Radio.active

The last addition concerns a couple of image links I put in place -- one to make it easier for AmphetaDesk users to subscribe to my RSS feed and the other to link to my Powell's.com affiliate account.

Radio seems to be a little persnickety about where images are located, and downright ornery about the syntax in img src tags. I have everything working properly on the Home Page, but I still don't have it right on all the category and support pages. I don't understand why.

Now AmphetaDesk users can subscribe to my RSS feed with a single click on the XML_Pill icon, the same way Radio users can suscribe by clinking on the XML_CoffeeCup. AmphetaDesk provides clear instructions on integrating AmphetaDesk into a site. I just did a cut-and-paste of the code into my Home Page template. Again, the syntax is persnickety -- especially the placement of / at the end of things. Radio couldn't seem to decide if the image path needed / in front of it or not.

I don't know Userland lingo or Frontier so this makes no sense to me. But I just looked for similar code examples, kept fiddling with it, and it finally worked. For the Home Page I did not put a / at the front of the image path.

But, like I said, the image isn't rendering on any of the other pages. That may be the problem.

It's the same with the Powells.com link. Everything works fine on the Home Page, but Category and support pages have a broken image link. I've submitted a query to the Userland Discussion group on this.

Haloo! Lawrence Lee responded already and pointed me to the radio.macro.imageref macro to solve this little instability. Thanks Lawrence!

It seems like the imageref macro may not work. I may have to point to the full path of the image on the Cloud site. A hard coded link will break when I transfer Radio to my own server because the path will change. Bummer. I don't like that but it will have to do.

Update: Doh! Somebody slap me...

The imageref macro generates the img src tag so there is no need to include it inside a tag. Thanks again to Lawrence for straightening me out.

Seek and Ye Shall Find -- PicoSearch

9:18:50 PM

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Everybody needs a search engine, and I got PicoSearch. Of course google.com is the hot search engine right now, but google searches the entire web. I needed some way to search just my pages. I had seen PicoSearch on a few other blogs so I decided to try it out.

It was simple, painless, and quick (three of the finest words in the English language). Go to the web site, sign up for an account, point PicoSearch to the home page for your site, and let it build an index of your pages. That's it.

Once the index is built you get an e-mail with account info and you can go back to the PicoSearch site, login and administer your account. There are a variety of buttons and logos you can choose, and there are several macros you can choose to go on your site and enable your search.

I chose a simple query box. I copied the HTML text out of the window, pasted it into my Home Page template just above the calendarMacro, and Voila! I had a search engine for my pages. I had to go back to the template and enter a couple of break tags in the PicoSearch code to keep column with where I wanted it, but it was a snap. I had no problems with this one. If you don't mind having the PicoSearch logo on your site it's a no-brainer. Highly recommended.

New Addition to the Home Page -- Blogroll

9:02:50 PM

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Big additions for the Home Page today. Woo Hoo!

First I started working with Links for Blogroll, RSS and Subscriptions. This is a way to store a separate list (Radio outline .opml file) that contains all the links to blogs (or other sources) you want to list on your site. Radio has a macro that reads the list, converts the contents to HTML, and puts it on your page.

It's easier than hand coding the links and it's easier to update than a template. The other benefit is the macro adds a Link Header in your Home Page template that points to the OPML file, allowing others to quickly grab the entire list of your links and add them to their own. Now, I haven't actually used this yet, and I'm not sure I would. But Winer says the link enables new kinds of harvesters, crawlers, and directories. I trust him.

There is discussion about some technical stuff I don't completely understand here. And Jake Savin's directions didn't work just as described.

First, it didn't work at all to replace my <%navigatorLinks%> macro with the suggested BlogRoll macro. I could never get the Navigator Links to show up. I tried several times to to include the navigatorLinks macro into the BlogRoll files as instructed but it never worked. I finally left the navigatorLinks macro in and moved the blogroll macro to another location on the template.

When I did that it worked. I got a little confused by the delay between making a modification and seeing it on the page. Sometimes I had to go to the Radio app to Radio --> Publish --> Entire Site and wait a while to get everything updated properly. But eventually it did. And it looks much better.

You can format individual lines (nodes) in the outline using HTML commands so you can control font size and color, etc. And now I can easily add new sites, or recategorize old ones by just dragging them around in the Radio Outliner. Pretty cool.