In the Appearance section, you can select the default theme that external users and you see when arriving at your Weblog. You will notice that the default templates show a “theme bar” at the bottom of the page that looks (depending, of course, on the selected theme) like this:

When users click on one of the themes, the Weblog engine will send them a persistent cookie which pre-selects the desired theme for whenever they come back to your site. The selection you make here applies to everyone who is new to your site or does not have set a preference. If the user clicks “Reset”, the theme will fall back to the default you specify here. The list contains all themes that are registered locally in the web.config (V1.0 – V1.7) your weblog’s main directory. V1.8 does not use the web.config for theme information, see Release 1.8.  Details about registering and designing templates can be found in the Templates and Macros section.

The category filter for the main page is a setting that causes only entries of the given category to be presented on the home page. This is convenient if you do not want your main page to contain and aggregated view of all entries from all categories, which is the default behavior, if you leave this setting blank. There’s one catch with this right now: If you set this value and you have entries that are not in any category, they will not be visible anywhere and, worse, you will not be able to edit them, because they get filtered out in the internal view as well.

The setting maximum days on main page defines the maximum number of days to appear on your home page. This setting only applies to the default page and not to the category pages. This is not a “number of calendar days” value, but a cumulative value. If you have posted only on 15 days in the last year and this value is set to 10, the main page will contain the most recent 10 days of those 15.

Getting Inside ... or Logging In

To be able to post and manipulate entries and change the configuration of your Weblog, you need to sign in first. In all templates that are in the package, you will find a login box at bottom of the left or right navigation bar that looks somewhat like this: (After you click on the Login link)

It’s pretty obvious what this does. If you enter a correct username and password that corresponds to an account in the siteSecurity.config in your siteConfig subdirectory, you’re in. Check the “Remember Login” check box if you want to log in with your credentials automatically whenever you come back to your Weblog.

Once you’re in, you will notice two little changes on the page. First, the login box is gone, of course. Secondly, there is an administrator bar at the top of the page, usually (and that depends on the design template) the bar is right at the bottom of the page below the title. The bar will look like something like this.

The options are:

·         Add Entry takes you to the editor screen where you can create a new entry.

·         Activity lets you look at all activity including a  “referrer list”.

·         Configuration links to the configuration page that allows you to change most settings.

·         Content Filters links to the content filter settings page that allows you to change most settings

·        Blogroll points to the OPML editor that lets you edit outlines (lists of links to other weblogs)

·         Navigator Links lets you access the editor for your navigation links.

·         Crosspost sites links to the reporting/configuration page for crossposts.

·         Logout logs you out and resets the login cookie (May or may not be on the Admin Bar depending on the theme layout!

Please keep in mind that you should not use the “remember login” option at a shared or public computer and that your should always use the “Logout” option when you are done working with your Weblog at a machine that you don’t have under you own control at all times.

Edit the Navigator Links

You can edit the navigator links by clicking on the „Navigator Links“ link in the administrator bar. The navigator links list is available in templates using the <%navigatorLinks%> macro and included in all standard templates. You will see a list with you current navigator list entries to which you can easily add a new entry by entering a title and url and clicking the “Add” button.

If you want to delete an existing entry, you can click the “Delete” button next to the entry and it will be gone. If you want to edit an existing entry, click the “Edit” button next to the entry. The entry will change to look like this:

Now you can edit the entry and save the changes by clicking “Ok”. If you don’t want to change the entry, click “Cancel”.

Editing the Blogroll’s

Each template knows about a standard blogroll with the filename blogroll.opml that contains a list of Weblogs that you read and which you want to share with others. To edit the blogroll, click on the Blogroll link in the administrator bar. You will see the following view:

How to edit and delete existing posts

Sample default record upon install:

Once you are logged in, you will notice two little image buttons below every entry; one is to edit the post the other is to delete it. The “Pen image” takes you to the edit page, the “X image” takes you to a confirmation page that asks you whether you really want to delete this post.

Adding new entries

Adding new entries using the web interface is so trivial that a picture says more than a thousand words:

To add attachments or pictures, use the respective “Browse…” button and find a file. Once you are back from the File Dialog, click the “Upload” button.

