corzblog (about)

notes

There's some stuff in the "inc" folder you might want to look at.

The only ABSOLUTELY necessary files here are the bbcode parser (obviously), and the "sidebar.php" file, which is the navigation on the left. You could replace these, duplicating their functionality, but not remove entirely. removing the javascript functions file ("js/func.js") would stop the cool quick-code buttons from working)

Most everything else is related to the style of the blog site. Please do mess about with it.

.htaccess

actually, there isn't one of these in the inc/ folder at all, but there is in the main folder, and the arc/ folder too. The main one sets up the character encoding for the whole blog/ folder and directs the server to parse .blog files as html, and the other can (optionally) prevent direct web access to your arc/ folder

if you want to know more about .htaccess files, go here.
note: many operating systems will hide files beginning with a dot

blog_l.css / blue_l.css
blog_r.css / blue_r.css

the styles. edit to your delight. things would look very plain and strange without one of these. But then, ie5 users might like that ;o) there are left and right versions of both the orange and blue schemes.

buttons.php

the buttons for the editor
note the unbuttons

cbparser.php

the bbcode to html to bbcode parser
you can use this on its own for other projects

cbguide.php

the bbcode guide
this gets re-used so much I separated it

corzblog.png

image for the footer.php. see next item.

footer.php

you can leave that as it is, incorporate my logo into something else, or trash it. so long as you leave a link somewhere, it's your call.

js/func.js

javascript functions for the quick-code buttons. If you add something real groovy, let me know.

I sometimes experiment with the <h6> button, it might blow up your browser one day.

metadata.php

this is inserted at the top of every page in corzblog, stuff that browsers like to know. I also chucked the starter for the page generation timer in here, handy.

note: character encoding metadata is hard coded into the pages themselves, reason being, when the webserver finds that data, it reloads the page from scratch with the specified encoding.

It makes sense then, not to go including pages before this process happens. Although utf-8 is specified in the master .htaccess file for corzblog, some webservers ignore this. As they say, your mileage may vary…

sidebar.php

the left/right hand column with the links, edit in your own links

I'd prefer you to leave the "get source" link around somewhere, if possible, ta. I'll update that as I go along for sure.

deleting blog entries

---

Note, there's no mechanism to delete blogs once you publish them. This is by design. If you really must, just edit the text to "deleted!" or something.

If you really really must delete a blog entry, it's easy enough to do in a text editor, so long as (AND THIS IS VERY VERY IMPORTANT) you take care to edit out the correct parts. Each blog entry is terminated with an fictitious <end> tag. There are a few in this "about.blog" file. Select the entry you want to remove, like this..





and just remove that part. It's okay to leave linebreaks between blogs.

Archiving your blogz

---

At the end of each month, you'll probably want to archive your blog. Not only will this save you bandwidth and quicken downloads of your blog (say 100k per month, per page, per page view .. think about it), but keeps everything nice and organised. This is ridiculously easy to achieve:

• click the edit blogs link in the sidebar.
• You'll figure out the rest.

note: you must to ensure that the "arc" directory is world-writable!
(see above for how to set permissions.. probably chmod 777 arc )

Remember that the name you choose for your archive will appear in the sidebar, so don't make it too long. I may add a check for this. As a guide; the blogs menu truncates the individual blog names to 18 characters. I'm using "2003-nov" type names, see left.



bugs:

---

no known bugs


to do:

---

erm.. I'll likely find something.

That's it! Get blogging!

;o)
(or


ps.. this software is free for personal, non-profit use, so long as you leave a link to my site, especially the "powered by" logo in the footer, and perhaps a link to the corzblog source. thanks very much. see the enclosed license (probably called "free-sex.txt" or something like that). Please do read that, there's effort in it, you may be surprised.