Sweet! You CAN call in a photo from the menu after you’ve uploaded it. FlatPress uses BBCode to drop it in. I’m starting to think I need to learn a whole lot more BBCode than I do, even though FlatPress responds very well to straight-up HTML.

Look at the wiki for FlatPress themes. I’m overwhelmed a bit by how many themes there are to choose from, many of which have been ported from WordPress.

I’ve made a few changes here and there, but thus far I haven’t started hacking into the CSS and the templates for this FlatPress blog.

But I will.

After writing my entry on CMS and blog software that doesn’t require a database, one of the commenters recommended FlatPress.

It’s not just the name (a play on WordPress, on the off-off-off chance that you missed that particular bit of wordplay). OK, a lot of it is the name. By way of explanation, it’s called FlatPress because it stores its data in “flat” files and not in a database, such as the MySQL that powers the back end of WordPress and innumerable other content-management platforms.

But it turns out that FlatPress is a very easy-to-install blogging platform that uses PHP, stores the entries in the aforementioned flat files, runs extremely fast, takes up very little disk space (1.9 MB after the files are uncompressed, 508 KB before you unpack it) and is refreshingly simple.

Part of that simplicity at the level this particular blog is at includes entering a lot of HTML (or BBCode) tags, and it’s not as easy to bring images into the system as it is with something like WordPress. But there is an uploader in the FlatPress software, and once you know where the files go, it’s easy enough to call them into the blog with the proper tags.

Read the rest of this post

I took the offset off of the UTC so this blog reflects when the entries were created in Universal Time.

Edoardo Vacchi is the coder behind FlatPress, which is under the GNU GPLv2 License.

Edoardo does request donations, with a PayPal link on the FlatPress home page. I did make a donation — the first screen is in Italian, and the currency is euros. But once you enter the amount in euros you wish to donate and the enter your PayPal password, things magically turn into your own language (English in my case).

Thanks, Edoardo, for hacking on such a cool project.

When I get the time I’m going to start hacking into the code and customizing this particular FlatPress blog. I’ve tentatively decided to offer one entry three entries per page, and that works quite well both in WordPress and FlatPress because there are links at the bottom of the entry to easily go from one page worth of entries to the other. Kind of like paging through a book, no?

I’m always torn about how many entries to include in a blog index. Most, including my own, seem to go on much too long.

Ilene clued me in to the joys of Post Options in Blogger. Just click on the blue Post Options link in the lower left portion of your Blogger post window and you can either allow or disallow comments (which I don't care about) or ... change the date and time of your post. The ability to make posts appear as if they were made in the past (not entirely Kosher) or future (I do it all the time in Movable Type) is something I miss from the earliest days of Blogger. I'm glad to see it's either still here or has made a triumphant comeback.

This post originally appeared on The CTRL freak blog.

I thought Blogger had been eclipsed by WordPress.

That's not quite the case. I'm working in both and will try to get comfortable enough in WordPress to make an evaluation as to which I should stick with.

This post originally appeared on The CTRL freak blog.