Mr. Fix-It Computer Services

Thingamablog

I have been hacking about on my personal webpage off and on for several years, mostly using just a plain text editor, such as my favorite PSPad. I'll admit that I am no expert on html or web design, but the little I do know is entirely self-taught, and fiddling around in plain text is both the best way to learn, as well as (usually) resulting in the most compact code. I have enjoyed trying out different snippets of code on that site, and I am constantly tweaking it - sometimes even totally messing it up.

When I decided to post a site for Mr. Fix-It Computer Services, however, I knew that I needed something more stable, more professional, and both faster and easier to use, but that would still result in fairly compact code. I toyed with the idea of trying a CMS (Content Management System), such as Joomla!, which is used on the SWLAPCUG website, but all the programs I looked at seemed to be way more than I really need at this time. I had never even considered a "blog" (weB LOG) solution, but after accidentally stumbling upon Thingamablog, a freeware blogger, I realized this may be just what I was looking for. I thought about what content I would be posting to this site, and realized that it would mostly be a repository for various articles that I have written, both for myself and our club, and that a blogger could actually be a good fit. Next, I compared features with WordPress, the more well-known open-source blog solution, and decided that Thingamablog would do quite nicely, at least for now.

From the Thingamablog (TAMB) website: "Thingamablog is a cross-platform, standalone blogging application that makes authoring and publishing your weblogs almost effortless. Unlike most blogging solutions, Thingamablog does NOT require a third-party blogging host, a cgi/php enabled web host, or a MySQL database. In fact, all you need to setup, and manage, a blog with Thingamablog is FTP, SFTP, or network access to a web server."

Thingamablog allows you to:

• Set up a blog in minutes via an intuitive wizard
• Maintain multiple blogs
• Effortlessly manage thousands of entries
• Dynamically update blog content
• Write entries offline (Dialup users)
• Publish your blog with a single click
• Publish remotely to your blog via email
• Read news with an integrated feed reader
• Make posts from your favorite feeds
• Create a unique layout with customizable templates
• Import entries from RSS/Atom feeds
• Set up flexible archiving options
• Organize your entries by category or date
• Save entries as drafts
• Define your own custom template tags
• Syndicate your blog via an RSS or Atom feed
• Ping services like weblogs.com, BlogRolling, and Blo.gs
• And much more...

OK, enough of the canned hype. How well does it work for me? Fantastic!!! It is easy (easy to install, setup, run, make entries, and edit existing entries), does all the updating and linking automatically, doesn't require php, MySQL, Apache, or any other services other that Java on your computer and ftp access to your site, outputs fairly small pages of code, comes with several templates (skins), and more freely available, the templates are easily modified, and Thingamablog is FREE! What more could you ask?

Glad you asked. As great as this program is, in my short time using it I have come across a few limitations that may or may not be relevant to your needs. First, although not a limitation, when you first set up your blog, you need to tell it "The Base Path" and "The Base URL". That may sound a little tricky, and you do need to get this right, but there is excellent help available both within the program and on the website. The first real hitch is that Thingamablog is not set up to allow feedback, such as you would find at most blog sites. This was not a problem for me, because at this point I did not want that feature anyway. If I decide to enable that feature later, there are add-ins available that are supposed to bring this and other functions into TAMB.

Second, there is no way to change the URLs or Permalinks of the article entry pages, and no easy way to find and reference those Permalinks from other articles. The individual posts or article pages generated by Thingamablog have URLs like "/archives/2007/10/entry_0.html", "/archives/2007/10/entry_1.html", and so on, and there is no way to change this so that you get a URL like "/category-name/post-title.html". To find the Permalinks, you need to go to the website, find the entry you are looking for, scroll to the bottom of the entry, then the "Posted by ... at" and a time, which is the actual Permalink. There is no provision to be able to do this from within the program itself. There is a "Wikilink extension" which does add this feature to the program, but it is apparently for Thingamablog version 1.0.6, and TAMB is now up to version 1.1 beta 6, so I was reluctant to test it yet. If you would like to read more about Wikilink, I suggest Felix Atagong's Unfinished Projects page.

Third, there is no search facility built-in to the templates to search your site or the web. This is fairly easy to add in yourself, however, and I will be adding a custom Google search to the site soon.

Fourth, there is no facility to add other types of pages than blog entries. Well, DUH! It's a blogging program! I wanted to have a "Welcome" page on the site, and this would actually have been fairly easy to do, as the default page for TAMB is "blog.html". All I would have to do is create a welcome page (outside of TAMB) and name it "index.htm", with a link to the blog. But I really wanted to do this in TAMB, so my workaround was to create a "Welcome" category, a "Welcome" entry, and a link at the top of the home page to the Permalink for the "Welcome" entry. Likewise, I wanted a page listing some of my services, and I created a category, entry and links for that as well, and I am happy with the results. Want a calendar function or other types of content? TAMB won't help, but you could still those outside the program and link to them.

Fifth, you can publish to your local computer, or to the Internet, but you can't do both from the same blog. Therefore, there is no way to preview the pages locally before posting them. There are 2 workarounds that I have tried, but both have their faults. First you can create a second local blog, using the same template, and creating the same categories. Go to your original blog and "Export Weblog to Feed". Then go to your new local blog and "Import Entries From Feed". Then publish the site locally. The problems with this is that if you have already imported the entries, and later do it again, you will have duplicates, and even worse, the "Permalinks" of the new entries are almost certainly going to be different from those posted to the web, effectively breaking any internal links you have established. Plus the process is cumbersome. Another option, if you just want a local copy, is to actually post to the web, then download the post with your ftp program, such as Filezilla. Again, this is NOT a "preview", and requires several steps, including actually posting to your site.

Sixth, there is no list of archives by title or post name, nor the ability to automatically list by title the last few posts on the main page - say the last 10 posted titles. This should be fairly easy to implement manually, but it seems like it should be incorporated within the program.

Last, it would be good to incorporate an automatic backup of the weblog database to a location of your choice. Although it is not automatic, it is easy to backup, as it puts the entire blog in one Database folder. Just periodically copy the folder to your preferred backup location and append the date to the folder name, such as "Database 2008-02-02". You can probably even automate this with a simple batch file and Windows built-in Task Scheduler, but that didn't seem necessary to me.

Verdict: In spite of the things mentioned above, I love this program, am recommending it to others, and will be using it myself for a very long time. As the author releases new versions, I hope that most of the points above will be addressed, but even if they are not, it is already fantastic.