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Here is a step by step guide to setting up a Silt blog server to work for more than one blog (after all, once you start, everyone you know is going to want one!):
- Open VisualWorks 7.x visualnc.im
- Click the Launcher status bar on the right, choose Connect to Cincom Public Repository
- Launcher | Store | Published Items
- load SiltSSPFiles
- When prompted that a file name is not right for your platform, all you need do is create the directory for that file
- load Silt
- While that's happening, sort some files and dirs out:
- Copy webtools.ini, default-site.ini, config-site.ini, wtklogo.gif from VW web dir to VW image dir
- Edit default-site.ini
- directory = $(VISUALWORKS)/image
- Launcher | Web | Read Configuration Files
- Launcher | Web | Server Console | Create Server
- Server Type: Smalltalk HTTP Server (Tiny HTTP)
- Hostname: localhost
- Port: 8009 (8008 is taken for some reason on my PC)
- Virtual Directories: blogs
- This will give you paths like http://localhost:8009/blogs/steve. If you want your blogs to start at the root - e.g. if you only want one blog called 'blog' - you can specify no virtual directory, and omit /blogs in the URLs below.
- Press 'Create & Start'
- Open the Blog Manager tool: Launcher | Tools | Blog Manager
- For each blog you want, press New in the Blog Manager and fill in the form:
- Appkey: your user name, e.g. first part of your email address
- This will be your blog's name, and will appear in the URL after SSP Home
- SSP Home: http://localhost:8009/blogs
- RSS Path: same as appkey
- RSS Home: http://localhost:8009/blogs/appkey (replace appkey with what you entered above)
- Base Path: .
- Username: same as appkey
- Password: you choose!
- Site Administrator checkbox: check for first, probably not for others
- fill in the other fields as you like!
- Press Set Up, Quit
This will have the RSS files that Silt generates be served by Silt. If you are behind a web server like Apache or IIS, you can have that serve those files instead, which may be faster. To do that, create a subdirectory rss of your image directory, and enter rss as the RSS Path and http://localhost:8009/rss as the RSS Home. Then create a virtual directory /rss in Apache/IIS that points to the rss subdirectory you created.
You can now do any of the following (replace APPKEY with what you entered for appkey above!):
- view your blog from http://localhost:8009/blogs/APPKEY
- login and make new entries from http://localhost:8009/blogs/APPKEY/blogLogin or with the Blog-Tools bundle in the Open Repository.
- subscribe to your blog in an aggregator such as BottomFeeder with http://localhost:8009/blogs/APPKEY/APPKEY-rss.xml
These instructions will hopefully have helped you get started with a development server on a local machine. Here are some instructions on deploying a production blog server by Using Silt with Runtime.im.
Stopping Spam
Silt checks inbound comments and trackbacks (if you have them enabled) against a blacklist. That blacklist is held in a file called badText.txt, and that file should be in the same directory as the image. The file should look something like this:
textToMatchHere
moreTextToMatchHere
And so on. Spaces are ok, and each line represents an individual snippet of "reject" text to match against. The server will create a directory called "spam", and drop anything that matches in there (also in there - things that violate the other spam rules, like "too many hrefs" or "too many from this IP address").