Introduction

Having created your blog and opened you will need to configure Firedrop2 so it produces what you want. This involves three steps :

1. Configuring Firedrop2
2. Editing your templates
3. Choosing a markup format

This page covers item number 1. For a full reference on the different options, read Options & Archives.

build.ini

build.ini is a text file in your blog directory. It contains various options that control how Firedrop2 creates your blog. You can edit it with a text editor, or choose "Edit build.ini..." from the "File Menu".

This brings up a dialog that lets you edit the most common options. Not all the possible options come in the default build.ini, so you might need to use a text editor to add them.

On the other hand, you won't need to use all the options that are in there. Only edit options that you actually need.

Values to Change

Before you can really create a blog there are a couple of options you ought to change. Some of the values you set here you will use in your templates, others control the behaviour of Firedrop2.

Values you ought to change (or look at) are :

• archive_method

  This is how often archive pages are created. I like the default d:7. This produces a new archive page for every week of entries.

  Alternatives are :

  • d:1 A new archive every day.
  • e:5 A new archive for every five entries. You can use whatever number you want instead of five.
  • m:1 A new archive every month.

  It is relatively important that you decide what you will use for this value early in the life of your blog. If you change it later, the URLs for your archives will all change. This will confuse people who might have linked to interesting entries.

• author

  Your name, how you want it to appear in your blog.

• comments_system

  The name of the third-party remote commenting system that you want to use to provide for user comments on your blog. No default, but 'haloscan' will be a typical choice (and the only one supported as of Firedrop2 version 0.2.2). Leave blank if you don't want commenting on your blog.

• comments_username

  Your account username on the 3rd-party commenting system. No default; leave blank if not using this feature.

• description

  A brief description of your weblog.

• ftp_login / ftp_password / ftp_port / ftp_server / ftp_startdir

  If you are using Firedrop2 to upload your blog by FTP, then it will need all this information. See Options for more info.

  If you are putting the files on the server yourself, you don't need to worry about these entries.

• num_front_page

  The number of entries that Firedrop2 will put on the front page of your blog. The default is 20 - which is quite a lot. If your entries are long, your front page will take a long time to load; unless you reduce this number.

  You can change it at any time.

• output_dir

  This is where Firedrop2 puts the HTML pages it creates - probably one of the most important values,

  The default is in a subdirectory of your blog folder - called articles_html.

  This value can be an absolute directory path, or relative to your blog folder.

• root_url

  The location of the front page of your blog.

• title

  A title to use for your blog. This will also be used by the commenting system

• rss_category

  This option decides whether or not Firedrop2 creates separate RSS feeds for each of your categories. The default is True.

• archives_latest_first

  If True (the default is False) then newer posts will appear first on your blog pages.

You may want to edit several of the other values at a later stage, but these will be enough to get you started. You can find a description of all of the possible options in Options.

Having configured Firedrop2, move on to Introduction to Templating. This covers the basics of editing the HTML templates that allow you to control how your weblog looks.