JBLogs or JB-Logs is an abbreviation for Jamie Balfour Logs and is of course is blogging mechanism. JBLogs was known as BlackCat, but BlackCat has since been dropped in favour of the play on my name.
It's a content management system if you like, it's design is simple. You build the page around it rather than doing it all from some third party design. This is where it has the upper hand on certain other blogging systems in my opinion.
I say this from experience because when I used WordPress it was a nightmare to have to integrate into the site.
JBLogs is one of what I call the Three Steps To Ditch Third Parties in an attempt to make the site more fluid and my own work, not some third party constructed site. The Three Steps To Ditch Third Parties started with my gallery, then the calendar and now the blog. Prior to this blog that this post is on, I used WordPress. It felt like an external website. I then started to build this blog.
Now it feels like my blog is part of my site, and it's now got it's own back end system powered by the wonderful TinyMCE rich text box and some clever PHP.
There are even little widgets at the side of every page (not on mobile and tablet websites) and on the front page.
Of course, the widget is also included in the default blog package and is accessed through AJAX so it can be used on any website if you want.
Simplicity is the main focus of the blog though. It's simple by design having just one directory for user editing whilst the rest is not meant to be edited. It's also lightweight. It also only requires one line of code to start it from an empty PHP file:
<?php include 'jblogs/assets/posts.php'; ?>
That is all that is needed to make the blog work.
New features to come to the blog include a spellchecker for TinyMCE, the ability to edit posts from the user interface (it shouldn't take long, but I've got a job at the moment and then there's university, so we'll see how that pans out) and certain improvements on the interface. It's also written in mysql_ commands not the newer mysqli_ commands.
