In order to manage your blogs with WebStory, you will need to set them up in WebStory first. No matter your blog is hosted at blogspot.com (or blogger.com), typepad.com, wordpress.com, livejournal.com or hosted on your custom installed WordPress blog server, MovableType blog server or other WebStory suppored blog services and blog servers, the process is straighforward and guided, all you need to do is follow the instructions on screen and you are good to go.

Basically, there are 5 important stages (and 3 of them being optional steps that could be skipped easily) involved when setting up your blog, and some of them are optional:

• Setting up basic blog information
• Activating current blogs
• Specifying picture storage (optional, so that WebStory knows where to publish the pictures that you use in your article; this step is only shown when the blog server does not support file upload directly)
• Setting up offline post preview (optional)
• Backing up your blog! (optional, but it’s highly recommended that you complete the blog backup)

Note: For users of some custom installed blog servers, such as WordPress blog server, you may need to enable the remote publishing capability first.

Here are the detailed steps:

1. At the main blog management window, locate the the Blog Account button and click at it:

2. Since we are only concerned with setting up our blog account now, choose the first option, “Add a new blog account“:

3. Now we see 2 options:

• Add my current blog — which is for you to add your existing blogs hosted at blogger.com, wordpress.com, typepad.com or any custom blog servers
• 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

Here we will demonstrate how you may add your existing blog with the first option, i.e. Add my current blog.

4. [Blog Information] When you see the next screen, enter the blog homepage, or blog URL that your users visit, this will allow WebStory to detect the settings of your blog in the coming steps. In this example, we are using a blogspot.com hosted blog, which is located at http://chrysanth-webstory.blogspot.com:

5. [Blog Information] Then you will need to enter a unique blog account name to identify your blog account, as well as the blog’s user credentials:

6. [Blog Information] Click Next and WebStory will start to detect your blog settings and retrieve blog information:

7. [Blog Activation] When the blog information is successfully retrieved and verified, WebStory will start the activation phase. Please visit this user guide for more information about account activation. 

8. [Specify Picture Storage] When blog activation is done, you could proceed with the rest of your blog setup. From current screen onwards, if you do not need to access the presented functionality, you may click the Skip button at the lower right corner of each upcoming screen. The first you will see now is “Assign Storage for File Upload” screen, this is to set up the online storage that will host all your image files that you include in your blog post:

9. [Specify Picture Storage] If your blog server offers blog server storage (which may be used to host image files or other files of your blog post) by default, WebStory will set it up automatically, as shown in the next screen. If you do not wish to alter the default setting, then just click Next. If you would like to change the “File Upload Storage” to other location, then you may click at the paper clip button to reassign a new one to it:

10. [Post Preview] After you are done with “Assign Storage for File Upload”, WebStory will check if you want to enable offline ”Post Preview” capability for blog editing. If you enable this feature, you will be able to do an offline preview of your newly written blog post even before you publish it to your blog server! You may take a look at the 2 screens that come after the next screen on the feature of “Post Preview”:

11. [Post Preview] To see Post Preview in action, consider the following example. First, write something in WebStory’s blog editor:

12. [Post Preview] Then flip to the “Preview” tab, which is located at the bottom of the blog editor, and you will see how your new blog post should look like if it gets published to your blog:

13. [Post Preview] In order to enable post preview, WebStory will have to publish a test draft to your blog so that the blog template will be retrieved properly. Don’t worry about the test draft, as it should be removed automatically under most circumstances. The next screen shows WebStory that is downloading the blog template:

14. [Blog Backup] Now WebStory offers to back up your existing blog posts from your blog server. You may download posts, pages as well as comments (only for blogspot.com and WordPress servers). Having a local backup is always a good idea as you may at one day decide to print out your blog posts, export them into PDF ebook, or simply want to migrate them to other blog services, as in the recent case of Windows Live Spaces blog shutdown:

15. [Blog Backup] WebStory starts to back up all your important blog posts, pages and comments:

16. Finally, you have your blog set up successfully:

17. You may notice that a new blog account is added to the left navigation panel now: