THINGAMABLOG made simple.

First Print Edition

THINGAMABLOG made simple.

First Print Edition

THINGAMABLOG made simple.

First Print Edition

Stephan Hoppe

PENS Publishing

PENS Publishing
Peterborough, Ontario K9L 1A8
Canada

Find us on the world wide web at: http://www.penspublishing.com
Or check out the Using Thingamablog web site at: http://www.penspublishing.com/UT/
Or contact Stephan directly at: UsingThingamablog@penspublishing.com

Copyright 2008 by Stephan Hoppe

Cover Design: Stevanoppa

Notice of Rights
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher. For more information on getting permission for reprints and excerpts, contact PENS Publishing.

Notice of Liability
The information in this book is distributed on an "As is" basis, without warranty. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, neither the author nor PENS Publishing shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the instructions contained in this book or by the computer software and hardware products described herein.

Trademarks
Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and PENS Publishing was aware of a trademark claim, the designations appear as requested by the owner of the trademark. All other product names and services throughout this book are used in editorial fashion only and for the benefit of such companies. No such use, or the use of any trade name, is intended to convey endorsement or other affiliation with this book.

ISBN 0-9780826-0-5

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in ???

This is dedicated to my wife, Patricia, as well as my daughter, Elizabeth, and my son, Niklaus. Were it not for their love and attention, this book would have been completed a year earlier.

About Thingamablog

Thingamablog is a free, open source CMS/website/blog publishing package. It's a standalone desktop application that makes it simple to author and publish content for the Internet. Unlike most CMS applications, Thingamablog does not require a cgi/php-enabled webserver and it doesn't need a MySQL database. All that is needed to set up and manage a site using Thingamablog is FTP or network access to a basic webserver.

Thingamablog capabilities include:

  • Set up a blog in minutes via a wizard
  • Maintain multiple websites/blogs
  • Manage thousands of entries
  • Write entries offline
  • Publish with a single click
  • An integrated feed reader
  • Create posts from favorite feeds
  • Customizable templates
  • Flexible archiving options
  • Save entries as drafts
  • Ping services

Thingamablog is released under the GNU GPL (General Public License) and is available for free download here. The installer is less than 4 MB for all platforms. Versions are available Linux, Solaris, Unix, and Windows.

Thingamablog is copyrighted - ©2003 - 2008 Bob Tantlinger.

About Bob Tantlinger

I am not Bob Tantlinger, the genius yet mercurial inventor of Thingamablog. I am merely Stephan Hoppe - his biggest fan. And I thought that before the book goes to print I should actually meet Bob Tantlinger. So I made my travel plans and on the scheduled day, I made my way to Springfield USA to Bob's house. It's silly but I was a little nervous because I hadn't figured out exactly how I was going to introduce myself. Somehow, just sticking out my hand and saying "I'm Steph" didn't seem to cut it.

Anyway, I arrived pretty early in the morning and so I only had to wait a short while for Bob to show up, because presently he came into his bathroom, took off his bathrobe and pulled the shower curtain aside - revealing me.

Me: Hi Bob!
Bob: Aauugh! What the?!
Me: I brought a towel for you. Here.
Bob: (shouting) Honey, call the police!
Me: You don't have to yell. I'm right in front of you and besides I can't call anyone because I didn't bring my cell phone.
Bob: I wasn't talking to you! How long have you been there?
Me: Just a little while. Boy do you snore! I could hear you all the way in here. I hope you don't mind, I made myself a sandwich. By the way, do you like the tutorial?
Bob: Tutorial? What?! Steph? Are you Steph?

(sirens in the background getting louder now)

Me: Of course! And let me say it was hard to find you, what with the unanswered letters and phone calls, and the restraining order and all that...
Bob: Are those flowers?
Me: Yeah, they're for you! And could you please take the towel...

It gets a little chaotic after that. But everything in life is a learning experience. For instance, I now know that Bob doesn't like flowers first thing in the morning, and that it's not the hiding multiple times in Bob's bathroom that bugs him so much as Bob actually finding out about it.

Preface

In the old days, if you wanted to create even a simple web site you pretty well had to learn HTML. Prior to the advent of CSS, there were all sorts of tags you used to get the styling job done. Even if you did manage to get more than a few pages completed, maintaining the pages were a chore as you had to sift though and decipher a mess of tags.

With the advent of the CSS standard in 1955, it was finally possible to separate content from style. Using an external style-sheet you could (still can) alter the styles of an entire site in one fell swoop. Content updates became much easier as there were a whole lot less tags to worry about.

But back then and for many, content management was still a problem. Linking to and between pages and the necessary link-checking was still completely up to the user. CMS has solved all of that. If you add a page, the CMS set’s up all of the links to and from that page. If you remove a page, the CMS removes the necessary links. Good CMS systems organize pages based on categories, dates, or both.

Many CMS systems are actually collections of PHP scripts running on your web server. This offers the benefit of portability, and gives the ability to allow multiple people posting to the same site, even at the same time. but because so many CMS systems require PHP and/or SQL to run, you must consider the associated requirements, headaches, as well.

Unlike these server-based CMS systems, a desktop CMS doesn’t offer the ability to have multiple posters, but a good desktop CMS should not be seen as disadvantageous either. Some desktop CMS systems still offer that same portability, and also the ability to keep multiple backups of your data/database, as well as the security of knowing you are not depending so much on another machine.

So these days if you can find a CMS system, that offers a wsywig gui, integrates well with HTML/XML and CSS, and that holds all of your data securely on your own machine in a SQL database, you should get it.

Thingamablog is just that kind of application.

Stephan Hoppe
Peterborough, Ontario
January 2008

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