KidzBlog is an easy-to-use weblog publishing system for kids (and anybody else, for that matter). With KidzBlog you can publish weblogs that contain both text and pictures. KidzBlog weblogs are full-featured, with CSS controlling the look of the pages and RSS handling syndication (you do not need to understand RSS syndication to use KidzBlog). This User's Guide shows you what you can do with KidzBlog.

A weblog is a journal or diary on the web. It usually consists of individual posts where each post has a title, a date, and some text. Weblogs also have archives of previous posts, so that not all of the posts have to be on the main page. Usually there is also a place to put your favorite links, sometimes called a blogroll. Finally, most weblog publishing tools provide support for something called syndication, which is the ability to subscribe to a weblog from an outside tool such as Bloglines. Syndication is made possible by the presence of a special file that contains information about the most recent updates to the weblog.

KidzBlog is just like any other weblog publishing tool. It creates posts, archive pages, and a syndication file, and can publish the whole thing to a website using FTP. If you don't care to publish a weblog on the Internet, you can preview your weblog from a folder on your own computer. Each KidzBlog post can contain either a picture, text, or both. You draw the pictures and write the text directly in KidzBlog. When you publish your weblog, KidzBlog your posts into HTML and sends them to your web server. You don't have to do anything more than click the Pubish button in order to see your weblog on the Internet.

You can use KidzBlog for more than just weblogs. This user's guide, for example, was created with KidzBlog. You can use KidzBlog for many web content projects, including year books, book reports, and news.

All the pictures, text, and page layout information for an entire weblog is stored together in one KidzBlog file. That same file can be used with either the Mac or Windows version of KidzBlog. If you wanted to send a KidzBlog weblog to a friend, you could send just the one file and your friend would have the whole weblog.

KidzBlog's main window is the posts window, which shows a filtered list of all the posts in a KidzBlog weblog. Above the posts list are three popup menus that filter the list to show the last fifteen posts, the posts for a particular month, or all the posts in the weblog. Buttons along the top of the posts window provide easy access to often-used functions such as creating a new post, deleting an existing post, modifying a weblog's settings, or publishing the entire weblog to a web server.

To delete a post from your weblog, select it in the posts window and click the delete button. If the post has a picture, it will be deleted as well. Any pictures associates with deleted posts will be removed from the web server that servers your weblog the next time you pubish your weblog.

To create a new post in your weblog, click the new button. A new post window will open in which you can draw a picture and type some text. Your post will become a part of your weblog based on the date and time you created it. Most weblogs show their posts from newest to oldest, so that a reader can easily see what's new with you, but you can change the order of the posts on your weblog in the settings dialog.

Click the preview button to preview your weblog. When you preview your weblog, all the files are written to a folder on your computer and are not copied to your weblog's web server on the Internet. You can preview as often as you like before you publish your weblog on the Internet.

Most weblogs have links. They can be links to pretty much any other websites, but are usually links to your favorite weblogs. To create a link in KidzBlog, click the links button. A dialog will appear from which you can your weblog's links. Add links by clicking the '+' button and delete links by clicking the '-' button. When you add a new link, being sure to give it both a name and a URL (that thing that starts with 'http://'). When you preview or publish your weblog, you should see a Links section in the menu to the right with all of the links you have created.

Note that KidzBlog recognizes URLs that begin with 'http://', 'ftp://', and 'mailto:'. If a URL does not begin with one of those three protocols, then 'http://' will be added automatically.

Cick the settings button to show KidzBlog's Settings dialog. From the Settings dialog you can configure the way your weblog looks, as well as important information needed to publish your weblog on the Internet. The details of the Settings dialog are described in the next several sections of this guide.

The What tab of the Settings dialog contains the settings for your weblog's content. You can set the title, description and author. You can also decide which elements of the weblog will appear, and how many posts will appear on the main page. As you make changes to the content settings, the preview to the right will update to reflect the changes.

One of the settings in the What tab is a popup to control the order in which posts are published on your weblog. You can choose oldest-to-newest or newest-to-oldest. Most weblogs go from newest-to-oldest so that a reader can quickly see what has changed. If the new posts appeared at the bottom of the weblog, then a reader would always have to scroll down to the bottom to see new posts.

