A Peculiar Blog

When I started my first blog, I was using thingamablog to do it with.  I’ve long since converted to WordPress but I remember it well.  It was actually a decent program.

Then on the latest edition of the flog “My Two Cents Worth_{(freenet link*)}” there’s talk of a version that’s been modified so that it’s possible to use it for freenet.  I’ve known about this version since it was created and I even knew that the original developer of the freenet mod hasn’t worked on it in a long time and has, in fact lost their source code in a hard drive crash.  What I hadn’t realized however was that in all this time, nobody else has taken up the project.

So, I took a look at the test flog _{(freenet link*)} and the flog (a ‘flog’ is a Freenet Blog) of the guy who did the mod _{(freenet link*)} and it’s all very familiar Thingamablog style blog, though the only known executable: Thingamablog-1.0.5.freenet.jar

has got a few bugs that need to be worked out.  Apparently it’s not quite the version used to insert /jaff/15// _{(freenet link*)} and the original project was never completed.

Since the modified source is not available, I got the source for Thingamablog 1.16b from Sourceforge and tried to recreate what had been done on 1.0.5 Here’s the source code for what I’ve managed so far: Source code for freenet version of thingamablog1.16b

So far, I’ve managed to do the part described in /jaff/12// _{(freenet link*)}, so it’ will accept
#$#ps.key;/#$#e:ps.ednum;// as a base URL which FiW can then parse into the correct freesite key for insertion, but there still remains the part described in /jaff/13// _{(freenet link*)}.

I’ve not been able to figure out where in the source the thing puts together the URLs for categories, archive pages, or individual article permalinks

The problem is that while I’ve varying degrees of skill in Basic, C, html, php, tcl and a bit of javascript I haven’t done much with Java at all.  This makes figuring out somebody elses code a lot more difficult.

Back in January I tried asking on the Thingamablog forum on Sourceforge and haven’t yet seen a reply.

If somebody would be willing to take a look at this source and give me a clue or six I’d love to see this project completed and working.  Especially if it could achieve Jafo’s original goal of adding functionality to TAMB that would let it handle the inserts as well as the blog management duties.

This would make creating and maintaining a flog so easy that it could well bring more *current* freesites into existence.

Besides, as was pointed out on /mytwocents/61//_{(freenet link*)}, 0.7 has taken this idea and run with it.  THEY have a thingamablog that is tailored to talk directly to the 0.7 node.

http://downloads.freenetproject.org/alpha/thingamablog/thingamablog.zip

I don’t know about anybody else but this idea originated on 0.5 and I’d like to see 0.5 benefit from an easy to use, self contained, Flog publishing system that this could turn into.

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* Note: links marked with “_{(freenet link*)}” will only work if you have freenet 0.5 running on 127.0.0.1:8888

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