I hate writing documentation.

By now, you've probably unzipped the archive in your directory, and you're ready to go. 

MicroBlogger is pretty simple, but it helps to have an overview of what it does.

When someone visits your blog, their browser picks up on index.shtml.  You may need to have an .htaccess file in your web directory that tells visiting browsers to go for index.shtml instead of index.html. Search Google for "DirectoryIndex" and ".htaccess" for more information on this stuff. For the lazy, just issue this command inside your web directory:

  echo "DirectoryIndex index.shtml: >>.htaccess
 
MicroBlogger's index.shtml file relies on a bunch of server-side includes in order to be so pretty... It uses header.shtml, welcome.shtml, news.shtml, links.shtml, and footer.shtml. You can change the order that these appear in, by simply editing index.shtml and moving the lines around accordingly.

Each of the *.shtml files relies off a *.txt file of the same name for its content. For example, news.shtml pulls in a file called news.txt, which contains all of the news entries shown in your blog. You can hand-edit any of these files in any text editor. MicroBlogger uses vi by default, because vi is holy and pure. It doesnt use emacs, because emacs is pure bloat. It doesn't use pico because pico is a pic-o-crap. Specifically, pico will truncate any lines longer than 255 characters, which is unacceptable and smacks of crappy programming. So, hand-edit at your own risk, and be extra careful when tweaking any of the HTML, of course. If you hand-edit any of the individual news items, you're going to need to re-build "news.txt" ... MicroBlogger does this for you, so edit the news items via mb... not on your own.

To use MicroBlogger, simply go to your web directory, and type "./mb" at your prompt. "mb" is the menu-driven backend for MicroBlogger.  Its pretty much self-explanatory.

When you add news in MicroBlogger, it "bumps" the oldest news item off the front page, and puts the news item you just wrote at the top. The articles you add are also immediately dumped into an "Archive", called archive.txt ... archive.shtml includes this file when showing you the old news items. 

MicroBlogger supports multiple authors, or "avatars". At the time you create an avatar, MicroBlogger will also create a special archive just for that person's news items. You can view that person's articles specifically by clicking on their avatar on the main page.

MicroBlogger also supports things called "snapshots"... That means for every article you write, it will randomly include a little photo on each one for fun. To add more photos into the hat, just move pictures into the "snapshots" directory, and MicroBlogger will see and use them automagically. To get you started, I have included a few snapshots of my fiance', me, and possibly my folks. 

Most importantly, do not taunt MicroBlogger. If you have a problem with it, email me. You'll find my email address on MicroBlogger's development page.

Happy Blogging! :)

Cheers,
Bowie