Greg's Blogging – User's Manual

Introduction

From the earliest days of Minecraft, people have had a desire to share their playing experiences with others. One popular way is to make YouTube videos, but editing and uploading videos can be time-consuming, and not everyone is comfortable with recording themselves.

Greg's Blogging provides an alternative way: keeping a diary. While playing, at any time you can easily create a short entry consisting of a piece of text and optionally a screenshot. Depending on how the mod is configured, the entry is then automatically uploaded to a blogging site or sent to your friends by email.

User Interface

To create a new entry, press the B key (by default – this is configurable). The Blog Entry screen appears, where you can enter a paragraph or two of text.

To attach the most recenty taken screenshot to the entry, press the Add Screenshot button. A thumbnail preview of the screenshot is shown. To remove the sceenshot, press Remove Screenshot.

You can leave a partially-completed entry by pressing Escape and return to it later by pressing B again.

When your entry is ready, press Send. The entry will be sent to all of your configured blog destinations as a background task. You can continue playing in the meantime, but you won't be able to create another entry until sending the previous one is complete. You will be notified by chat messages when this happens.

Configuration

Currently, two methods of sending entries are supported:
  1. Uploading to a Wordpress blogging site, either at wordpress.com or another Wordpress-powered site.

  2. Sending to one or more email addresses via SMTP.
Both of these can be used at the same time if desired.

Configuration File Name and Location

Note: The configuration file contains sensitive information such as usernames and passwords for blog sites and email servers, so it is important not share it with anyone. To minimise the chance of this happening accidentally, it is not kept in the usual place for mod configuration files (i.e. the config folder).

The configuration file is named GregsBlogging.cfg. It can be found in your Minecraft folder, alongside the bin and mods folders, after Greg's Blogging has been run for the first time.

As a further security measure, the configuration file is created with permissions that only allow reading by the owner.

Configuration Options

CategoryNameDescriptionDefault Value
wordpress




 enabled
 Whether to perform Wordpress uploads. Only effective if the other required Wordpress options are filled in.
 true
host
 Domain name of the main Wordpress hosting site. (Not your personal site name. E.g. wordpress.com rather than fredsmith.wordpress.com).
 wordpress.com
username
 Your Wordpress site user name.
password
 Your Wordpress site password.
blogName
 Name of the blog to which you want to upload entries. This is only required if you have more than one blog at the site. If you put a name here, it needs to exactly match the title of the blog on Wordpress, including upper/lower case, spacing and punctuation.
smtp





 enabled
 Whether to send entries by SMTP. Only effective if an SMTP server name is configured.
 true
server
 Domain name of your SMTP server.
port
 Port number of SMTP server.
 25
username
 Your SMTP username, if required.
password
 Your SMTP password, if required.
hostname
 The name that will be sent with the HELO command to the SMTP server. You probably won't need to change this.
 minecraft
email


 enabled
 Whether to send entries by email. Only effective if an SMTP server name is configured and enabled, and one or more destination email addresses are specified. true
from
 Address to use as the "From" address of email messages.
to
 A comma-separated list of email addresses to which entries should be sent.

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