Radio UserLand, RSS, Weblog Tools and Design
Monday, February 10, 2003Automating the web (screen-scraping). Simon Willison has pointed to a number of web screen-scraping tools in his weblog. These are useful for two reasons: they can be used to automate web activities that the websites themselves don't easily support; they can also be used... [Column Two]
Here is way to view your Radio weblog on your desktop:
Use this link only with Radio running. This can allow you to do two things: 1) provides you a preview of your weblog if you are publishing while disconnected (ie. a laptop on an airplane), and 2) allows you to use Radio as a personal journalling tool that is never published (this is a great way to create a extremely private back up brain of time organized notes). [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Restoring Radio's Default Background
... Mark, you can get the plain display to come back -- you don't have to restart Radio -- just right click on the background and choose Back. The "normal" background is also a Web page. It's in a file named background.html in the Appearance sub-folder of the Radio folder. You can edit that file, of course. (But keep a copy so you can restore it. Mark is right, it can get awkward, but it's lots of fun to play with.) [Scripting News]Thanks for the update Dave. I thought I tried the context menu to get back to Radio's default background, but I clearly did not try hard enough. It works just like you said it would. [On The Mark]
Writing Posts From Radio's Outliner. For the last week I have been writing all of my posts from an outline in Radio and loving it. It turns out to be pretty easy to set up, if you are reasonably comfortable with working in Radio. I still have some additions I want to make to the framework and hope to tackle some of these additions in the weeks ahead.
- Support directives specifying an alternate renderer (so I can easily drop a table in a post).
- Provide a framework for managing posts (a bit like the old Radio 7.x weblog framework).
- Package everything up for easy installation on a non-technical user's machine.
Radio Tip Of The Day. Radio's glossSub macro allows you to substitute the text phrase of your choice for the text normally associated with a shortcut. For example, earlier today I wrote a story titled Accessing FoxPro 2.x Data With DBFView. The link was generated using Radio's shortcut facility - the title of the story enclosed in double quotes is automatically resolved and converted into a link using the Story's title as the link text. Radio's shortcut feature does allow you to associate any text phrase you want with the shortcut, but this is a one-time thing; the shortcut text is permanently associated with the shortcut. Sometimes you want to change the link text depending on the context in which it is used to improve the readability of a sentence. That is where the glossSub macro comes in handy.
With the glossSub macro you can still refer to the linked item using a shortcut, but you can override the link text itself. Using the macro is incredibly easy. I used this syntax in a prior post: <%glossSub("Accessing FoxPro 2.x Data With DBFView", "adventure")%>. The first parameter is the shortcut itself, the second is the link text I want to use. An optional third parameter allows you to specify an anchor tag within a page.
The glossSub macro, shortcuts, and writing in Radio's outliner become an unbeatable authoring combination when you automate creation of story shortcuts.
[On The Mark]Radio tweak: editor size.
From the helpful folks at thought?horizon comes this useful tweak:
We have just added a useful tip on how to modify the size of the editor window used to write posts. The short depth of 9 lines makes longer posts difficult.
The basic steps are:
- Open the Radio Userland console
- Open Root.root tables
- Navigate to user.radio.prefs.browserBasedEditorSize
- Set whatever value you like and return to your home page.
You can read more in our Radio How-To. Look under Tricks and Tips, Look and Feel.
[thought?horizon] [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]