Control Panel: Blog!

Blog your site! Our weblog or blog is an easy to use tool for creating and maintaining an online journal. Some common uses (with a few examples) include:

• Self-expression - BoingBoing
• Business communication - Raging Cow
• Customer service - Macromedia Support
• Knowledge sharing and knowledge management
• Interactive journalism
• Learning - Resource Shelf
• Self-marketing
• Community building - Slashdot
• Storytelling

Blogs and blogging are growing in leaps and bounds because they offer numerous advantages over tradition static web site pages, and the main advantage is - simple and rapid updating via a browser - no html editor, no ftp program needed. Update your blog 50 times a day, or have others update your blog - the choice is yours.

1. How does the blog work?
2. How to add an entry
3. How to edit an existing entry
4. How to create a new "sub-blog"
5. How to customize your blog
6. Tips for customization
7. How to uninstall your blog
8. Where is my blog?

Our blog tool is based on the Blosxom blog script, created by Rael Dornfest. Instructions for using and modifying your blog follow, but in the most basic terms, the blog tool creates regular text files for the individual entries. You can use the built-in tools for writing to your blog, or you can use any text editor to write a file and then simply upload it to your cgi-bin/blog folder - it will display as an entry sorted by date/time order.

The Calendar display in the left column is another way to access entries chronologically - click on underlined dates for entries from that day.

Select the "Blog icon" in your host account control panel and click on the Add a New Entry link, or go to
http://yourdomain.com/cp/blogAdmin/blogAdd.pl.

Add your blog entry in the large text field. To create an entry or article headline (automatically in bold), enter the first line of text and then a return. Everything that follows will be the entry body. You can use any valid HTML code you wish, so you can use image tags, link tags or bold/italics tags. The script will remove any server side include tags or any html comments. Click the Save button to add the entry, or the Clear button to clear the form.

Select the "Blog icon" in your host account control panel or go to http://yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/blogAdmin/blogAdd.pl and click on the Edit your entries link. The main directory will list all of the entries in every blog. To view specific blog entries, select the blog or sub-blog and click the Show button. This will only display entries for the specified sub-blog.

Click on the name of the file you wish to edit. This will open a new window with the blog entry filename and text. The filename is not editable, but is displayed in a text box. The entry text displayed in the text field is editable.

To change the entry, just edit the text in the field and click the Edit Entry button. A confirmation message will display with a link to close the window.

Every Blog setup begins with the main, parent blog. That may be all you'll ever need, but some people like create more blogs under the main blog - topic or author-specific - whatever you want! To create a new blog, select the "Blog icon" in your host account control panel, or go to http://yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/blogAdmin/blogAdd.pl (you'll be prompted for your account username/password).

Under Add a New Blog: enter the name of the new blog and Save. Any white spaces or non-alphanumeric characters will be removed. Some invalid blog name examples: ../../../some blog here, *.blogname, [blogname].

• Description of your blog
• Title of your blog
• Number of entries to display on a page
• Main background color
• Main font color
• Sidebar background color
• Sidebar font color
• Font style or face for your blog
• Font size
• Display your name and e-mail address

On the configuration page there are two types of fields, drop down boxes and text fields. The title, description, number of entries, e-mail address and blogger name fields are all text fields and are fully editable. The font color, size, and style options are drop down boxes.

To edit the text fields, just click into the text box, remove the current text and add the new information. To change the options that have drop down boxes, click the small gray section of the field that has the down arrow. Scroll through the available options and click on the one you want. After make you changes make sure you click the update button, this will refresh the page and you should see the changes immediately. If you don't see the changes, click your browser Refresh button.

Don't forget - no changes will be make with out clicking the update buttons

6. Tips for blog customization:

The ways you can layout the blog page are nearly endless. Some things to keep in mind:

1. You may edit the header and footer file to change the layout of the blog. The blog reads the text from the header file and displays it, then it displays the blog entries and finally the footer information is displayed.
2. The header file is head.html, the footer file is foot.html both are located in the main blog directory
3. The footer file needs to contain any leftover html code to complete a well-formed html document (i.e. closing body tag, closing html tag.)
4. Any of the variables defined in the configInfo.blog or blog.pl scripts can be displayed as text in your header or footer files. To display a variable just type the name (i.e. $variableName) where you want the text to be. Don't forget the dollar sign.
5. For more documentation and customization ideas, see: http://www.raelity.org/apps/blosxom/.

7. How to remove your blog:

To remove a blog you will need to either log into your account control panel or log in via SSH-Telnet. Below are instructions for both methods.

Method 1: Control Panel

• First log into your control panel
• Click on the file manager icon
• Click on your domainname-www directory (where domainname is replaced with the name of your site)
• Click on the cgi-bin link
• Delete the blog directory, and any other blog-related files
• That's it! your blog is removed.

Method 2: SSH-Telnet

• Open the SSH-Telnet software and connect to your hosting account
• Type 'cd domainname-www' and hit enter
• Type 'cd cgi-bin' hit enter
• Type 'rm -r blog' and any other blog-related files, hit enter
• That's it! Your blog is removed.

8. Where is my blog?

Your blog is located at: http://www.yourdomainname.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl (replace yourdomainname.com with your own domain name or IP address). To write to your blog without entering your account control panel, go to: http://yourdomain.com/cp/blogAdmin/blogAdd.pl (for security you will be prompted for your account username and password).