One Canuck's Radio Weblog

  Saturday, 9 March 2002

.< 11:58:24 PM >

What Is The Difference Between Posts And Stories?: "You can find and open the upstreamed story to copy the URL by going first to the Stories index page on your public site at http://radio.weblogs.com/0100059/stories but substitute your user number for mine in the URL! Otherwise, you will see my story list ... "

I have a tip which I gleaned from a page on Userland's site (which I've since lost track of) which may make this easier for some people. Once the file has upstreamed, go to your events page. Look for the file that upstreamed. Right-click or control-click on the link and copy it to the clipboard.

Thanks to Russ for his stories on how Radio 8 works.

< 11:40:33 PM >

Nice of the Belgians to point out that most of us have the words to this famous Canadian poem wrong. "The poppies blow" is the correct line.

< 11:36:35 PM >

Yup. Everyone hates Toronto. But they'll gladly tax our tax dollars.

< 11:28:38 PM >

< 7:26:21 PM >

< 6:51:57 PM >

The coffee cup thing is already there, but it's in a more sensible place (at the bottom of the page) where it makes sense on any page on the site.

Also, he's heavily commented the theme so that even a neophite like me can find his way through.

.< 6:47:23 PM >

Looking through the template for the Three Column Flex theme now, I see that it is full of tables. Oh well. I'm going to stick with it for the moment. I guess creating three columns without tables is non-trivial at this point.

.< 6:39:35 PM >

I've got the leftLinks macro working to put some bookmarks in the first column. Now I need to improve the list and see if I can get the text closer together and smaller in size.

.< 6:17:16 PM >

Right. The escape character is the back slash not the forward slash. Doh!

.< 5:52:30 PM >

Changed my mind about the coffeecup macro. If I knew how to get it on my home page only I'd use it. But when I'm on a categories page the xml link correctly (in my mind) refers to that category's rss feed. But the coffeecup macro points to the site's main feed. Doesn't lend itself to a good user experience.

.< 5:47:28 PM >

Aha! As I suspected. I had upstreaming turned off and now that it's back on, the verb returns a date and time. Nice.

I'm still mystified about the syntax of calls made from outside Radio. I guess I'll remove the code from the previous post so that it doesn't muck something up.

.< 5:25:53 PM >

There's nothing showing up under the 'Last modified' header. When I look at the homeTemplate I see a macro call here. I think there's a syntax error here.

<\%if radioResponder.flStaticRendering {return (now)} else {return ("")}%>

if what? I think this should be

<\%if radioResponder.flStaticRendering = false {return (now)} else {return ("")}%>

but I'm not used to looking at Frontier/Radio calls in this new format. Let's give it a try.

Nope. I get a macro error. Nice try.

I tried inserting text into the else part of the statement and that gets returned. So I'm not passing the if test. I wonder why.

And how the heck do I escape written code here so that it doesn't get rendered?

.< 5:17:17 PM >

Actually, if I open the index.txt locally then Home becomes bold. But if I click on any of the other categories, they stay links.

.< 5:14:34 PM >

I'm working with Garret's Three Column Flex theme. I'm going to keep track of changes I made, and problems I find.

I want to add the coffeecup macro.

The navigator links always seem to be hot. For example, f I'm on the Music page then Music in the navigator links section should be bold and not a link. Is that a problem with the theme or with Radio? Or with me?

.< 4:28:32 AM >

So, I'm taking advantage of the situation. I'm going to try to go css. This should make for smaller pages and faster downloads. I don't need to be a purist about it by any means. But I'd like to make some effort.

Fortunately others who know what they are doing have gone before me. I've just done a bit of looking around but I see that Garret P Vreeland has some beautiful designs. I've downloaded his Three Column Flex theme and have installed it. I really like it a lot although I'll have to figure out how to adjust the colours. I love the Big Radio theme but I want to have three columns if I can.

.< 4:25:48 AM >

Lesson learned. Apparently the option to create your own theme is not there just for those of you who'd like to distribute themes to the world but for those of us who would like to preserve changes we've made to our themes for our own use.

Too late this time around.

.< 3:15:34 AM >

I screwed up my template pretty badly so I thought I'd start over by selecting Restore Defaults from Radio->Templates. Here's a big warning for you: it resests your Navigator Links as well! That was a surprise.

.< 1:11:21 AM >

I want to test the glossary mechanism so excuse me for a moment.

CBC Records

"Globe and Mail"

Too bad this doesn't work on my Manila site as well.

.< 12:36:34 AM >

Man oh man xmlCoffeeMug macro is a mess. First of all the image is missing. So find a site with the proper file and save it to your disk. Now where should it go?

I finally found the verb that calls it and can tell you that it goes here: /system/images/icons/xmlCoffeeCup.gif.

But that's not all. I downloaded the image from a couple of different sites and in the Finder it claimed to be a 140 kb file. What? Maybe I'm missing something. Anyway, check to see what you find. I opened it in GraphicConverter and saved it again and ended up with a 4 kb file. Much better.

Are we finished yet?