Jake Savin reports on the first-of-month Radio bug fix. [via Scripting News]

In a comment to my previous tutorial on liveTopics features, Blaine Wishart asks pointedly how I can explain the difference between the left sidebar on s l a m's home page and the same sidebar on the archive page for Sept. 30th (the day of its publication).

Well Blaine, I reckon it is a bit confusing, yet the explanation is real simple.

You see, the #homeTemplate.txt stored directly in the www folder of my Radio installation *does* include the call to the liveTopics macro as I showed:

<%liveTopicsHotButtons( howMany:50, flDisplayInColumn:true )%>

This is the template directly responsible for the layout of s l a m's home page.

But the archived pages are stored in a different folder hierarchy within the www folder. The file rendered as the Sept. 30th archive is stored in the 09 subfolder of the 2002 folder.

It just so happens that this 09 folder has a different version of the #homeTemplate.txt file, one without the call to the liveTopics macro.

By default, the month and year folders do not include any template files, so the rendering is done using the *top* template in www.

But I repost the content of my site once in a while, specially when I crash my Radio installation after tinkering a little too far with UserLand's code.

If I didn't archive the templates about once a month in the months folders, all my archived pages would have the latest layout when I repost them.

I'd rather keep their original layout, hence the monthly templates duplication from the current ones in www. This is all manual btw, no Frontier tools involved :-)

An interesting wish from Al Macintyre in Don Strickland's RadioFAQ:

Recent Radio Discussion Group Posts indicate that there is a very high risk of newbies trying to follow current instructions for adjusting the code in Prefs, and getting error messages that are unintelligible to them.  If Radio Userland is ever to be marketed successfully to a large mass of computer users, this is a problem in need of a solution.  I can see that one of two solution approaches is needed:

• Plug In Tools be developed in which the end user keys in the name of what is to be inserted, and its url, similar to how we handle adding a link in an editing box, or add a subscription to News Aggregation.  This might have to be a subset of a particular standard Theme, because of placement on the left or right side of the screen.
  • I think this is probably the more practical of the two approaches that I can think of.
• Wherever an error message could show up on user screen, add a trouble shooting button.  This would capture the text of the error message, the actual code that it was reacting to, the location of the scenario (specific Prefs from user perspective and www folder path name), then take the user to some Help resource that analyses the kind of stuff that might lead to this error.
  • Experienced XML programmers would not need the trouble shooting button.  The error message, and them carefully checking their code leads them to see what mistake they made.
  • Intermediate XML programmers would need the FAQ about XML programming to help them see what are the most common human misconceptions that might occur here.
  • Beginner XML programmers might need to continue posting questions to the Radio Discussion Group Forum