The Where tab of the Settings dialog is where you configure both your weblog's local preview folder, and the FTP information needed to publish your weblog to a web server on the Internet. If you don't plan to publish your weblog to the Internet, you can leave the FTP information blank. The FTP information is locked so that you don't accidently make changes to it.

If you are on Mac OS X and you have a DotMac account, you can publish your weblog on DotMac. To do that, mount your DotMac iDisk on your desktop and choose a folder in the iDisk to be your preview folder. Then, when you preview, you will really be publishing to your DotMac account.

The Look tab of the Settings dialog is where you change the look of your weblog. The Look tab contains a small representation of a weblog composed of boxes. To select a box, click it. It will be outlined in red. To change the look of a selected box, choose new settings for that box with the settings controls. The preview weblog on the right side of the Settings dialog will update automatically as you choose new settings for each box.

There are two kinds of boxes: background boxes and text boxes.

Background boxes sit behind the boxes they contain and are used to control background colors and borders. The background color will fill the background box and appear behind other elements in the box. The border will appear around the background. You can set the color, thickness, and style for each of the four lines that make up a border. Styles include, solid, dotted, and dashed.

Text boxes sit inside of background boxes and are used to control the settings for font, size, and color for the text that resides in those boxes.

It is possible to edit the individual lines of the border of a background box separately. First, select a border you want to edit by clicking it with the border selection control. Then, change the color, width, and style of the selected border using the popup and color selection controls located below the border selection control. The border selection control is composed of four separate red border lines. To select a particular border, click it. To select more than one border, hold the shift key down as you select each border. To select or deselect all of the borders at once, click in the center of the border lines.

A weblog post can have either a picture, text or both. Create your picture in the paint canvas on the Draw tab and write your text in the text box in the Write tab. Don't forget to give your post a title.

Tools to the left of the paint canvas in the Draw tab include a rectangle tool, an oval tool, a text tool, a paint bucket tool, an eye dropper tool, a line tool, and an eraser. Below the tools are line widths. To the right of the paint canvas are a palette of colors to choose from. Click a color to make that the current color with which to paint. Double-click a color to choose a new color. To the right of the colors palette are effects, which include undo, mirror image, rotate, duplicate, and erase (the bomb!).

In the Write tab are text styling buttons that you can use to style the text in your post. These buttons include bold, italic, underline, and link. Select some text in your post and click one of the styling buttons. The selected text will appear in the style you have selected. When you publish your weblog, the styled text will automatically be converted to HTML tags.

To create a link, select the text that will become the link and click the Link button. You will be prompted for the URL for the link. To see the URL for a link that you have already created, select some or all of the link text and its URL will appear in the field located directly below the post field. The URL field is editable. To change the URL for any link, select it and edit the URL that appears in the URL field.

KidzBlog posts are saved to a KidzBlog document file automatically whenever you close a post's window. You can also save a post manually by choosing Save from the File menu. Saving a post is not the same thing as publishing, however. To see the post on your weblog, you must publish your weblog to the Internet by clicking the Publish button in the main posts window.

Before you can publish your weblog on the Internet, you must fill out all of the FTP server information for your weblog in the Settings dialog (for more information about how to fill out the FTP information in the Settings dialog, see "Setting up FTP Publishing" later in this guide).

When you are ready to publish your weblog on the Internet, click the publish button in the posts window. All the posts and styles information that has changed will be uploaded to the server you have specified in the FTP section of the Settings dialog. When you publish your weblog for the first time, everything will need to be uploaded to the FTP server. If you have a lot of posts, then the upload may take a while.

KidzBlog tries very hard to publish only those parts of your weblog that have changed since the last time you have published. If you are having trouble getting KidzBlog to publish something that you know has changed, try republishing your entire weblog by choosing Republish from the Weblog menu. Please realize, however, that republishing can take a long time if you have a lot of weblog content. If you only need to republish the text in your weblog (but not the pictures), then choose Republish Indexes instead. This will publish everything but the pictures, and generally should be faster than republishing everything, especially if you have a lot of posts with many pictures.

Note that the main page for your weblog is called 'index.html'. If your website already has an 'index.html' file, then create a new directory inside of your home directory on your server and publish your weblog to that directory.

