Easy Blog Script - a blogging script

Easy Blog Script
A simple blogger

Version 1.6

Description

This is a basic blogging script which will allow you to add entries into your website via a browser. Each entry becomes a separate webpage which can be crawled to by search engines such as google. It adds a title, body text, and also the date to each webpage created. Archives are shown to the right, and pages are created as .html files. Search engines should have no problem finding or indexing any of your blog pages.

Working Example

Here's the blog in action:

Hot Brunette Girl

Images can be added in to your entries, as can colored fonts, links, and anything else you can do with HTML.

Download & Installation

It's actually pretty fast to get up and running.

1) Download the Script HERE

2) Unzip to a folder on your hard disk.

3) Open up settings.php in a text editor. Notepad for windows will do - or anything like it. Change the username to your own username, and add in your choice of password too.

4) Create a folder on your webspace where Easy Blog will run from. Eg. www.yourdomain.com/blog/

5) Upload all files to the folder on your domain.

6) Create a folder in there called data/ so, in the example above, you'd have just created a folder: www.yourdomain.com/blog/data/

7) CH MOD the folder data/ and the file numfile to 777.

That's about it for the installation of this script. Give me a shout if you get stuck.

Customizing Your Blog (Basic)

Changing the look and color of your blog is done with both the settings.php file and by altering the template.html file. Here's instructions on doing that:

As of version 1.1, the blog script is now a lot easier to customize. The script uses a page called template.html (which is one of the things you can alter) to get the look and feel for each page it generates. Anyone into automated page building for the SE's should be pretty pleased with the kind of pages that are output to the data/ folder. The script creates full HTML pages with body and text. So the first step is to configure template.html to make it look the way you want it to.

NOTE: YOU MUST LEAVE THE FOLLOWING 100% INTACT:

 (both of them)
[TITLE]
[ENTRY]
[DATE]

Everything else can be altered. It's just a regular HTML webpage.

Once you've got template.html looking the way you want it to, open up settings.php again. You'll see a section where you can now customize other aspects of the blog's appearance - color and it's title. Use Huey or another color picker to choose the colors you want to add.

NOTE: The part that appears between the two blog comment bits is the part that will appear on your index.php page as the entries. So whatever you customize template.html to be, the body of it will be the part that gets listed each day (or whenever you add to your blog) as the entry.



This bit will be the HTML which is used as the template for each entry in the blog.

Customizing Your Blog (Advanced)

The problems that occur when trying to add HTML into PHP scripts is that the PHP script will burp if you use any " marks in your HTML. As most HTML does use quotation / speech marks at some point, most people get an error when trying to customize a PHP script.

The good news is there's an easy solution - and it's what I'm using on my blogs.

Follow these steps to be able to customize your blog in an easier way:

1) Rename index.php to blog.php

2) Open blog.php and remove:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>$blog_title</TITLE>

</HEAD>

<BODY BGCOLOR=#$background_color TEXT=#$text_color link=#$link_color vlink=#$link_color alink=#$link_color>

3) Then remove:

</BODY>
</HTML>

4) Make a file called index.html

5) Make this a regular webpage. Customize it with your own colors, HTML - anything you like.

6) Add this line where you'd like the blog to appear:



7) NOTE: You will need to be able to run SSI on HTML pages to do this. Give me a shout if you need help doing this. It just requires a single line to be added to the .htaccess file.

That's it. index.html will be MUCH easier to customize than the blog script, and it separates out the script from the HTML. You shouldn't need to ever alter blog.php again once it's all set up like this.

How Archives Work

To the right of the main blog page is a section which lists the archives. Every entry you make becomes an HTML file which is added to this long list on the right of the screen also. The following setting in settings.php controls how many archives are shown here:

$archive_number = "5";

Beyond that, they are shown in archives.php which is linked from the main blog page. If you'd prefer to make your own archives, in hard coded HTML, use the DUMP feature from the admin area.

Example:

Example dump

You can copy and paste these entries into HTML archives for months, or in any other way you see fit.

