Following this getting started guide, you will be able to see your first blog post published in 5 minutes after you have successfully created your WebStory database!

If you have already got a basic understanding of how WebStory works, you may skip this section and check out how to add a blog account in WebStory.

First of all, you may need to download the latest version of WebStory from here: http://webstory.my/download/

After downloading WebStory installer (which is a compressed zip file), you will need to unzip it and run the WebStory installer to complete the software installation.

When you are done with WebStory installation, you are ready to manage your blogs, microblogs and web albums from WebStory now.

For the steps below, you may click at the images to see the enlarged image. (If your screen display is smaller than the actual image, you may see a smaller image instead)

1. Launch WebStory and you will see the screen below, enter your desired database name in the highlighted field:

2. Set your password to protect your WebStory database:

3. Your WebStory database is ready to be created:

4. When the database is created, you will be prompted if you want to import all your existing articles written using Notepad or other applications. Files stored in TXT, RTF (Rich Text Format) or even HTML format may be imported now. You may also skip this step for now and perform your import later.

5. Now you will be prompted for WebStory user account credentials. This is needed for WebStory user rights validation, such as types of blog account activation; and to serve as an online discussion platform for issues related to WebStory. If you have already signed up a WebStory user account, you may choose the second option “I want to use my existing WebStory user account” to enter your existing WebStory user account credentials, otherwise you may choose the first option “I need to create a new WebStory user account” and continue to the next screen after this step:

Enter your user credentials to complete the WebStory user account sign up:

6. WebStory validates and retrieves your account information from Self.my:

7. Now you are signed in to the WebStory’s blog management window. Since we have got no blog account set up yet, we may do so now in order to publish our first post. To do so, click at the Setup button just right under the label “Set up Blog“.

8. The Blog Account Setup window will be displayed. You are presented with 2 options now, i.e. to Add my current blog, which means any existing blogs you may have already been publishing post, like those hosted at blogger.com, wordpress.com, typepad.com or even your custom installed wordpress servers and etc. Or you may Sign up a FREE Self.my blog if you don’t have any blog yet, or when you just wanted to test drive the features of WebStory, this may be a convenient option. In this case, since we are going to demonstrate how easy and pleasant it is to publish post with WebStory, we will sign up a new Self.my blog for our purpose.

9. We will need to enter a unique Blog Name and a proper Blog Title in the next window, then click at the Sign Up button to proceed:

10. WebStory will then send the blog sign-up request to Self.my:

11. When the blog sign up is successful, WebStory will flip to the Post Preview page, where you could determine if you want to download the current blog template for offline post preview purpose later when you write your post. It is highly recommended that you proceed to download the blog template now, otherwise you may also click at the Skip button to do it later.

12. And finally you will see the window below when the blog sign up is done.

13. Upon successfully adding a new blog to our database, we will now see that Blog View will show us the blogs available to be managed by WebStory.

14. Let’s write our first post! Click at the New button at the leftmost of the toolbar, as shown in the highlighted area:

15. Write our first blog post in WebStory’s blog editor:

16. Save and publish! Click the second button (with a diskette icon) to save our first blog post, then click at the Publish button at the leftmost:

17. Select the target blog that we want to publish our first post (you may select more than one if you want), then click Next:

18. Set the post options, most of the time the default values will be good enough, so don’t worry about this part first, just click at the Publish button:

19. WebStory will show the current blog publishing progress in the blog editor, which is highlighted at the screen below:

20. Congratulations, you have successfully published your first blog post via WebStory:

And you are now done with the basic getting started part, you may continue with how to add a blog account in WebStory next.