blog Version 1.0 User Guide
Nathan Binford
egenus@hotmail.com
Contents:
What Is A Blog?
What Does blog Do?
Why Should I Use blog?
How Do I Use blog?
A Blog is a chronologically ordered journal used on web site to document everything from personal diaries to corporate events. They have great potential as replacements for now overgrown FAQ pages and help desk applications. I have personally used a precursor to this software to create a categorized press release archive. Right now Blogs are gaining fast popularity and, with this tool, it is exceedingly easy to throw together a very scalable web journal.
blog is an interface or API used to create and manage web journals. You can easily customize what database and JDBC driver it uses to connect to its database. blog IS NOT a pre-designed web interface for journals, you still have to do that, but it does make the process significantly faster and more sturdy. blog has two objects that give access to the data, blogAdmin and blogView, and an object that controls access rights, blogUser. With blogAdmin users can add and delete threads and entries and manage users in the journal. With blogView users can retrieve journal entries. With blogUser users login to the journal and check to see if they have appropriate access rights to the threads.
The feature that sets blog aside from other web journal software is how it can maintain multiple topics in the same journal. Think of blog as a one-way forum where you control all the viewable entries. Topics, called "threads" can have multiple journal entries within them, as well as other threads which have the same properties. All of this is available through the same easy interface.
Using modular components cuts down dramatically on development time. Lets say your boss wants a whole new set of content outputted to the company web site today. How can you design a decent interface AND create a scalable means of storage and retrieval? The answer is simple, reusable software (like blog). Now you can throw together a project in a few hours that could take several days. Or maybe you aren't into any real coding and have no desire to be. With a basic understanding of Java and JSP you could use blog and not need to learn any databasing techniques.
blog keeps your development simple and time-effective, not to mention cost-effective (blog is FREE). It is also under the GNU license and can be legally modified and redistributed, so please share this software with your friends and associates and feel free to tinker with it. Maybe you'll have some good ideas.