How Hotlinks Work

When you're typing your entries into the blog, you can add in any HTML you want to. If you were to type the following into your blog entry window:

<a href="http://www.google.com">Google</a>

Then when the blog entry was posted, Google would be a link.

But new to version 1.5 there's something which might save some time. It's completely optional and just a nice extra. I've called it hotlinks.

There's a file in the zip download above which is called hotlinks.txt

In this file you'll find the following lines:

Footastic|http://www.footastic.com
Google|http://www.google.com
Tom's Newbie Booster|http://www.tomsnewbiebooster.com

There is one entry per line. Each line has:

• some words
• A | (pipe) symbol
• And then a URL

Which looks like this:

some words|url

This is a list of words and links which, when typed into the blog entry window in the admin screen, will be converted into links. So if you were to type Footastic into your blog entry, once it was posted Footastic would become a link to http://www.footastic.com.

This feature is designed to automatically make links out of frequently typed things you want linking. If that makes sense! :-) You should add in your sponsor urls here so that when you type Milf Hunter, or whatever sponsor site relates to your blog, that will become a link automatically.

Using Your Blog Script

Your blog script, the part the surfer will read, is the page index.php.

The part you use to ADD to the blog is the file admin.php.

Both of these pages are visited in the browser. In the example above, they would be:

www.yourdomain.com/blog/ <-- the surfer sees this page.

www.yourdomain.com/blog/admin.php <-- this is your admin page.

Notes

Setting the number of entries to show & a note on archives

In the file settings.php, there's a section which reads:

// SHOW NUMBER OF ENTRIES AT A TIME
$show_number = "20";

This is how many entries will be shown in the blog at a time. The archives are shown on the right of the page. The entries are shown on the left of the page. The entries are what is controlled by the $show_number = "20"; setting in the settings file. The archives are NOT affected by this. The links on the right will keep on growing and growing. It's only the text on the LEFT of the page which will be controlled by the ="20" setting. So ALL of the archives will be shown on the right of the page regardless of what this number is set to. It would be a bad idea to remove any of those links as the SE's are going to be following 'em.

Version Update History

Version 1.2

This fix alters a bug whereby files were both entries and archives were being listed in the wrong numeric order.

Upgrading from an older version

If you already have the blog script installed, this is the part you need. If you do not have the blog script installed, ignore this part and follow the regular installation instructions above.

- Download the latest version (same link - above).

- Upload index.php over the old one on your server. (If you have renamed this file blog.php - then it will need to overwrite that file).

Version 1.3

This update is for anyone who would like an easy way to swap links with other blogs. An automatic rotating links section has been added (and is fully optional). Many people will want to swap links with other blogs out there on the web. This update makes it easy to do that without having to mess with php files.

You'll notice that there's a file in the new .zip file called links.txt If you look at this file, which is full of example links which you should change or remove, you'll notice it contains HTML links which will appear on your blog.

NOTE: Look on this page: http://www.tomsnewbiebooster.com/resources/blog/ - where it says Other Blogs. This is the list of link trades on my example blog page.

When you trade a link with someone, add them to links.txt (one link per line). The script reads this file and automatically rotates the links each time someone visits. If you don't want to trade links, or don't have any link trades yet, don't upload links.txt OR leave it blank.

Upgrading from an older version: Upload index.php over the old one. Upload links.txt

Version 1.4

Added in something to take care of archiving. See 'How Archives Work' - above. To upgrade from an older version, download the new zip file. The files that have changed are:

admin.php
settings.php
index.php (which may be blog.php if you've used advanced customization)

And there's a new file: dump.php

Version 1.5

Added hotlinks. (See the section on hotlinks above).

Version 1.6

Added a new search feature, which appears above the archives. This lets users search through all the entries made so far. This will be handy when your blog grows to the kind of size where it will be easier for users to use a search.

To upgrade from an older version:

1) BACK UP ALL YOUR FILES.

2) Download the zip file and extract it.

3) Upload search.php to the blog folder.

4) Upload blog.php over the old version.

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