If you have special requirements for the HTML output, you can switch to the HTML view by selecting the “HTML” button and edit the HTML source directly:

Clickthrough. Click-through is an optional feature that tracks clicks through your page. All hyperlinks in your blog entry get replaced by a special link that lets the engine track it and then redirects to the desired page. The statistics for click-through are also displayed on a special page.

Cross-posting. dasBlog is capable of cross-posting content to other Weblog engines that support either the Blogger API or the MetaWeblog API and will keep cross-posts to these other sites synchronized with the local content. This feature needs to be enabled on the configuration page to be available. Once it’s enabled, you will have two more administrative pages; one is for managing the cross-post sites and one is to see referrals that you get from the cross-posted items.

The following is an excerpt directly from Clemons Vasters Blog:

The service settings of the configuration file are pretty much self explanatory; many of the individual services have their own documentation posts.

In the Basic Settings you can adjust, the title and subtitle, the contact email address (which is also used to send notifications to you from within the blog system), the external base Url of your Weblog (the one external users need to type in to reach your blog) and the name of the copyright owner.

The engine can send Notifications to you whenever someone posts a comment on one of your entries and whenever one of your entries receives a Trackback, Pingback or a referral from another site. You can enable any of these notification types using the checkboxes in this section of the configuration page. For the engine to be able to reach you, you also need to provide a valid SMTP server address in the SMTP Server Address field. The value may be a DNS name or a numeric IP address.

You can control the RSS output for Syndication in this section. The maximum days in RSS setting defines the maximum number of days that your RSS stream shall contain. This, again, is not a “number of calendar days” value, but a cumulative value. If you have posted only on 15 days in the last year and this value is set to 10, the RSS will contain the most recent 10 days of those 15.

The maximum entries in RSS value is a number defining the overall maximum number of entries that can be contained in your RSS stream. If the number of entries gathered within the days restricted by the maximum days in RSS setting exceeds this number, the only the topmost, more recent, entries, up to the count specified by this value are rendered into the RSS stream.

This section controls the Mail To Weblog feature. If you enter the DNS name or IP Address of a POP3 server and a POP3 user name and password here, the engine will try to check for new mail on this account periodically (the wait between polls is defined by the POP3 Poll Interval setting).

Please note that the engine will download and delete all mail from the given POP account while scanning for items to post!

I understand that the next version/release of dasBlog has defaulted to "Only processed". One dumb user did not read this guide (that was me, before I wrote this), and lost over 500 e-mails in a real on a job e-mail account. "Delete all" works well if you have a dedicated e-mail account for just your blog!

The incoming mail’s subject lines are checked for whether they are prefixed with a secret phrase, specified  in the POP3 subject prefix field. If the phrase is found at the beginning of the subject line (the test is case-sensitive!), the mail is accepted for processing. The engine will extract the mail and all attachments, store them and create a new entry into your Weblog.

MailToWeblog in DasBlog takes new posts via email with the email subject in this format:

SECRETWORD Blog Post Title [category1;category2;category3]

SECRETWORD is the prepended keyword that will cause dasBlog to post your post. This is configurable. The list of categories is separated by semicolons ";" and appears within brackets []. If you send email and HTML'ed inline images, those emails are automatically stored and the whole email is posted as is. If you send plain text email with attached images, those images are optionally thumbnailed and linked to, and of course extracted and stored on the server.

The siteSecurity.config file

The siteSecurity.config file resides in your {webroot}/siteConfig/  directory and may look somewhat like this in the beginning:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<SiteSecurityConfig xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  <Users>
    <User>
      <Name>myaccount</Name>
      <Password>a/somewhat$better!password</Password>
      <Role>admin</Role>
      <Ask>true</Ask>
    </User>
  </Users>
</SiteSecurityConfig>

The use is pretty obvious. Users are defined inside <User> tags where you can set the user’s <Name/> and <Password/>.

Note that that role MUST be set to “admin”.   See Contributor Role for expanded use of the siteSecurity.Config file.

