Boblycat HOWTO

Boblycat has a lot of features and although we try to make things as simple and intuitive as possible, we don't always succeed so we have made a few use-cases that might help.

How to contact an admin

Easiest way is to just send a private message to stig or karltk, and we will get back to you as soon as we can.

How to set up your blog

Most of our users want a personal blog where they can show photos, tell what is going on in their lives or post articles of general interest. This little text is an attempt to explain how to set things up. First of all, your blog needs a title. Go to My Account -> Edit -> Content. There should be a field for Blog Title. Please enter the name of your blog here. When you have started using your blog, stig or karltk will make a named link to your blog. An example of this is: http://journal.boblycat.org/your_username instead of http://journal.boblycat.org/blog/450. We will also add a link in the menu to your blog so others may find it easily.

How to photoblog

This is something many of our users want to do, and we want this to be easy. There is a good way that will save you time in the long run and which is fairly easy. Let's have a go :) First upload the photo or photos you want in your blog to the gallery. This allows you to reuse the photos in other blog-entries and pages too, as well as in the upcoming portfolio system. Click the GALLERY link, find the album where you want to upload, click ADD ITEM, make a caption and upload. Go to the Album view where you'll get a view of the items, and you'll find a button under the image which says BlogMe:

You will be sent to the Blog Creation page. The title has gotten a default value equal to the image caption and the image-insertion code (like [G2:5555]) has been automatically added for you. Remember to select fitting categories and maybe some text to accompany the photo and you are done. :) In case you want to add more images to your blog, there is a little Gallery button that looks like: . A new window will open. Find the album you want and then it will show a preview with thumbnails. Just click the photo you want to blog. You will be returned to the blog-creation page and you will have gotten some info like [G2:5555]. That is your picture.. You can add more pictures the same way, add text, etc. You click SUBMIT at the bottom when you are done. You have now blogged a photo! It is adviced that the maximum width is around 600 pixels to ensure that the layout remains fairly normal.

How to tag a blog-entry with several categories

When posting a new blog entry you are asked which category/categories to put it in. If you click normally you can select one category to post it in. Now, if you hold down the Ctrl-key you can actually select several options, e.g you can select BW and Street photography and even portrait at once. A good alternative when you feel that your blog-entry fits in more categories.

How to configure a block of your own

In the left column you will see a number of blocks. Upper one has general Boblycat-information, and then there are navigation-items, gallery images, .. You can also define your block which will be shown in your blog, next to your blog-entries and when people check your userpage. It's fairly simple to do so, go to My Account -> Edit -> Content where you can enter the title of your block and you have a bigger field where you can enter the content. Here you can write text, use gallery images, use basic html or something called bbcode. It's not hard to make links, one can do:

<li> [url=http://barbecuediguana.com/] Chris [/url]
<li> [url=http://flumpie.deviantart.com/] Flumpie [/url]
<li> [url=http://rollfilm.wordpress.com/] René [/url]

Which makes three little bullets on the left and with three links. Feel free to experiment :)

How to configure the gallery block for your blog

In My Account -> Edit -> Content you can also set limits to which galleries random photos should be picked from with the Main Gallery field. The way to do this is to go to the gallery (link in left column) and let your mouse hover over the album you want to showcase. You will see a link e.g like: http://journal.boblycat.org/index.php?q=gallery&g2_itemId=1072 In this case the album is 1072. So in the Main Gallery field you enter 1072 This feature currently only works for your blog and blog-entries. You can also select how many images to show and whether you want to feature your latest images or random ones from your gallery.

How to keep the URL namespace clean using aliases

In order to prevent total pollution of the journal.boblycat, namespace, we have made the following guidelines:

• In the root (journal.boblycat.org) only section names or blog names may occur.
• A blog name is the name of a user's blog, e.g. journal.boblycat.org/karltk.
• A section name is the name of a section. Currently the following sections are used: portfolios, music, categories and internal. Under music live various named music releases. Under categories live the various category names (e.g. school, theoretical, ...). Under internal live various pages related to the maintenance of boblycat.org, such as this one.

Examples: journal.boblycat.org/stig (blog), journal.boblycat.org/categories/school (category), journal.boblycat.org/music/adelaide (music), journal.boblycat.org/portfolios/hellokitty (portfolio), etc.

Feel free to add new types of sections (e.g. video) but please respect these guidelines so that we may keep the namespace relatively clean.

How to blog from Flickr

One new feature added is the support from blogging straight from Flickr. Flickr has a small button above images: which you can click to blog straight to Boblycat. If you haven't set up the connection before, a click on the button will guide you to a connect-to-boblycat wizard. This little step-by-step should have you flickr-blogging in a jiffy.

1. On the question of which weblog you have, please select MetaWeblogAPI Enabled Blog
2. When asked for login details enter the following url as API Endpoint: http://journal.boblycat.org/xmlrpc.php and your boblycat username and password.
3. That's it.

Next time you click the button, you can select the boblycat blog. You will be presented with a simple blogging-interface that should be simple to use. When you click POST ENTRY the entry will be posted on Boblycat too.

You may also configure the layout of your blog-posts in Flickr as well.

Please let us know if you have problems connecting Flickr and Boblycat. One known issue is that the Flickr-blogging interface doesn't allow you to select categories for your photos.