Web publishing made untraditionally easy

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Hot Ink is a complete online publishing solution for small publishers. It’s also so much more.

Hot Ink is a publishing system that makes it easy for small publishers (like you!) to distribute content online. It’s an archive, taking special care to ensure all uploaded content is carefully protected and always available. It’s a communications hub, allowing you to push your content quickly, easily and effectively to anyone with an internet connection.

But it’s also a platform. With an easy-to-understand API, Hot Ink is extendable to meet your always-changing publishing needs. Develop your own application extensions to serve content to a new medium, to facilitate reader discussion, or just to have a little fun.

Hot Ink is an open source software project currently under development and launching Summer 2009.

Recent updates

Tutorial: How can I enable comments to my site?

October 29th, 2009| By andrew

That’s actually a trick question. Comments are already enabled but you need to add a few things to your templates to display the comments and form.

You can do this many ways but these are the steps we recommend.
1) Add a template called ‘Comments’. This will be for displaying existing comments and displaying the form to leave a new one
2) Add a template called ‘Comment’. This will be for displaying an individual comment
3) Add a template called ‘New Comment’. This is the form for leaving a new comment
4) In your article template, include the new ‘Comments’
There’s sample code for each step at the end of this post.
But first, a few technical details. (more…)

Template Data – Part 7: Linking

October 29th, 2009| By Chris

This post will focus on a key task you’ll encounter while working with any website: linking. To make linking as easy as possible, Hot Ink provides a series of Liquid filters that will build links to any Hot Ink page. Hot Ink linking helpers will automatically decide which text to use as the link text unless you’ve provided specific text as an argument. (more…)

Template Data – Part 6: The Section/Category Drop

October 29th, 2009| By Chris

If you’ve been working with Hot Ink for a while, you may have noticed some overlap between the use of the terms “section” and “category”. In Hot Ink your newspaper can have many categories, those categories can have many subcategories, those subcategories can have their own subcategories and so on. We use the term “section” to refer specifically to your top-level categories, those that are not subcategories of any other category.
(more…)

Template Data – Part 5: The Blog Drop

October 29th, 2009| By Chris

You can access your Hot Ink blogs from 2 different locations. The first is on the blog index page as the array variable ‘blogs’, the other is through the newspaper drop as ‘newspaper.blogs’. This can be used in combination with the ‘newspaper.latest_from_blog’ hash to run through a list of each blog and the latest posts in each blog.

For more information on how to work with Liquid data types like hashes and array, read: http://wiki.github.com/tobi/liquid/liquid-for-designers

Blog entries are available through the Article drop, with one added variable, an ‘entry.blogs’ array of all the blogs this entry is belongs to. In all but a few rare cases, you can access the entry’s blog data using the syntax ‘entry.blogs.first’. (more…)

Template Data – Part 4: The Issue Drop

October 29th, 2009| By Chris

Issues represent the printed editions of your newspaper. You aren’t obligated to use issues to organize your content, but it does help readers navigate your site, especially those who are looking for an article that appeared in a certain issue of your newspaper. Issues are special; they can have an attached PDF.

Issue are generally accessed through the newspaper.latest_issues array, newspaper.latest_issue or through the “issues” array on an issues index page template.
(more…)