Creating a Blog Without PHP and Mysql

So why do you want to use a webspace without PHP and MySQL when nearly every hosting package includes these features today? There are different answers for this. The first is cheap hosting, where you may have PHP but mostly no database installed for you. The second is basically if you don´t want any scripting to be involved in presenting your webpage or blog to your clients. This may fall into the category of search engine optimisations, where dynamically generated webpages are bad for search engine spiders like the Googlebot. Static webpages can be crawled way better then dynamic ones. In my personal case it was a webspace provided by my DSL provider, which has neither PHP nor a MySQL database included. So I was looking for a way to create a blog without these features.

After doing some research on Google and Sourceforge, I finally found a nice piece of software called Thingamablog. This program is free to download so I gave it a try and was fascinated about its features. Thingamablog is programmed in Java so you need to download the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) in order to run the application. You can use it either on Windows or Linux. You also need your webspace FTP account data to actually transfer your blog onto your webserver (you can also publish your blog posts locally on your harddrive for first testing the software). Thingamablog is a desktop blogging software and can be used like a content management system (CMS).

Setting up your own Blog

Thingamablog works with templates and so called template tags, which are filled with data like blog posts, the name of the author or description tags. After that the software generates Html-pages from these templates which are published on your webspace. When you start the application you will be presented with a wizard that guides you in setting up your blog. First you have to enter some informations regarding your webspace, namely the Base-Path of your blog (like "http://www.mywebsite.com/blog/") and the Base-URL (like "/htdocs/blog"). The Base-URL is the path where Thingamablog publishes your blog posts to, ask your webhost for more details regarding this adress. If you want to publish your blog on your local harddrive you must enter different paths. Your Base-Path should be something like "/C:/Mywebsite/blog" (notice the first slash before your actual path!), the Base-URL is the same adress plus the prefix "file://", so you would have "file:///C:/Mywebsite/blog" as your Base-Path. I know this sounds a bit difficult, but you luckily have to set it up ownly once.

When you proceed with the wizard, you have to type in your blog title and a description. Right after this you can enter some categories (or call it Tags) in order to arrange your different posts later. The same goes for blog authors, which is the next step within the wizard. You can assign different writers for the same blog. Next comes the design part, where you have to choose from a list of different templates provided with the installation of Thingamablog. You can also download different templates from the web (use a Google search for it) or even create your own one. If you want to develop your own template you have to play with template tags, so I would suggest looking into the help files that come with the installation. The last step before you can actually begin blogging is entering your FTP account data. Thingamablog needs your publishing path, your user name and password, which are all provided by your webhost. If you want to publish locally, simply select "local" in the drop-down list. Right after this you are ready for blogging and please notice, that you can change your blog configuration at any time, so if you made a mistake it´s no problem.

Start Blogging

Now you can start blogging. The whole process of writing and publishing posts is self-explaining. First you will write a new post, the you choose one or more categories. After this you can either save your post as a draft or save and publish it. Notice that you can change the posts Html-code, simply choose the tab at the bottom of the editor window. Play around with Thingamablogs features (I suggest you first publish locally to test out the software). There are a lot more things you can do with it. For example you can drive Thingamablog to ping different servers, use it as a feed reader to stay up to date or publish your pictures with it.

If you need further instructions, visit this nice tutorial about Using Thingamablog or this Forum, where you can also find informations about setting up commenting functions for your blog, which would be impossible without PHP or other scripting languages.