The Site.Config File

The site.config file resides in your {webroot}/siteConfig/  directory and may look somewhat like this in the beginning:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<SiteConfig xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="urn:newtelligence-com:dasblog:config">

  <Title>My DasBlog!</Title>

  <Subtitle>newtelligence powered</Subtitle>

  <Theme>dasBlog</Theme>

  <Description />

  <Contact>dasblog@example.com</Contact>

  <Root>http://localhost/DasBlog/</Root>

  <Copyright>Your Name Here</Copyright>

  <RssDayCount>10</RssDayCount>

  <RssMainEntryCount>50</RssMainEntryCount>

  <RssEntryCount>50</RssEntryCount>

  <EnableRssItemFooters>false</EnableRssItemFooters>

  <RssItemFooter>This weblog is sponsored by &lt;a href="http://www.newtelligence.com"&gt;newtelligence AG&lt;/a&gt;. </RssItemFooter>

  <FrontPageDayCount>8</FrontPageDayCount>

  <FrontPageEntryCount>50</FrontPageEntryCount>

  <CategoryAllEntries>true</CategoryAllEntries>

  <FrontPageCategory />

  <AlwaysIncludeContentInRSS>true</AlwaysIncludeContentInRSS>

  <EntryTitleAsLink>true</EntryTitleAsLink>

  <NotifyWebLogsDotCom>false</NotifyWebLogsDotCom>

  <NotifyBloGs>false</NotifyBloGs>

  <ObfuscateEmail>true</ObfuscateEmail>

  <NotificationEMailAddress>@foo.com</NotificationEMailAddress>

  <SendCommentsByEmail>true</SendCommentsByEmail>

  <SendReferralsByEmail>true</SendReferralsByEmail>

  <SendTrackbacksByEmail>true</SendTrackbacksByEmail>

  <SendPingbacksByEmail>true</SendPingbacksByEmail>

  <SendPostsByEmail>false</SendPostsByEmail>

  <EnableBloggerApi>true</EnableBloggerApi>

  <EnableComments>true</EnableComments>

  <EnableCommentApi>true</EnableCommentApi>

  <EnableConfigEditService>true</EnableConfigEditService>

  <EnableEditService>false</EnableEditService>

  <EnableAutoPingback>true</EnableAutoPingback>

  <ShowCommentCount>true</ShowCommentCount>

  <EnableTrackbackService>true</EnableTrackbackService>

  <EnablePingbackService>true</EnablePingbackService>

  <EnableStartPageCaching>false</EnableStartPageCaching>

  <EnableBlogrollDescription>false</EnableBlogrollDescription>

  <EnableUrlRewriting>true</EnableUrlRewriting>

  <EnableFtb>true</EnableFtb>

  <EnableCrossposts>true</EnableCrossposts>

  <UseUserCulture>true</UseUserCulture>

  <ShowItemDescriptionInAggregatedViews>true</ShowItemDescriptionInAggregatedViews>

  <EnableClickThrough>true</EnableClickThrough>

  <EnableAggregatorBugging>true</EnableAggregatorBugging>

  <DisplayTimeZoneIndex>85</DisplayTimeZoneIndex>

  <AdjustDisplayTimeZone>true</AdjustDisplayTimeZone>

  <ContentDir>content/</ContentDir>

  <LogDir>logs/</LogDir>

  <BinariesDir>content/binary/</BinariesDir>

  <SmtpServer />

  <EnablePop3>false</EnablePop3>

  <Pop3Server></Pop3Server>

  <Pop3Username></Pop3Username>

  <Pop3Password></Pop3Password>

  <Pop3SubjectPrefix></Pop3SubjectPrefix>

  <Pop3Interval>30</Pop3Interval>

  <Pop3InlineAttachedPictures>true</Pop3InlineAttachedPictures>

  <Pop3InlinedAttachedPicturesThumbHeight>100</Pop3InlinedAttachedPicturesThumbHeight>

  <ApplyContentFiltersToWeb>true</ApplyContentFiltersToWeb>

  <ApplyContentFiltersToRSS>false</ApplyContentFiltersToRSS>

  <EnableXSSUpstream>false</EnableXSSUpstream>

  <XSSUpstreamEndpoint>http://radio.xmlstoragesystem.com/RPC2</XSSUpstreamEndpoint>

  <XSSUpstreamUsername />

  <XSSUpstreamPassword />

  <XSSRSSFilename>rss-dasblog.xml</XSSRSSFilename>

  <XSSUpstreamInterval>3600</XSSUpstreamInterval>

  <ContentFilters>

    <ContentFilter find="\$g\((?&lt;expr&gt;[\w\s\d]+)\)" replace="&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/search?q=${expr}&quot;&gt;${expr}&lt;/a&gt;" isregex="true" />

