v1.0b3 Released

Thingamablog v1.0b3 has been released! In addition to a few bug fixes, this version includes several new features such as WYSIWYG entry editing capabilities.

Get the whole scoop on what's new in v1.0b3 here.

French Translation

French speaking thingamabloggers will be happy to know that Thingamablog is now available in French thanks to Guillome who provided this excellent translation.

To implement the French translation in the current version, simply download lang.zip and copy it to the "lib" subdirectory in the directory where you installed Thingamablog.

v1.0b2 Released

The second public beta of Thingamablog v1.0 has been released. This version includes several bug fixes and usability enhancements along with a couple new features such as a "Feed Reader" tab on the Options Dialog. Users now have the option to update the news feeds at a specified interval. In addition, feed items can now be formatted when they are posted to blog entries via a template.

v1.0b2 also slightly improves on the performance of the previous beta. The user database now gets loaded in a separate thread, which reduces startup time. The help system and find dialog are now initialized only when they're needed, rather than at startup, thereby further reducing startup time and the memory footprint.

Thingamablog v1.0b1 RELEASED!!!

The first public beta of v1.0 has finally been released! This version includes a whole kitten-kaboodle of new features and enhancements. It might be a good idea to have a cursory glance at the included User Guide to see what's new. The most notable new feature is the integrated news reader which allows you to subscribe to, and make posts from, the RSS or ATOM feeds of your favorite weblogs/websites.

For those upgrading from the previous version, please have a look at the Getting Started instructions so you can properly import your 0.9.x blog into the new version.

Development update

For those that have asked, the next release of Thingamablog, v1.0, should be along in the near future. For a quick look, click on the screen shot.

The new version will include -many- new features and enhancements which are too numerous to go into detail here. But a few of which are...

• Users can work on multiple weblogs simultaneously
• User-definable template elements
• Publish any files that are part of your site (ala content management)
• Fully integrated news aggregation (Make posts from your favorite RSS feeds!)
• Export/Import your weblogs from an RSS feed
• Users can now create their RSS/Atom/whatever feeds from a template
• More flexible templates (Template variable attributes, etc)
• Calendar generation

Recently Updated ThingamaBlogs

Thingamablog users can now notify this site of blog updates via an XML-RPC ping. Updated ThingamaBlogs will appear on the Recently Updated Blogs page.

To configure Thingamablog to ping this site, follow the steps below.

• Open the Blog Properties dialog for your blog (Blog menu/Blog Properties...)
• Switch to the "Pinging" tab and click the Add button.
• Enter "Updated ThingamaBlogs" in the Service Name field.
• Enter http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php in the Service Url field
• Click OK to save the ping service and ensure that the Ping checkbox is selected

That's it. Now whenever you publish your blog, it will appear on the updates page.

As of v0.9.4c, newly created blogs have this service enabled automatically. If you don't want to ping this site, simply disable the service by unchecking "Ping"

0.9.4a Released

This release will probably be the last one before the next major version ,v1.0. It doesn't add much functionallity to the previous release, but rather ties up a few loose ends on 0.9.x

0.9.4a adds a feature whereby the user can specify whether to generate full or limited entries in the RSS feed. In addition, the spellchecker now ignores HTML tags.

Commenting and trackbacks with Haloscan

Want commenting and trackback capability for your Thingamablog powered blog? It's fast and easy with Haloscan. Just sign up for an account with Haloscan and follow the easy instructions for adding the code to your template.

For Thingamablog blogs, you'll use the <$EntryID$> tag in the Haloscan code. So the bit of code for commenting/trackbacks will look like this...

<a href="javascript:HaloScan('<$EntryID$>');" target="_self">
<script type="text/javascript">postCount('<$EntryID$>');</script></a> | <a href="javascript:HaloScanTB('<$EntryID$>');" target="_self"><script type="text/javascript">postCountTB('<$EntryID$>'); </script></a>

That's all there is to it.

0.9.4 Released

This release adds a Ping feature whereby users can notify services like weblogs.com that their blog has been updated via an Xml-Rpc ping.

Also, users can now post and publish blog entries with a single click from the EntryEditor dialog. This saves the user from having to click "Publish" after posting/updating entries.

Additionally, this release fixes a bug in the undo/redo implementation, and a bug that caused the program to crash when certain Blog tags were mismatched in the templates.