Thank you, double feature

This week's Philly PHPMeet-up was all about Drupal. The night was jam-packed with many wonderous things, including some of the latest and greatest drupal modules, philly-based sites powered by drupal, and even the drupal song (DANGER:ITS UBER-CATCHY and has remained firmly embedded in my brain since I first listened to it over-and-over again)

Two of the most interesting non-drupal things I first heard about last Tuesday night were Habari and Snag-it. Habari is an open source blogging platform that is being developed right here in Philadelphia, and Snag-it is a wonderful little program that allows you to quickly and easily take screen-shots and pimp them up all nice-like in one simple step.

I am so jazzed about both of these, that I decided to install Habari and produce a step-by-step tutorial using Snag-it. (The tutorial's target audience is a total n00b with a hosting account with Site5, who wants to get in on the early stages of this home-grown 'next-gen' blogging platform)

Here goes:
First, download the package here. Then extract all the files.


Next, create a new directory on your site, and transfer the files using FTP. If you need a good FTP program, download FileZilla - its super-easy to use and totally free.



Now its time for database stuff. Lucky for me, my Site5 account makes it nice and candy for anyone one who can point-and-click to manage databases. Simply log-in to site admin, and select 'mySQL Databases' --> Manage Databases. Scroll down to the section labeled 'Create mySQL database', and give it a name.



Once you have created the database, go back to 'mySQL databases' --> 'Manage Users'. First, create a user, and assign a password. Then, go to the section labeled 'Grant Permissions' and select the database and user you just created.



Now for the fun part! Your first look at Habari's simple-chic interface. To complete the installation, all you need to do is view the directory that you uploaded your Habari files to in a browser.



Fill in the information about the database name, user, and password that you just created. Give your new Habari Blog a name, and click 'Install'.



Voilà! - you have a shiny new home-grown blog!

So there you go - one night, two awesome new-to-me tools, one colorful tutorial. Now I'm off to get my hands dirty hacking into Habari to see what I can find.

woohoo!

Remove the Blogger Brand

The PANMA Web 2.0 Shootout last Thursday was a blast. My presentation on Blogger was great success, or so I was told...The one point that was mentioned in conversation afterwards was the nagging Blogger brand that must always grace every Blogger Powered Blog(or so you thought!) Well, it turns out that completely removing the Blogger Brand is easier than you think.

1) How to remove the Blogger Bar:
Who knew that by simply inserting one simple line of code into the top of your template's HTML you can completely hide the Blogger headbar? Well, these guys did, so now I know how to also.
Simply add this line to the very top of your template:

#navbar-iframe {
display: none !important;
}

To edit your template's HTML, simply click on 'Template' 'Edit HTML', paste the code as shown below, and then save the changes.


2) But what about the ".blogspot" domain?
That's easy! Blogger offers two options for you to have a custom domain name. You can either create a sub domain for your blog and change your DNS record to point to the google, or you can publish to your blog using FTP to your site. For more detailed information, check out Blogger Help.

3) Well, the favicon still gives away the fact that my blog is a 'mere blogger blog'
Truf, but have no fear! Simply tell your template where your favicon lives and wola!

link href="%27http://www.ascentive.com/favicon.ico%27" rel="'shortcut"
link href="%27http://www.ascentive.com/favicon.ico%27" rel="'icon'/"

Now you have a fully-branded blogging platform.