    <ContentFilter find="\$d\((?&lt;expr&gt;[\w\s\d]+)\)" replace="&lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=${expr}&quot;&gt;${expr}&lt;/a&gt;" isregex="true" />

    <ContentFilter find="dasBlog" replace="&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dasblog.net&quot;&gt;dasBlog&lt;/a&gt;" isregex="false" />

    <ContentFilter find="" replace="&lt;img alt=&quot;&quot; src=&quot;smilies/openmouth.gif&quot;&gt;" isregex="false" />

    <ContentFilter find="" replace="&lt;img alt=&quot;&quot; src=&quot;smilies/frown.gif&quot;&gt;" isregex="false" />

    <ContentFilter find="" replace="&lt;img alt=&quot;&quot; src=&quot;smilies/veryhappy.gif&quot;&gt;" isregex="false" />

    <ContentFilter find="" replace="&lt;img alt=&quot;&quot; src=&quot;smilies/unhappy.gif&quot;&gt;" isregex="false" />

    <ContentFilter find="" replace="&lt;img alt=&quot;&quot; src=&quot;smilies/wink.gif&quot;&gt;" isregex="false" />

    <ContentFilter find="" replace="&lt;img alt=&quot;&quot; src=&quot;smilies/happy.gif&quot;&gt;" isregex="false" />

  </ContentFilters>

  <CrosspostSites />

  <Pop3DeleteAllMessages>true</Pop3DeleteAllMessages>

  <Pop3LogIgnoredEmails>true</Pop3LogIgnoredEmails>

  <EnableReferralUrlBlackList>false</EnableReferralUrlBlackList>

  <ReferralUrlBlackList />

  <EnableCaptcha>true</EnableCaptcha>

  <EnableReferralUrlBlackList404s>false</EnableReferralUrlBlackList404s>

  <EnableMovableTypeBlackList>false</EnableMovableTypeBlackList>

  <ChannelImageUrl />

  <EnableCrossPostFooter>false</EnableCrossPostFooter>

  <EnableTitlePermaLink>false</EnableTitlePermaLink>

  <EnableTitlePermaLinkUnique>false</EnableTitlePermaLinkUnique>

  <EnableTitlePermaLinkSpaces>false</EnableTitlePermaLinkSpaces>

  <EncryptLoginPassword>true</EncryptLoginPassword>

  <EnableSmtpAuthentication>true</EnableSmtpAuthentication>

  <SmtpUserName></SmtpUserName>

  <SmtpPassword></SmtpPassword>

  <RssLanguage>en-us</RssLanguage>

  <EnableSearchHighlight>true</EnableSearchHighlight>

</SiteConfig>

There is no formal schema for this file as it is expected to change wildly and there’s also no namespace declaration for it for the same reason. Here’s the list of some of the currently recognized tags below <SiteConfig>:

·         <Root /> This is the most important element for you to change. This element contains the external root URL of you Weblog. All relative links are built using this value, instead of relying on the URL that was used for the incoming request, because that URL may not be what we want to have, especially when the URLs come through a complex redirect.

·         <ContentDir /> The value of this entry is the relative path to the content directory and should end with a forward slash. You should not need to change this.

·         <LogDir /> The value of this entry is the relative path to the log directory and should end with a forward slash. You should not need to change this.

·         <BinariesDir /> The value of this entry is the relative path to the binaries directory for uploads and should end with a forward slash. You should not need to change this.

·         <Title /> The title of your Weblog.

·         <Subtitle /> The subtitle of your Weblog.

·         <Theme /> The default design these that first-time visitors are seeing your Weblog in. Visitors can pick their own preference using the so-called Theme-Bar, which is included in all templates that come with the default installation. The available design themes are registered in Web.config. The Macros section has details on themes, macros and how to register new themes.

·         <Description /> The description for your Weblog. The description is a short description of the Weblog topics; maybe two to three sentences long.

·         <Contact /> A valid email address that’s yours. This email address is used to generate mailto: links on the site and is also the email address at which you will receive notifications.

