blogger’ folder, your web address in the Document Setup would be:
http://www.mydomain.com/blogger/
and then in your template when any graphics were needing to be used in Site A, Blogger would look for the ‘web address’ you set, which is for Site B, and then the Blogger template would automatically go:
Hmm…go to mydomain.com, see if a subfolder named ‘blogger’ is there, look for a Resources folder, got it, load image1.jpg…load it in the template.
For the web savy out there, the template system would adjust the URL’s to your images for you so it’d be “http://www.mydomain.com/blogger/Resources/image1.jpg” BUT it’s important to note that this is handled by Blogger and not FW. This is something that they do and you can’t do anything but set the right path to those files.
So, to wrap one more step up. When building your Blogger template, build it like a normal one page site. There’s no fancy things you have to do, if you want a photo there put a photo there. There’s no special way in which it should be built. When you create any FW site when you ‘Publish’ it you get a ‘Resources’ and a ‘css’ folder and those two folders are standard without changing any of the Document options. These two folders are your only focus (again, depending on design) for putting on a remote server space. The index.html file that is created you don’t even need to upload or use. It won’t do anything. That’s important to understand.
If you feel like you’re close and almost getting it feel free to e-mail me or the people at Softpress and we’ll get it figured out. Remember however I don’t get paid for technical support for FW like the people at Softpress do, I do it for the community here. So take that into consideration. I do offer a consulting fee and if that’s an absolute must for you then e-mail me and we can setup a time to discuss that.
Any other questions, just post here if you feel they aren’t worth e-mailing about.
Good luck.
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