Back to Yen 9 Knowledge Base
In this portion of the knowledge base we will learn how to use Thingamablog to:
Create a Blog
Add Text to a Blog
Add Categories to a Blog
Add Photographs to a Blog Entry
Choose a Template (a style) for Your Blog
Publish your blog
Before we go further remember that a blog and a weblog are the same thing. The names are used interchangeably. In Thingamablog we will create our blog inside the Thingamablog software and then publish it. If you have not already created the database, go back to the installation portion of the knowledge base and create your database.
Open Thingamablog and you should be looking at something like this:
Click on "Create a new weblog." We will now create an example blog for John Doe and we are assuming that John has already secured this as a sub domain name at Yen 9. We are also assuming that John wants to have only a blog and not a traditional web site. (If you will be creating your own blog while following this tutorial you will need the PDF file sent to you when you registered with Yen 9)
The first screen you will see after clicking on create a new weblog is this:
John Doe will enter:
Base Path: /
Base URL: http://johndoe.yen9.com/
and click on the next button.
John will then see:
Here John will enter the title of his site and a brief description. John has decided to call his blog JD's Blog so he will enter the following:
Site Title: JD's Blog
Description: JD's Weblog where John Doe will share his uncommon thinking.
Hw clicks next and sees:
Categories are pretty straight forward. Some of you will have only one category called something like "Main" but John has a lot of interests so he will add four categories: Science, Politics, Flowers and Poetry. For each of these he will press the add button. When John is done it will look like this:
After creating his categories John clicks on next which takes him to the Authors window. In the same way John has added categories, John will add authors. John is the only author, so he adds himself like this:
NOTE: You may leave the email and URL blank and you should not put your email here unless your email server has a good spam filter, because your name will be picked up by spammers and you will receive tons of unwanted email. In John's case he wants people to be able to contact him and he has a good spam filter, so he puts his address there. He could have put something like "johndoe34-AT-hoyaa.com" instead. John clicks on next and gets the template window.
Here John uses the drop down selector and the preview button to choose a template. After looking at several template styles he decides on "Georgia Blue" so he selects that and then clicks the next button and is presented with the publishing window:
For this screen he consults the PDF file he was sent when he registered with Yen 9 and he enters the following information:
Server: ftp.yen9.com
Port: 21
User Name: ers1001johndoe@yen9.com
Password: her034446s
And he checks the boxes next to Save Password and Passive Mode and then clicks the tab that says "ASCII" and he makes two entries there.
John then clicks Next. He gets the "Your Done" screen and clicks on "Finish". He then sees the following screen:
John is real excited now because he can feel he is about to start adding content. He clicks on compose a new entry and he gets a screen that looks like this:
He types in Chrysanthemums in the title, checks the Flowers category and types in "Chrysanthemums are a flower cultivated in China as a flowering herb as far back as the 15th century BC" in the window below. He is too excited to continue typing so he decides to put a photograph in his entry and see what this will look like. He moves his text down a little but press the Enter key twice and then clicks on Insert | Image and navigates to an image he has of an orange colored chrysanthemum. He clicks OK and the image appears in his blog entry. His screen now looks like this:
John clicks on File | Post and he is taken back to the main screen.
John clicks on Weblog | Configure Weblog | Front Page and he changes filename from blog.html to index.html.
Now he clicks on publish the weblog and he watches as his blog is published. He sees:
He fires up his browser and goes to his site: http://johndoe.yen9.com and here is what he sees:
If John wanted to confirm his settings he would click on | Weblog | Configure Weblog |. Then he would see the following screens:
Under | General | he would see:
Under | Front Page | he would see:
Under | Archiving | he would see:
Under | Catagories | he would see:
Under | Authors | he would see:
Under | Custom Tags | he would see:
Under | Templates | he would see:
Under | Email | he would see:
Under | Pinging | he would see:
Under | Publishing | FTP | he would see:
Under | Publishing | ASCII | he would see:
Seeing John's configuration gives you an idea of the scope of Thingamablog and what you can change easily.
Note: If you are combining a traditional web site and a blog then there are a few small changes you must make:
- In Weblog | Configure Weblog | Front Page change filename back to blog.html
- In your traditional web pages, create a link to blog.html.