How to make a weblog-style diary!

First a little preamble: Before I created Diaryland, I created Pitas, which was the first-ever weblog creation site, back when there were like 30 weblogs around or something (that was back when a weblog was mostly a list of links with some commentary about them, which is how lots of weblogs still are. Oh man I sound like an old stupid man now: "oh and also we rode to school on horses and used tincans to get on the internet!" haha ugh). The site got very busy and was fun, and then I also created Diaryland, which got even busier than Pitas (Diaryland has somewhere between 200 and 300 thousand diaries now!). One thing I have always meant to do was to integrate Pitas more closely with Diaryland, but because of various factors, I haven't gotten around to it. Recently I realized that it might just be faster to basically add the features that Pitas has to Diaryland instead, so that's what I've done! It turned out not to be as fast or easy as I hoped to do, but oh well, it's done haha!

So what am I talking about anyway, what is the big difference? Well: With this new feature, you can have multiple postings on one page, as opposed to the old system where you of course have one entry per page. By following the steps below, you can create a weblog-style page on Diaryland which lets you put multiple postings on one page easily. Before now, you could always do this by editing your entries to add stuff to them or whatever, but that was a pain and not many people did it.

So, now we have the best of both worlds, all within Diaryland, which means you can keep a normal diary as well as a weblog-style one, and still use all the handy built-in Diaryland stuff like buddy lists to see when your friends updated their diaries or weblogs. You of course have full control of your html, free subdomain, etc., all the stuff you have with normal diaries (and I'm going to be adapting the notes feature very soon so you can have notes atatched to specific postings, the way many weblogs work). Now, how do you use it? Let's begin!

There are a few steps you have to do below. I would make it easier, but I'm going to leave it like this while I make sure all the bugs are out and while I take a few days off to rest (I'm still here and reading email, fixing things, etc, I'm just ignore non-essential things for a few days). First of all, I recommend starting a second diary if you want to keep a weblog. You can switch over and just start using this on your normal diary too, but it might seem wonky having a bunch of page-long entries and then suddenly a bunch of shorter ones. It's up to you though, but yeah, I definitely recommend trying it out with a brand-new diary first while you experiment with it, etc.

Step 1. First, you need to make some changes to your template. You know the template that determines how your entries look (click here to open the editor in a new window)? Well, you need to remove the %%date%%, %%time%% and %%entry%% part from there, and replace it with %%entries%% (you can leave the %%prev%% %%next%% and other tags though). Then, you want to take the stuff you just removed and stick it in a new template. Click here to go to the editor for that template. Here is a visual example that might help explain that. You can click it to make it open in a new window, which will make the text less garbled:

Step 2. Now, the only thing left is to change the 'add an entry' page you use. When you want to add weblog-style entries, you have to use a different page to add entries. For now, you have to go to the normal "add an entry" page and then click the line at the top that says "Click here to use the form for a weblog-style diary". Or to make it easy you can bookmark that page once you're on it, to save yourself the extra click. I'll add something soon that will make it know automatically which entry form to take to you, sorry about that!

So that's it basically! Don't be afraid to email me (andrew@diaryland.com) if something isn't working for you and you can't figure it out from these directions. If it's an actual bug I'll get to it quickly, but if not, it might be a while before you get a reply. Keep an eye on the members area to see when I'm back replying to emails in full force!