Chapter 4 - Posting and Viewing
In this, the third installment of the epic tutorial that is Using Thingamablog, let's get ready to do some serious work on some original templates of our own making, by creating one long test post that we can view in our browser(s), and modify in our editor.
The content of the post is unimportant, but it should be representative of what you are going to have in your posts when your site is fully up and running. I personally don't care to use the "Lorem Ipsum" text generators for my test post. I like to use actual prose I've written because I feel that designing style around content is much easier when there is actual content. Eventually, I'll add every single feature, bell, and whistle to my test post and get it all working right in both of my test browsers (IE6 and Firefox) before I modify a single template.
"Here, the UT
editors are previewing postsbefore publishing them..."
Now, there is no need to spell check at this point, because we are merely creating a few entries so that there is something to style around, but know that Thingamablog does have built in spell checking ability (Gee, does it baby sit the kids too?) so in the future there will be no excuse not to spell check every post your create. But for now, don't worry about it. I personally am very bad at spell checking. I never spelchek, much too my dentrimint.
Ok. In Thingamablog, there are at least a couple of ways to "compose a new entry" but I like the key combination CTRL+E (pronounced "controlee"), so controllee a new entry now, supply a title, check a category, and look at the bottom left of the New entry window. Don't see anything? Then you're like me and your lower-left editor tabs are obscured by the Windows taskbar. So drag the title bar of the entry window up about a quarter of an inch (metric: seven kilometres) to reveal the "Edit" and "Edit HTML" tabs down there at the bottom. Great. Now type a couple of lines of hilarious prose into the entry window. Make sure it's funny. Ok. Now toggle back and forth between the "Edit" and "Edit HTML" tabs. Super. See that? Believe me, going forward you are going to be toggling back and forth like . . . ummm . . . something in nature that toggles often.
Spell-checking, a
spelling book - get it?
When you're ready to publish, click on the little yellow post-it note with the red thumbtack and the blue upward pointing arrow in your button bar. Because as we all know a post-it note is the International symbol for publishing web pages...
After publishing your post, go to your local folder (usually: c:\weblog\blog.html but now it's c:\weblog\index.html, right?) and check out your cool new entry! In both browsers. (From now on, try to check out eveything you do in both IE and Firefox...and if anyone has a good reason to check their pages in more than those two browsers, I'd love to hear it.) With your page open before you, see it, understand it, love it.
I know what you're saying. "Wait a minute...ew...there must be some mistake." I know. My first page was really ugly too but at least it had a fantastic personality! But don't worry about the ugly, the "gold" is actually in the page source, so open up your test article/post/entry in your source code viewer/HTML Editor and open your main.template That's in your \My Documents\Thingamablogs\{numbered folder}\templates folder, remember? as well. Got both the page and the template open? Good. Now, as best you can, flip back and forth between the pages and try to acquaint yourself with how the various tags in the template are being parsed by Thingamablog into the text from your entry.
On second thought, let's do just one together. Look at the <title> tags within the <head> tags. Consider the part:
<$BlogTitle$>
...well, that's a global Thingamablog variable. When you publish, it replaces that tag with whatever you've put into:
Configure Weblog Settings - General -
Site Title
You get the idea.
Note:
Thingamablog also has a template editor built right in, you simply
open up the templates folder and right-click on the template you
wish to edit. That's fine for a quick job, but what we are going to
be doing will require a a more full-featured editor. Take the time
now to pick one to use going
forwardSee the
colophon....Aaand, that's it for now! To summarize, in this Chapter:
- We created a new post and then we looked at it.
- We opened the page Thingamablog outputted to view the page source.
- And we...uhhh...that's it actually; that's all we did.
But nevertheless I am spent.
You can close Thingamablog. We won't be using it for a bit, because in the next part of the tutorial, we going to strip this page down to pure content, and then build it back up "with style" (hotcha! hotcha!)