Thingamablog Blog

Setting Up the Upload Parameters

Thingamablog is pretty easy to set up once you know the magic. It is also easy to change the setup since just about everything you put into the setup wizard can be changed later. The most confusing part of the setup for me was specifying the Path and the URL on the very first page of the wizard. I must confess that I got this part wrong a couple of times, and the results were confusing. So here is the straight skinny on what those two things mean.

Path: This is the path that the FTP program must follow to find the right directory to put the files into.

When you sign up with a company to host your web site you get part of a disk. The server software gives you a chunk of space and assigns it the name "/", which is your "root" directory. That is as far up as you can go as a user on their disk. All of your stuff starts at "/". That space is further broken up into directories for various purposes, for example, /public_ftp and /public_html. There is probably also a folder called "/mail" and one called "/logs".

Files that you want to make available to the public for FTP download are put into /public_ftp. Files that you want to make available to the public for access using http are put into /public_html. That is the directory that contains your web site, i.e. all of your .html files.

The FTP program needs to know the complete path from your "/" directory all the way down to the directory where you want to store your blog pages. Normally that will include the "public_html" directory. The path on my server for this blog is:

/public_html/brian/blogs/TAMB

URL: The URL is different. Thingamablog uses it to create the internal links in your blog to its own pages, such as archive pages. Since the URL path goes directly into the web pages, it must look just like a path that an outside user would use to get there. Your web server knows enough to send requests for web pages directly into your /public_html directory, so readers do not have to put that part into the path. The server itself, of course, is addressed using your www address, for example "http://www.thekimerers.com".

So when you enter the URL into the wizard, enter the path that you would type into a browser if you were just trying to read the blog from the outside. Most of the path will be the same as the Path entry, but do not put in the "public_html" part.

The URL for my setup is

http://www.thekimerers.com/brian/blogs/TAMB/

P.S. If you are writing the blog to your local disc, use the complete path from your home folder to the blog for the Path variable, and use the "file://" protocol instead of the "http://" protocol in the URL. In my case, the Path is

/home/brian/blogs/TAMB

and the URL is

file:///home/brian/blogs/TAMB

Notice that there are three "/" characters after the "file:" part. Two of them are for the protocol spec. and the third is the "/" for the root directory. On a Windows computer it could be something like:

file://C:\blogs\TAMB