Congratulations and welcome to your new War blog. Check out the instructions in the about page. But first, to see the magic -- log in. Your email address and password are the same as the ones used to create this website.
What is it, seems weird?
It's a dynamic site, all the bits are built, some are cached, some things go off and get things from other servers. These aren't meant for high volume traffic -- their personal sites -- who the hell would
come? If you want me to set up static rendering to a really fast, high bandwidth server, I can do that and remember you're on the free server - it can be quite fast, but people are writing, discussing, searching, creating graphics and sites and otherwise using the machine, when you cough up we'll stick you on a better, less used server
.
A good backgrounder for the different types of Manila sites, with set ups of brochure, essay, news room, community -- on the Manila Newbies site. This is serious, simple, easy to use, with depth.
It'll last you a life time Members, editors, pictures, stories, memories, cooperation. We keep open standards so you can be assured that your site will never be out moded. And, since you can down load your site, if we go tits up, you can move it to somewhere else or serve it yourself. BTW: I run 5 sites and I personally will always want them there, for me and my kids.
The best bit is the Edit This Page -- see it, edit it, save it. On day one, that's all you need to know!
War? I need to publish
What you do with this site is your business. That's because you're the owner of the site or to use the terminology
Managing Editor. We can move you to another domain, and put it under one of yours.
You're in charge. You can add people to your editorial group and allow them to post stories, checking in and out, or you can keep it all to yourself. Lots of membership things to play with. Currently, anyone can join and start posting. If you add more Managing Editors or Contributing Editors, they too will get the extra buttons (only ME's see all of the Editors Only).
So go on. Log in. Flip the homepage (it's below the calendar) and start writing. It's simple and powerful -- maybe millions will read your ramblings!
What's a blog!?
The History of Weblogs by Dave Winer is a good place to start. Did you know the
first website was a blog? This history piece also has links to plenty of news stories about blogs. Incidently, if you don't like what we've got, you can get a free blog
here from Blogger.com. We've got a lot more to offer than this front page, hence the price.
At its simplest, our blog is easy, flip the page once a day or whenever, use the form below and your done. It was reviewed on the BBC's site. You can also right click or bookmarklet -- highlight text on another site, right click or bookmarklet, add some comments, zap it into your blog (see this photo howto). You can even SMS into your blog. Everything is archived, filed in the discussion group, double returned paragraphs in this blog are news snippets, these are syndicated around the web. As well as being available in WAP 
We can chuck it through all sorts of templates or standards. Of course, you can open the blog up by allowing ordinary members to post to the front page, moderated (if you like, like disturbing search requests) by the ME and CE's.
Yeah? So what else?
- You can change almost everything about the site, including its name, appearance, membership and bulletin features. The commands in the Editors Only menu at the top of this page is the place to start -- once you've logged in, of course. It's your interface with how to customise the site to your specifications. The best trick for me is swapping themes. Go to your Editors Only: Prefs: Themes. Then the next thing is Editors Only: stevesTitles -- making new pictures with your text headlines.
- You'll find out that you don't need to use html, you can use shortcuts, it's one of the simplest tricks to learn. You just surround a link or image with "quotes". Configuring this site is a doddle, many powerful things can be done -- as well as at it's simplest, just filpping the home page, and blogging away.
- After logging in (you'll get a cookie that will let our server know that this is your website) either: click the Edit this Page button below to edit this text or you'll also see a textarea edit that and click update. You'll notice that the date is set to yesterday, this is so you can immediately Flip Home Page that's the button under the calendar. This is something you'll soon be doing everyday.
- This is your home page to edit, it's a syndicated blog (but it doesn't have to be: syndicated or a blog), the other main section of the site is the discussion group. Then stats, lists, searching and an about page -- more faqs like this I suppose, a good overview with plenty of links (see the stories list) and there's the rest of the site -- the content management stuff -- the Editors Only: menu. You can build a site that's thousands of pages big, and arrange it, squish it through different templates; add plugins, swap this theme at anytime, change the graphic titles; work with other editors; change the domain name; download it, even use power tools. Powerful stuff. But from the get go, it's easy -- just edit this page
- You'll soon get the hang of it (if you don't, download the pdf [3.5megs]), join the mailing list, ask on the Manila-Newbies list -- everything's been asked and there's plenty of friendly people to help. Visit the Getting Started page on the Manila-Newbies site, it provides an overview and introduction to the different kinds of projects you can do with Manila. The Manila-Newbies site is there to help you work with Manila and to learn from each other. 20,000 users, editors, designers, writers, parents, students.
- Finally, please bookmark this page. This is your website. Be sure you can find it again. I'm working on a plugin that'll allow you to down load 172 bookmarks for this brand new site of yours. In the mean time the Editors Only: menu holds all the config and fun stuff. If you want it under your own domain name or if you need some help, tell me.
Sounds easy, is it?
Yes it is, and there's a good community to go with Manila. It will grow with you, as a newbie just getting the blog flipped is enough. There's even
training courses -- it's a skill. As a simple writing tool that gets stuff on to the internet it cannot be beat. Most of the site takes care of itself, set to email the ME (you) when something's posted, add stories to the directory and they'll appear in the site map, discussions are threaded, archives made, search engines added to, XML made ready, syndicators pinged, auto-check ins/outs, members' lists built, preferences modifyable, pictures categoriesed, 5 languages, even join-up-able and spawnable. So it is
pretty simple. Even football
supporters can do it (for
over a year now). Their main site has nearly
40,000 messages. Read a
testimonial.
There's some extremely powerful plugins out there and more macros coming. It's an active developer community.
Now, we're further down the page, I'd better explain the stuff to the lower left. The FBI pictures of terrorists is just as macro, you can chop it out of your template. The other boxes: moreover and newspapers, are macros in an include macro in your template. Yeah, don't worry after a day or two it'll make sense. It's actually message number 4, and if you swap themes that's the only one that'll change.
The moreover panel is searching, hourly, for news from thousands of news sources on the two words contained in that macro -- you can change them -- if you can figure out where they are. Just go to either the edit button below the Newpapers panel, or look in your discusion group ordered by time and date (not the topics view).
BTW: that macro, or a version of it can take the XML off your blog and stick it in their site. Your Flipped Home Page can appear in someone else's site. The reverse is also true, you can stick their blog on your site.
The Newspapers panel is one that I maintain, as I get more newspapers sent to me. Again, it's a include message macro (Msg no. 4) in your template that calls another include message macro (Msg no. 6) in your site. Fun Anyway, you can't edit the newspaper panel yourself even if you use Radio (that power tool I was talking about), as it will be over written by swapping themes -- and I update it from time to time. If you want to take over a branch of it, drop me a line.
Getting long
Well, I'm going on and on a bit. Trying to convince you it's worth it. It is. Hence, try it for 30 days, if you like it you'll want to buy it.
My comments
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