BlibbleLinks - advanced options

Hiding categories

Understandably, there may be some directories in the Links area which you don't want listed. For example, I have admin pages which don't contain links, and I have pages which I'm working on, but haven't published yet. Simply place a blank text file named nolink.txt in any directory you don't want listed

Note: this only prevents BlibbleLinks from displaying the directory in its listing. If you actually want to restrict access to it, you should investigate .htaccess files, and other such systems

Hard-links

Sometimes you might want a link to appear as a directory, even if it's actually a link. For example, Links/ contains a directory called "Software", even though it links to a completely different part of the site.

To accomplish this, create a directory with the desired name, as usual, then put a file called linkto.txt in the directory. It will then appear as a category, but will be a link to another place

Moving directories

To move or rename a link, a category, or a whole block of categories, simply move the directory structure on your webserver. This is one of the reasons I chose to use directories, that they could be easily moved around, in a way which is quite difficult on other link-management applications

When moving directories, could I reccommend that you keep the old directory around for a while, so as not to break any pages which link to you, or any bookmarks that people have stored. You can put a nolink.txt file in the old directory, to stop it being listed

Advanced editing

I find it much faster to use SSH to login to the website and edit links, compared to using FTP programs. You can type things like:

mkdir PhotoNet
cd PhotoNet
cp ../index.php ./
echo "http://www.photo.net/" > link.txt
echo "Description of photo.net" >  description.txt
cd ..

Which will create a new link, give it a URL and a description, all in less time than it takes to do an FTP transfer. Use the middle mouse-button to paste the clipboard into an SSH session in GNU/Linux, and the right mouse-button to do the same in Windows.

You can download an program called PuTTY (google it) to do SSH on Windows, while Linux systems have it built-in. There are similar programs for all other computers

ssh -l username -p www.mywebsite.com

... to open a connection using GNU/Linux. You might have to ask your website host to enable 'shell access' for you

(SSH is the encrypted version of Telnet, for anyone not familiar with the abbreviation. It allows you to login to a remote computer, and act as if you were at the keyboard of that remote computer, changing files, running programs, etc.)

Customising it

To change the look and feel of the web-pages, just edit the general_index.php to your liking. That's the good thing about this system, that you can just change one file, and the changes are immediately reflected in every page

There's a file called styles.css which lets you change the colours, text-styles, etc. without needing to touch HTML

For more detailed changes to the way links and directories are displayed, you may need to delve deeper into the general_index.php and include.php files, which are somewhat messily combined. Email if you need specific help