TechBlog

[[ Description ]]

TechBlog is a free blogging tool. Installed in just a few minutes, it consists of only 4 PHP files and 3 MySQL database tables. Feature-rich in such a small package, TechBlog was designed as a project log rather than a public diary. As such, it is simple, concise, fast and fairly easily modified.

TechBlog is also under development, so I suggest you consider it Beta software, and apt to change at a random moment's notice. I will also probably break your installation if you install a new version over an old one. Caveat emptor.

[[ Features ]]

TechBlog was designed primarily to serve my own needs and desires. Thus, TechBlog:

  • Requires PHP 4.1/MySQL 3.23
  • Has a small footprint (it's only a 4Kb zipfile)
  • Very simple install script
  • Supports multiple posters
  • Supports multiple tags
  • Supports permalinks
  • Code snippets are trivial to insert and auto-formatted
  • The majority of the page is devoted to blog entries.

I will likely add things in the future, but in my own sweet time. :-)

[[ Un-Features ]]

TechBlog will probably never:

  • Support localization
  • Allow for multiple weblogs
  • Provide a WYSIWYG post editor
  • Support post moderation or comments
  • Generate RSS or Atom feeds
  • Support multiple templates or skins
  • Support plugins, logs, imports

If you think any of those are worth having, by all means do them yourself!

[[ Installation Instructions ]]

  1. Download v0.3 to your PC.
  2. Unzip all the files to a directory on your web server.
  3. From your control panel, create a new, empty, MySQL database.
  4. Edit the variables at the top of the TBconfig.php file.
  5. Open the file "TBblog.php?config=1" in your browser. If no errors were encountered, you should see the "Database configuration complete" message displayed.
  6. You can move the TBblog.php file anywhere (e.g., to replace the index file of your website), as long as you update the variables at the top of TBconfig.php.
  7. Once you've got the site running, you can modify TBstyle.php to suite your taste.

[[ Documentation ]]

After configuration, you will have displayed an empty blog. To add posts, login with the initial poster name and password that you entered in the TBconfig.php file. You can now click New Post.

Select a Tag, or enter a new tag name in the field provided. Type in a title and content for your post. Once you've entered all the information for the post, Publish it.

From the main blog page, to edit posts you can click [EDIT] to revise and Republish the post.

Note that you can only edit posts that you have created; those posts created by other posters are read-only to you.

[[ Support ]]

As this is not an income-generating product, I will only answer questions at my whim and in my spare time. Unless, of course, you point out a genuine bug in my code. Email me.

[[ TODO LIST ]]

Add support for tags

Add tag cloud

Add a file that contains release notes

Add log in the readme for previous versions

Add facility to add new users. probably an admin page. Must define which posters are admins.

Versions. Display a TB version number on the TBblog page. On the admin page, read a file from www.spthorn.com/TechBlog that contains the current version so you can indicate the user that there's and update and what to do about it.

Remove user variables into a separate file, so if the code changes, I can just update a file without breaking their installation.

Look at pulling code out of TBblog so it's easier to separate my code from the page layout. This could make updating the code later a lot easier.

Create a mailing list to let people know of updates?

Hire someone to create a website?