·         <Copyright /> This is typically your name. The copyright symbol and the current year are automatically inserted into the templates, so you only have to put the copyright owner’s name here.

·         <RssDayCount /> A number defining the maximum number of days that your RSS stream shall contain. This is not a “number of calendar days” value, but a cumulative value. If you have posted only on 15 days in the last year and this value is set to 10, the RSS will contain the most recent 10 days of those 15.

·         <RssEntryCount /> A number defining the overall maximum number of entries that can be contained in your RSS stream. If the entries gathered within the days restricted by <RssDayCount/> exceed this number, the only the topmost (most recent) entries limited by this values are shown.

·         <FrontPageDayCount /> A number defining the maximum number of days to appear on your home page. This setting only applies to the default page and not to the category pages.  Everything else work just as with the <RssDayCount/> entry.

·         <FrontPageCategory /> This is an optional setting that sets a category filter for your home page. This filter is actually used on this documentation site and the effect is that only entries that are in this category are showing up on the home page. There’s one catch with this right now: If you set this value and you have entries that are not in any category, they will not be visible anywhere and, worse, you will not be able to edit them, because they get filtered out in the internal view as well.

·         <EntryTitleAsLink /> Set this to “true” or “false” depending on whether you want to have the Title macro formatting a link instead of just the plain text.

·         <NotifyWebLogsDotCom /> If you set this to “true”, the engine will notify weblogs.com any time you add or change a post. The default is “false”.

·         <ObfuscateEmail /> If you set this to “true”, all email addresses rendered onto the website will be mildly obfuscated to irritate spammers harvesting your page for email addresses. Default is “false”.

·         <SmtpServer /> The value of this entry should be a valid SMTP server address. The SMTP server should not expect authentication. This setting is used for the following four options:

·         <SendCommentsByEmail /> If you want to be notified by email about someone commenting on an item, set this to “true”.

·         <SendReferralsByEmail /> If you want to be notified by email about a referral on an item, set this to “true”. This option generates lots of emails on a busy site.

·         <SendTrackbacksByEmail /> If you want to be notified by email about someone sending a Trackback for an item, set this to “true”.

·         <SendPingbacksByEmail /> If you want to be notified by email about a Pingback received for an item, set this to “true”.

·         <Pop3Server /> Set this value if you want to enable the Mail-To-Weblog feature. This should be the DNS name or IP address of your POP3 server from which mails shall be retrieved.

·         <Pop3Username /> This is the username for the POP3 account used for Mail-To-Weblog. Please note that the POP3 account should be exclusively assigned to the Weblog, because the engine will remove all entries it finds, regardless of whether it’s able to post them.

·         <Pop3SubjectPrefix /> This is the password equivalent for Weblog entries received through Mail-To-Weblog. E-Mails are only recognized if the subject line starts with this exact character sequence. All other emails are ignored and discarded.

·         <Pop3Interval /> This number is the interval (in seconds) in which the Mail-To-Weblog handler checks your email account. The preconfigured default value is 240 (4 minutes) and that’s usually impatient enough for everyone.

·     <DaysCommentsAllowed /> This is the number of days which a comment can be added to your blog postss, for example just add <DaysCommentsAllowed>30</DaysCommentsAllowed> to your site.config and it will only allow posting of comments on entries not older than 30 days old.

Summary A feature that adds support for RSS Channel Images (for display in aggregators) -

Currently, RSS  Channel Image support is accomplished via the configuration file. There is a new XML Element that tells dasBlog what Image URL to use.

Example:

        <ChannelImageUrl>http://yoursite/yourblog/content/binary/channelImage.gif</ChannelImageUrl>

This should be the full URL to the image file that you wish to use for your channel. While the RSS 2.0 specification allows for varying image sizes, most popular RSS Aggregators expect to find the default image size of:

        width = 88px

        height = 31px

There is currently no configuration support for uploading and defining the image. This means that you'll need to upload your channel image via some other means (FTP, WebDAV, file copy, etc.) and then insert the FULL URL of the image in this XML element. dasBlog will then include the <image> tag in your RSS feed. It will use the title and description for your blog as defined in the configuration file (accepted practice based on RSS spec)

More information: RSS 2.0 Specification for the image element:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss#ltimagegtSubelementOfLtchannelgt