User Guide

Contents

  1. Logging In
  2. Creating/Editing Blog Entries
  3. Modifying User Information
  4. Requesting a New Blog
  5. News Feeds
  6. Displaying Your Blog
  7. Searching Your Blog
  8. Troubleshooting

Logging In

Unless you are the admin user, you should have been emailed your password. If you lose or forget your password, you can click the 'Forget your Password' link to have a new password emailed to you. At the login screen, simply type enter your username and password.

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Creating/Editing Blog Entries

After logging in, you'll come to the main entry screen. On the left, you'll have a menu and a form for creating/editing entries. On the right, you'll have a list of all blogs that you have editing rights and a list of the 5 most recent entries you have made to the currently selected blog.

  • Create/Edit an entry

    Use the form to select a category, enter a title for your entry, and enter the text of your entry. HTML is allowed in all posts. If you wish to preserve the format of your entry without using HTML, please make sure the 'Preserve formatting' checkbox is checked. You can also have Simplog translate text links and email address into web links for you simply by checking the 'Translate links' checkbox. If the blog super user has enabled it, you can check the 'send update notice to weblogs.com' checkbox and have a notification sent to the weblogs.com website(this may cause long load times upon saving). When finished, you can preview your entry with the 'Preview' button. To save your entry, click the 'Save' button. If editing, click the 'Update' button to save your changes and the 'Cancel' button to cancel your changes.

  • Trackback/Pingback

    A new feature for 0.9! If enabled by the Simplog admin, you can click a checkbox to try to send a trackback and/or pingback ping back to any sites you link to in your post. Simplog will visit those sites and determine whether they support trackback/pingback, and if they do, will let them know that your have referenced them in your post. To learn more about trackback, visit http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/beginners/. For more information about pingback, visit http://www.hixie.ch/specs/pingback/pingback.

  • Smilies

    You can now include graphical smilies in your entries if the Simplog admin has enabled it. Simply click on a smiley and it will be appended to your entry. You can also type the text of the smiley into your entry. The following table shows all current supported smileys.

    :)Smile
    :DGrin
    :(Sad
    ;)Wink
    :PTongue
    :|Neutral
    :xMad
    :oSurprised
    :?Confused
    :'(Cry
    >:)Evil

  • Switching blogs

    To change the current blog, pick a different blog from the blog list in the upper right hand corner

  • Entry list

    Along the right hand side of the page is a list of your most current entries. Each one shows who entered the post, the title, the category, the date of the post, edit and delete buttons, and the number of comments with a link to the comments. If you have more than the specified limit of entries to show, arrows will appear to take you to the next page of entries.

  • Changing Templates

    Only blog administrators can change the template for the blog they have admin rights to.

    To change the template. simply select a template from the dropdown above the entry list.

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    Modifying User Information

    To modify your personal information, click the 'User' link in the blog menu. You will be able to change your name, email address, URL, and password from this form. Make any changes you wish and click the 'Edit Info' button for personal information and the 'Change' button for changing your password.

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    Requesting a New Blog

    Click the "Contact Admin" link in the main menu to send an email to the Simplog administrator.

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    News Feeds

    You can now pull headlines from other sites and blogs into Simplog via RSS, RDF, and Atom feeds. This allows you to read news from your favorite sites and cite them in your blog quickly and easily.

    Adding a new feed

    Click the "News Feeds" link in the main menu. Enter the URL of the feed, then click "Add". URLs for news feeds can be found at syndicat8 and NewsIsFree

    Browsing News Feeds

    If you have added any feeds to your list, you should get a listing of news feeds showing the title, description, URL, a button to edit the URL, a button to delete the feed, and a button to view the XML source of the feed. Clicking on the Title link will show you the summary provided by that site's RSS/RDF/Atom feed.

    Adding an entry from a Feed to your blog.

    While browsing a news feed, at any time you can add an item as an entry into your blog. By clicking the "Blog This!" button in the summary table, you will be given a from that has the title and text of the entry populated into a textarea, along with a citation and link back to that site. You can then picka category for the entry, give it an additional title, edit the entry how you see fit, and add a comment that will appear after the entry. Click the preview button to preview the post. Click the "Save" button to save the item as an entry to your blog.

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    Displaying Your Blog

    Simplog was designed to only display your blog entries, leaving the layout and look of the actual blog page to the end user. Your blog entries should be displayed via an 'included' file. This means you should use a Server-Side Include(in the case of HTML files) or PHP's include() function. All you need to do is reference the blog.php and set the blogid (the id number of your blog, the number next to your blog's name in the blog list on the entry screen).
    Examples:

    HTML SSI:

    <!-- #include virtual("/simplog/blog.php?blogid=2" -->
    (if blog.php is on a different webserver, use the full URL)
    PHP include(local machine):
     <?
     	$blogid = 2;
    	include("blog.php");
     ?>
     
    PHP include(remote machine):
     <?
     	include("http://www.example.com/simplog/blog.php?blogid=2");
     ?>
      
    Side blocks are also displayed in a similar manner using the blocks.php file. Your blog can even be included with other server side scripting languages similar to the example above. The demo.php script is an example of a blog page using the PHP include function.

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    Searching Your Blog

    You and visitors to your site can now search your blog entries either via the archive or the search block(if the blog administrator has enabled it). In the archive, he search box is underneath the calendar on the right-hand side of the page. This search currently only searches the entry titles and bodies.

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    Troubleshooting

    Q: I can't log in!

    A: Please make sure that cookies are enabled in your browser and make sure that you are typing you password correctly. Password ARE case sensitive.

    Q:I point my browser at 'http://mydomain/myphpblog' but I don't get the login screen, I get a directory listing?

    A: Quick fix: point at 'http://mydomain/myphpblog/login.php
    Proper fix: Your webserver is not set up to show index.php as a default page. Apache deals with this with the 'DirectoryIndex' directive in httpd.conf

    Q: I'm using the PHP include function to include my blog from a remote machine, but get the error message "Warning: Failed opening 'http://mydomain.com/myphpblog/blog.php?blogid=1' for inclusion....."

    A: First, make sure that you can view 'http://mydomain.com/myphpblog/blog.php?blogid=1' in your browser. If so, then it is likely that your PHP configuration is set to not allow the include() function to include URLs. If you can edit the php.ini file on your sever, set the allow_url_fopen parameter to 'On'. If not, you can try using the virtual() function, but that may not work either(and isn't recommended in the PHP Manual). If all else fails, try to run your blog locally.

    Q: I saved an entry and saw this error message

    Can't open stream because TCP/IP error code 10060 - Connection timed out.

    What does this mean?

    A: You were trying to send a notification to weblogs.com and the connection timed out trying to send the notification.