Once you've got germ pointed at the right directory, it knows it's own name and 
you've changed the dat directory's permissions to 775 things are pretty simple.

To write a post, create a file in your favorite text editor.  The first line 
should (but doesn't have to) be the entry's title.  Hit return twice to leave a 
gap between your title and your entry and then type away.  Try to limit your 
lines to 80 columns or (perhaps even better) the RFC-1436 recommended 70 
columns.  However, should you prefer hideously long lines that may not work on 
terminal clients, you can do that (you just shouldn't).

When your done, save your entry in your dat directory with a format like this 
FILENAME.post.  If it doesn't end in ".post", germ ignores it and your post 
languishes.  Make sure it's readible.  A quick "chmod 644 FILENAME.post" can
do that for you.

After that, you're done.  Germ handles the dating, displaying, and archiving
of your posts.  It also handles the creation, maitanence, and dating of your
comment files, stored in "FILENAME.post.cmt".

To customize:

To customize your header or divider, simply edit the header.txt or div.txt 
file in your dat directory.

To use as a static phlog maker:

Currently, germ natively supports only dynamic gopherlogs, because that's 
what it was designed to do.  However, if you wish, you can wrangle it into a
semblence of static blogging.

Running a command at the command line like:

$germ.cgi > phlog

will create a static front page linking to dynamically generated posts and
archives.

Similar prompts, such as:

$germ.cgi archive1 > archive1
$germ.cgi FILENAME.post > FILENAME.post  (this one's potentially dangerous)

will create static pages of your archives and posts with a few caveats.

If you are running prompts like "$germ.cgi FILENAME.post > FILENAME.post
in your dat directory you will overwrite your original post which can make
a mess of things, especially if you go back to running germ as a dynamic script.

The other major problem with this is you'd need to manually edit each file to 
create the proper links, changing things like:

1Older Posts	/users/YOUR_NAME/germ.cgi?archive1
to
1Older Posts	/users/YOUR_NAME/archive1

which could be kind of a pain.  Also, once you have a lot of entries it would
get to be a hassle to create a new main page, new archive pages one new post 
page and edit them all by hand each time you added a new post.  Oh, and every
time someone posted a comment, you'd have to regenerate and reedit the post
they commented on.

I may make germ more static gopherlog friendly in the future, but it's not a
top priority.
