Section 2.1. The Settings

While each sports its own particular preferences, all the Blogger API-based applications hold certain API-specific settings in common, usually:

Username: The username with which you identify yourself to your blogging system.
Password: The password associated with your username.
XML-RPC URL: The URL of your blog system's Blogger API interface (the default is often Blogger's http://plant.blogger.com/api/RPC2/). Sometimes this is broken up into Server and Path settings (e.g., Server http://plant.blogger.com, Path /api/RPC2/).
Weblog ID: Many blog systems support multiple weblogs ? for example, with only one installation of Movable Type, you can publish as many different weblogs as you like. Some desktop clients understand the concept of multiple weblogs and will let you select the blog to which a particular post is to go. Others require you to hardcode the ID of a particular blog. A Blogger ID is a string, such as myblog, while Movable Type uses numerical IDs.

Figure 2-1 shows a fairly representative configuration panel. Beyond these standard options are features such as Ping Weblogs.com, which notifies http://www.weblogs.com each time you post a new story. Check the desktop client's documentation for details of such features.