Some of KidzLog's preferences must be set in the preferences dialog. On Windows, the preferences are under the Edit menu. On the Mac the preferences are under the KidzBlog application menu.

KidzBlog's security preferences allow you to set a security password and require the user to type in that password when they try to do certain tasks. Tasks that can be configured to require a password include: configuring FTP settings, publishing, accessing preferences, and configuring HaloScan.

You should consider enabling KidzBlog's security password if you plan to allow children to keep a weblog and you want to keep them from publishing on the Internet without your knowledge.

To register KidzBlog, please visit the Registration tab in KidzBlog's Preferences dialog. If you do not yet have a serial number, then click the Purchase button and KidzBlog will guide you through the registration process. Once you have registered KidzBlog, you will receive a serial by email. Enter the serial number in the space provided in the Preferences dialog to register KidzBlog and unlock all of its features.

An unregistered version of KidzBlog will only publish up to 10 posts and has other limitations.

Currently, FTP is the only way that KidzBlog can publish a weblog to a web server on the Internet. Before you can publish a weblog, you will need to enter your web server's FTP information in the Where tab of the Settings dialog. If you already have an FTP account on a server that you use to publish web pages, then you probably know how to fill in the information that KidzBlog requires. If you don't yet have an FTP account, may we recommend the Bronze plan from Host Dome. It is very reasonably priced and should have plenty of space for a KidzBlog weblog. But you don't have to use Host Dome. Any web server that provides FTP access will do.

Once you have a server and you know your FTP information, you are ready to visit the Where tab of the Settings dialog to enter the information for your web server. Each KidzBlog weblog saves its own FTP information, so you will need to enter the information for each weblog you wish to publish.

In the Where tab of the Settings dialog you will see that there are fields for entering your FTP server's information. There is also a 'Locked' checkbox. You will need to unlock the fields before you can enter information into them. If you have configured a security password to lock the FTP settings in the Preferences dialog, you will need to type that password now. Once the fields are unlocked, you can enter the host name, username, password, and path to your FTP server. Note that you will probably leave the port field blank. If you leave it blank, KidzBlog will use the default port for FTP. Only set the port field if your ISP administrator has told you to. Also, you will most likely want to use passive FTP, so the Passive FTP checkbox is checked by default. If passive FTP does not work, then try unchecking the Passive FTP checkbox and publishing again.

Please realize that HaranBanjo only has a very limited ability to trouble-shoot any FTP problems you might have. The best place to ask for help, if you have trouble, is the administrator of the Internet service provider where you host your website.

When you publish a weblog, you may find that readers want to subscribe to it with weblog reading software. There are a number of popular weblog readers to choose from, including Bloglines and NetNewsWire. Some web browsers even have weblog subscription support built right into them (so there is no need to use a separate weblog reader).

What makes it possible to subscribe to a weblog is a special file (also known as an RSS file) that gets published along with all the other files that make up a weblog. An RSS file contains an up-to-date record of the recent changes to a weblog. Weblog readers read a weblog's RSS file to figure out what has changed.

KidzBlog's RSS file is named "index.rss" and is published to the same folder on a web server as the index.html file.

KidzBlog weblogs can be configured to allow reader comments through the HaloScan commenting system. In order to use HaloScan with a KidzBlog weblog, you must first visit the HaloScan website and register an account (registration for a basic account is free at HaloScan). Because of the way that HaloScan tracks comments for a weblog, you must register a separate account for each KidzBlog weblog you will create.

Once you have registered an account at HaloScan, you need to check the 'Use HaloScan Comments' checkbox in the Where tab of the Settings dialog. You also need to enter your HaloScan username in the field next to the checkbox. Once you have configured KidzBlog with your HaloScan information, you should start seeing a 'Comments' link on all newly published posts on your weblog. Next to the 'Comments' link will be a number in parentheses. That number indicates how many comments have been left for that post.

Note that the 'Use HaloScan' checkbox in the Settings dialog can be password protected in KidzBlog's Preferences dialog. It is recommended that you protect the HaloScan checkbox with a password if you intend to have children use KidzBlog to publish weblogs. That way they won't be able to set up HaloScan commenting without your knowledge.