Chapter 2 - Creating a New Weblog

Here's a mouthful: In Thingamablog, Articles, Posts, and Entries (APEs) reside within categories, which in turn reside within weblogs (or sites); all of which reside within your database - and you can have multiple databases scattered across your hard drive if you wish.

This hierarchy is pretty cool and well-thought out, but it does beg the question as to whether it is better to have all of your sites within a single database or to have a separate database for each site.

Single database with multiple sites

The advantage to having all of your sites within a single database is convenience. All of your sites are accessible by a single click once Thingamablog is opened. There are also "Thingamablog-wide" settings that allow you to make certain changes to all sites at once...like the option to turn pinging on and off.

Multiple databases with a single site each

The advantage to having only one site per database is safety. If one database corrupts, you have lost only one site. I imagine another reason might be that with multiple databases, you actually have a more granular control over the placement of your files on disk.

"I said I wanted a picture of me with my BLOGS!"

I'm not going to advise one way or another here. I've never lost a Thingamablog database to corruption or gremlins, but I have read (mostly in the Thingamablog forumshttp://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/phpBB2 of plenty of others who have, so I guess it's something to think about. I myself use one database that holds 5 sites, but then again, I also have backed up my Thingamablog data 9 times so far this month...

One Year Later: I now have SEVEN sites within a single database and it's getting BIG - around 2 million terabytes or so I figure. Though Thingamablog and the associated HSQLDB is pretty fast, I am noticing a little "lag". Also, as of V1.0.5, Thingamablog remembers the last folder you pulled an image from while using Thingamablog - one last remembered folder per database, not per site within the database. There is nothing wrong with this, but if you're toggling between sites it's easy to get confused. And though I back up religiously, I can't help but feel that if I lose my database, I'll lose everything.

Two Years Later: I've got around 9 sites within a single database now. It's just easier for me to collect them all within a single database. And after several years working with Thingamablog, I realize that most of the database corruption reports reported are not in fact database corruption but other things entirely - like water damage. So, what I am saying now is if you have one database plus you have a backup plan in place (like on page ...what page will it end up on?...,) you'll be juuuuust fine.

Let's create a new site within our database...

From the menu, click File, then New Weblog. Thingamablog a has a nice wizard built in for this. Have a gas, because almost everything is modifiable here. Even picking your template doesn't really matter if you are following this tutorial, because we will building our templates from scratch a little later on.

One thing to keep your eye on though are your Base Path and Base URLuniform resource locator settings. Base Path is the root web folder on your web server - the folder that you FTPfile transfer protocol your files to so that they are visible when someone types in your Base URL into your URL bar. Often, this seems to cause people some trouble, so I am going to attempt to help out here.

Base Path - when I FTP to my current provider to drop off files for my web site, I personally must place them into my /web/ folder. That is to say, my /web/ folder is a relative path to a folder called /home/sites/123456783/shoppe.ca/web/ (and I'm pretty sure that my $75 a year means I get this web server all to myself...right...)

Base URL - my base URL is simply, the root "folder" of my website, as is visible by good users like you. A good example is my My "Me" site, which has a Base URL of http://www.shoppe.ca/http://www.shoppe.ca - this site exists solely as an excuse for me to put up pictures of myself which nobody wants to see.... If I wanted to have my "Me" site in a sub-folder under http://www.shoppe.ca/ like say..."MyMeFolder", then my base URL would be http://www.shoppe.ca/MyMeFolder/, and yes, my Base Path would then actually be /web/MyMeFolder/.

And My Name is Earlhttp://www.nbc.com/My_Name_Is_Earl/ - well, that's a TV show. Earl is a homonym for URL and judging by the one episode I've seen is a pretty funny show which has nothing to do with Thingamablog yet I never get to see the show because I've been cursed with this damn ascetic urge to write tutorials.

Tip! Regardless, you should be OK if you just remember that your base path starts with a "/" and your base URL starts with "http://"

If later, you are having problems FTP-ing files with Thingamablog but you can send them with your FTP clientYou use whatever you like, but I use Filezilla..., then you'll need to check and re-check what you've put in here. I am pretty comfortable with this stuff yet I myself have entered in the wrong values countless (three) times.

Another thing you need to keep your eye on is your "publishing info." I guess it should be the same as whatever you have set in your FTP client because that's essentially what you have - an FTP client built into Thingamablog.

Actually come to think of it, I think you should set your Base Path, Base URL info, and Publishing info locally for the time being. Why? Because as you build your templates later on you'll be hitting that little-blue-globe-publish-button something like 500 times (it will seem), and local is much faster than FTP, nobody but you will see the site until it's ready and you at least won't be pinging all over hell's half-acre.

To set up publishing to the local drive:

Base URL: 
file:///C:/weblog/
Base Path: 
/weblog/

And then go through the rest of the wizard, supplying:

1. site title
2. description
3. one category (General)
4. one author (Me)
5. leave Email unchecked
6. choose the BOXED template
7. choose local publishing

...etc. etc. until out pops a fully-baked (but empty) blog. If "par chance" (French for "probably") you made a mistake somewhere along the line while going through the wizard, you can go back and make changes from the main screen by selecting Weblog - Configure Weblog:

I wouldn't deviate too much from the default base path and URL; on the occasions I have tried to relocate the local publishing settings, it hasn't worked. One thing that definitely doesn't work as of version 1.1b6 is that Thingamablog always local publishes to whatever local drive Thingamablog is running from - if you are running Thingamablog from drive D then you can put whatever letter you want in the settings, but Thingamablog will always publish to drive D. So in short, if you're running TAMB from drive C then specify file:///C:/weblog/. If you are running TAMB from drive X, then specify file:///X:/weblog/...

Let's recap what we've covered in this part of the tutorial:

1. We created a new weblog (web site.)
2. After running the wizard we made any desired modifications via Weblog - Configure Weblog

If all of this seems like a lot of energy to expend...you're right, it is. But it really only needs to be done once. A little pain now translates into an awful long time where all this will be done once and for all, Thingamablog will handle all of the organization, and you will be left free to simply add content, play with your kids, or make new ones! :-)

Linux Users:

Good morning, Angels. You cheeky linux monkeys will be wanting to use the following instead to set up publishing to the local drive (assuming that, as I do, you want everything - both program and blog, to reside under a single directory under your home directory...):

Base URL: 
file:///home/{YourName}/thingamablog-1.1b6/weblog/
Base Path: 
/home/{YourName}/thingamablog-1.1b6/weblog/

Warning! I've also been experiencing some troubles with Thingamablog whenever I run it from any directory other than the directory where the thingamablog.jar resides. Keep that in mind when running Thingamablog, and especially when creating desktop shortcuts. (It might be more prudent to create a bash script that gets into the correct directory and then runs Thingamablog, and then have your shortcut link to the script.)