Overview
The Personal Weblog System is a perl script that works as some kind of personal journal and text file station, which only you can read. Think of a very basic weblog tool which get mixed up with a online text editor. The main difference to other weblog systems is, that you add new entries from the same page you read the entries. This page is password protected, that's why it is a "personal" weblog system. And you can add, view and edit your own text files online.

If you are interested in setting up a weblog system, which others can read also, PWS is the wrong thing. But Ted Hawkings made a great rewrite of PWS to enhance it to an easy and very basic weblog system, so try his GTBlog.

Features

• add new entries in automatically monthly generated journal files (with date and header)
• browse all journal files
• add, edit and view your own text files
• search all files
• use html in your entries
• have a lot of buttons to click on

Purpose - What it is for?
It's a tool for people who work a lot online and on different computers. I as a student use it for noting the daily progress of my work and to have some information about books and persons I daily work with always available, even in libraries, and without always syncronising laptops or palmtops.

Test it online
Before you want to read on and to install it you may want to take a look at the Personal Weblog System demo in action. Passwort is "test". It's on a free server as I dont want to be responsible for things other people enter there. Because it's a free server there are advertisments, which will not appear in your version, of course.

System Requirements
Your web server software must support Perl CGI scripts and your administrators must allow custom CGI scripts.

Download
Download pws.zip (ca. 5kb)


Version History

• 0.54 - Changed the date format of the monthly file. Instead of log-1-2005.txt it is called log-01-2005.txt in order to enable correct sorting of the files.
• 0.53 - Enabled search for german Umlaute. Added hint for the two different uses of the "new story/file"-button. Added option for different path to pws-logo.
• 0.52 - Added option for automatic linebreak encoding. See also new paragraph under "Installing".
• 0.51 - Link to PWS-Page added. Disabled possibility of creating files without .txt-ending. Removed Bug with the Error-Message.
• 0.5 - First Release

Installing

• After downloading the zip file extract it to your computer. It contains the program pws.pl and two pictures.
• Open pws.pl with a text editor. In the first line you can read
  #!/usr/bin/perl
  This is the path to the server's perl interpreter. Normally you can leave it as it is, but sometimes web servers have a different path, like "/usr/local/bin/perl" and "/usr/bin/perl5". In case it don't work, you should take a look at the online help of your provider or ask him for the path to perl.
  Now - very important - change the password in the program code. In the first lines you will find a line
  $MyPass = "test";
  This means the password is "test". Just enter something you want here and save the script.
  In the next line you can alter the default option of linebreaks. If enabled ("yes") every line break you do with the return key is coneverted into html code and because of that visible if the monthly file is shown. Note that this option applies ONLY to the "new story" function, not if you edit a file. In the "edit" window, all of the html code is shown and you have to fill in line breaks by yourself.
  In very few cases you will have to alter the ending from pws.pl to pws.cgi.
• Now upload the files to your cgi directory with a FTP Program. You may wan't to place it in a own directory, as with the times a lot of text files will prosper in your cgi-bin. For security reasons you should'nt name this folder "pws" - otherwise it would be easy to read your monthly files. Also at this step something can go wrong: You have to upload pws.pl in "ASCII"-Format and the pictures in "binary"-Format. But a lot of FTP-Client already do this automatically.
  Now, if you have a Unix Web Server, you have to set file permissions (chmod). Otherwise you will get an error when using the program. Set the permission of pws.pl and it's folder to 755 (rwx r-x r-x), in other words, you allow everything exept "write" of "group" and "other".
• Now everything should work. Try to start the program from your broser, for example: http://www.yourserver.com/cgi-bin/pws/pws.pl

Using
I hope Personal Weblog System is very easy. If you want to add a new entry, click "Create Story" and the entry is added to the actual monthly file (which is automatically shown at startup). If you want to add a new text file, click the same button, but enter a filename in the field before. You can only create files with the ending ".txt". Use simple html code to format your text:

• Enter "<br>" for a line break
• Enter "<b>This text bold</b>" for bold text
• Enter "<i>This text italic</i>" for italic text
• Enter "<u>This text underlined</u>" for underlined text

For viewing and editing you can easily click the buttons in the right column.
The search works with a "and" relation. It was the hardest part to code and it's still not working perfect. Note that it will also search the html code you may have written in the files. But you get google-like extracts from the hits, isn't that great?

Security
The Personal Weblog System is not a very safe script. Safety has always to do with knowledge, and if someone has more knowledge than the author of a program, the program is unsafe. So this script is very unsafe ;-)
The main problem is, that everybody who knows about how the program works, knows how the monthly files are named and can access them. So, better place your program in a folder named NOT "PWS". If you access your script from a external computer, someone *could* *theoretically* see the URL (and the folder name), visit this PWS page, check the program code and then access your monthly files. But you shouldn't get to paranoid over this.

Copyright Something you should really care for
Feel free to use the program and to alter the code. But don't forget that this is my piece of kinky art, and you should always blame me for it. At least you should leave the notes of copyright and authorship in the code.

Apologies
This was my first perl script intended to go public. I have a really old school style of programming, as I learned it with basic and pascal. There are really a lot of useless variables in the program, and I guess a lot of chaotic passages. It would be really helpful to hear some advices from experienced programmers or hints how to make a better and faster live search.

Another useful program
I'm also using the start-script from Zoltan Milosevic. For me it's the perfect addition to the Personal Weblog System and also targeted to people who work online on different computers. You can read more at the Start Script Home Page.