Making a weblog with Tinderbox. In the spirit of honesty, I must also report that my experience of making a weblog with Tinderbox was painful, painful, painful. Even in spite of my enthusiasm. Why? All that practical knowledge about weblogs that Mark imparted to us at the Tinderbox Weekend SF had evaporated somewhere between Hotel Rex and my home.
Blank page syndrome again. What do I do? I looked at Mark's presentation- I didn't want to build anything from scratch the first time I tried this, so that was out. I looked at Doug's sample weblog... but couldn't figure out how to make the HTML come out! I used the Simplicity weblog assistant, but again, I had the same problem. Finally, I expanded the README FIRST outline item inside the Tinderbox file that Simplicity had made for me. Aha! This is where the instructions are!
Ok, now how to get the HTML to come out? Groping around I finally found the export as HTML option under the File menu... command-shift-H. And voila! A weblog on my local Apache server.
And now... the templates that make the website... argh. How does this work? Why do the templates live outside of Tinderbox... so you can use Dreamweaver to work on them, I suppose, but it doesn't say that anywhere either... So after about 15 hours of fiddling with things, I finally got it to work more or less the way I wanted.
Still not working: permalinks, archives, automatically date and timestamping posts as I put them in the archives folder. Update: I fixed the permalinks.
Mark, if you're taking suggestions- put a note somewhere in the assistant or the documentation that tells people to expand that README item and read the steps! Better yet, also put the steps into a short How To PDF file, outside the manual, and call the file "How to use Tinderbox to set up a weblog.pdf" or something like that, so it's obvious. I know it seems so elementary, but saving newbies like me a few hours would be helpful, after all, I'm using this program so I can spend less time at the computer screen, not more...! :-)
And it would be great to have more sample files included, with simple descriptions of how they work. And sample templates- RSS and Atom feeds that actually work right out of the box. And website templates that are fully CSS compliant.
All that said, I still love Tinderbox, it's much better than anything I've used so far! I'm on my way to understanding it. [Adam Feuer]
Early this year I used Tinderbox to write a weblog for my job at Symantec. I stopped after a month or two for lack of interest, but in that time I had the same problems as Adam. I never did really understand the templates--I was just using one of the stock sets, which are rather minimal. Tinderbox isn't really a tool for weblogs, I think, but rather a tool for creating a tool for weblogs.
The thing that actually bothered me the most about maintaining a weblog in Tinderbox was not the template complexity, but the inconvenience of uploading. Tinderbox doesn't have any way to upload new files to the web server, so you have to do that manually. My work weblog was pretty much a "best case" for ease of posting--all I had to do was remember to mount the server's hard drive and then export directly to the appropriate folder on the server. That was still too much trouble for me, compared to Frontier, CityDesk, and Radio UserLand. I suppose I'm lazy, but for me it's a necessity that a web tool be able to take care of its own uploading without bothering me with the details.
10:07:06 AM 
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