Radio UserLand, RSS, Weblog Tools and Design
Thursday, October 03, 2002Wow! mnoGoSearch Rocks!.
Wow! mnoGoSearch Rocks!
[The FuzzyBlog!]Given my background in search and retrieval (like, oh, 15+ years), it's an absolutely travesty that my websites and my blog aren't searchable. And, yes, I know it. A real problem though, when you know a lot in an area, is that you become a perfectionist and are unwilling to not have perfection -- and that doesn't ever exist. So, alone, unsearchable, my websites and blogs have wandered in the wilderness. For the proverbial 40 days and 40 nights. And then a shot rang out ! Well actually John smacked me on the head and basically shamed me into implementing a search engine. He recommended mnoGoSearch so I ran with it. After a few errors, wrong turns and some silliness on my part (and more than few difficulties with their "documentation"), I now have a searchable site and a searchable blog. What's even better is that not only is mnoGoSearch hackable, I've been able to use its url spidering to implement a simple table of contents for my Radio stories on marketing (that url will go away in a few days when I make it better such as eliminating the stories which are still in draft stage). In the future I'll use it to implement a link checker and other tools that rely on link spidering. I am still fine tuning the indexing and making changes but the basics of search and retrieval are now quite functional.
Strongly recommended -- if you are willing to roll up your sleeves and grapple with poor documentation and a wee bit of bizarreness.
Weblog calendars useless?. Last week Jonathan Delacour removed the calendar from his weblog and explained why in Say goodbye to useless calendars:
it occurs to me that I never use the monthly calendar to access previous posts on my own site or any other site I visit. And, a quick check of my blogroll revealed that only a third of the sites displayed the standard weblog calendar on their main page. Those who don't have a monthly calendar include links to either monthly (the majority) or weekly archives.He goes on to complain about weekly archives and their effects on google searches, and he points to a full-screen calendar with post titles and a photo randomizer for a possible replacement tenant for the screen real estate vacated by the calendar. [Radio Free Blogistan]
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This is Big; deserving of front page coverage! ~ dws. |
Adding Comments To activeBookmarks. If you take a look at the bookmarks activeRoll on s l a m's home page, or at this bookmarks outline, you'll notice that most of the bookmarked links start with a 'collapsed' outline wedge. Expanding the line will reveal a one line comment for each link. Adding comments is in my opinion one of activeBookmarks nicest feature. [read more] [s l a m]
activeBookmarks: Picturesque Definition. Ok, a picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words, so here is the best definition of activeBookmarks I can come up with: [read more] [s l a m]
activeBookmarks Tutorial. I've published part 5 of the activeRenderer tutorial series last night. It covers publishing your browser's bookmarks in a dedicated outline page or an activeRoll. These activeBookmarks are the latest feature of activeRenderer vs 1.1, released on Tuesday. [read more] [s l a m]
Kit search and category-only posts.
Kit's search overlooks category information for a post; the upshot is that category-only posts do not get a permalink. Today I added a couple of lines of code to Mark's KitSuite.renderWeblogItem routine to fix this small oversight. You can download the code and try it out.
See, this is the kind of thing I expected from having an open source project. I guess it gets into the real nature of the concept, since Kit isn't really an open source project, just some software I put together that I happen to publish with an open source license. Radio also makes it more difficult to send a code patch than, say, some project in C, but even so, this is the first time anyone's actually sent code in the hopes that it'd be folded in.
And not to seem ungrateful, but I ended up doing the same thing in, shall we say, a more general (read: much less readable) way. I also copied the code to KitSuite.past.permalinkUrl, but I still think I'm the only person actually using that. Eh.
So if no one has any other complaints or fixes for Kit in the next few days, I guess 1.1.8 will be coming out.
[Mark Paschal: Kit]Kit 1.1.7.
Mark Paschal will add permalink improvements to Kit. Guess I should get busy with that then. =)
Actually, I just realized it worked for me since I started using KitSuite.past.permalinkUrl for the permalink. But of course I should still fix the built-in macro.
Thus: Kit 1.1.7.
[Mark Paschal: Kit]Another improvement to Radio as a blogging tool.
Thanks for another useful improvement to Radio. This took me about 4 minutes to install, including time for adding short names to a handful of categories that needed it. Now I can see all the categories I've posted a particular item to.
[McGee's Musings]Get Your Permalinks Here, They're Lovely.
With regard to my last post about making backlinking easier, I've modified UserLand's code to make it easy to see a particular post's categories and get at the matching permalink.
You'll get a checkmark for the home page and any categories to which the item has been posted, with each checkmark linked to the permament location for the item within that category (unless it's not being rendered, in which case you'll be told).
If you wade into weblogData.categories and set a shortName for the category, that'll be used instead of the full name, saving a lot of space. Enjoy!
An Answer to the Multi-Author Weblog Macro.
Roger Turner sends in this answer to my question of a few days ago:
Inserting the macro:
<%local (adrpost = @weblogData.posts.["<%paddedItemNum%>"]); if defined (adrpost^.sourceName) {return ( string.popSuffix (adrpost^.sourceName, ":") )} else {return ("")}%>
into your #itemTemplate.txt file (for the multi-author weblog category) does exactly what I was looking for: takes the sourceName from the contributor's RSS feed and strips the colon and everything following it. I'll soon announce where this multi-author blog is (and you can see the results there). In the meantime, thanks to Roger for sending me the answer! I love seeing this kind of generosity online.
[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]Truncating my RSS feed.... Thanks to Marc for his rssTruncate macro. I've decided to start truncating my feed and his macro works great. I had to mod [read more] [jenett.radio]
RSS Resources. Steve Pilgrim posted number of good links to resources/information on RSS feeds yesterday. Mark Nottingham's RSS Tutorial got my at [read more] [jenett.radio]
Derek is an inspiration to me in many ways. For example, I like how he aggregates multiple weblogs on his home page, so I'm going to try to learn how RSS Monkey works. [Radio Free Blogistan] [dws.]