Radio UserLand, RSS, Weblog Tools and Design
Wednesday, March 24, 2004A Tutorial Weblog: Great Approach!
I'm not switching from Radio UserLand to Movable Type just yet, but the day will surely come. Radio UserLand is a nice CMS, but lacks some basic features (such as post to past or future, spell checking, etc.) and has stability problems. The company is focused on Manila now, which they should, given the price people paid for that package. However, other packages are starting to eat their lunch at the low end.
A Tutorial Weblog: Great Approach!. Never underestimate the value of a good tutorial.
In the last couple of weeks, I've started getting much more comment spam on this weblog than ever before. When it was only one or two comment spams per day, that was no big deal for me to delete manually. But lately it's been more like 20-40 comment spams daily. I finally had to implement some prevention measures.
One reason I've held off on this task is that I use Movable Type weblog software. While I like its functionality, from the beginning I've disliked the extreme geekiness (from my perspective) of Movable Type. Its documentation is minimal, hunting for answers in the support forum is confusing and time-consuming, and fixing anything requires messing with arcane code. A non-programmer like me can easily do a lot of damage trying to make a simple tweak to my weblog. (Which is why the design of CONTENTIOUS is so basic.)
Fortunately, I've just discovered a fabulous and well-written resource for people like me, which I'd like to recommend.
If you use Movable Type and you're not a programmer, check out the Learning Movable Type blog at Elise.com. This is the most coherent, practical, and readable basic resource on Movable Type that I've seen anywhere....
(Full story...) [Contentious Weblog]
Look Ma - No Tables!
A seemingly simple question asked a while back at MezzoBlue, one that I struggled with myself for a long time before giving up and using tables:
Is it possible to use floats to position a fixed-width sidebar on the right of a page, with a liquid content area, if the content comes before the sidebar in the markup?
Floating, and not absolute positioning is necessary for the sake of a clearing footer.
1) no changing the order of the code (although adding new divs would be fine), and 2) no using absolute positioning unless you can somehow make it work with the footer.
Ryan Brill came up with an ingenious solution using negative margins that seems to work in almost all browsers. I have re-done the templates on this site with a variant of that method posted by Janos Horvath, which allows a background color to extend the full height of the page regardless of whether the content or the sidebar is longer than the other.
Finally! Table-free! (Hat tip: Richard Eriksson)
[The Tweezer's Edge v3]
High praise for Rhye
Rhye wrote up a Newbie Tip for Liz on "How To Insert A Picture Into Your (Radio) Blog", based on the following remark in Liz's weblog:
"...and if I ever figure out how to upload pictures, you will see for yourselves. I know that I just need to go to Rhye's site and find the info, because she is the be-all, end-all Radio Goddess, but that didn't happen today."
Rhye thanked Liz for the encouraging words, but claims its not even half-true. If you only knew about all the macro code Rhye helped me write (wink!). I only aspired to be a "Rogue Radio Rat" (and not a "Radio Rug Rat"!).
Rhye really is doing a great job of helping out in the Radio forums, even though she seems to attract more than her fair share of Mac users with Salon.com weblogs and she has neither one.
P.S. Rhye should really know better than to tell me not to post things like this. :)
[The Tweezer's Edge v3]
Get Better Rankings on Google With Weblogs
Get better rankings on Google with weblogs.
Lee LeFever: Case Study: Using a Weblog to Achieve #1 Rankings in Google.
Most of this stuff matches my own experiences as well.
[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
Gallery RSS Generator
“Gallery RSS Generator is a script to generate an RSS (version 2.0) feed for an installation of Gallery. For more information on what RSS is, and why it’s nice, see Dave Winer’s RSS 2.0 specification. Even though you may not use an aggregator to keep up with your favorite websites, someone who visits your gallery might. Hence, it’s helpful for everyone.”By meryl@lockergnome.com (Meryl). [Lockergnome’s RSS Resource]
Alphabetically Sorting Articles in a Category
Re: Alphabetically Sorting Articles in a Category. Kingsley: I've written a script that displays a list of weblog posts ordered by date:
http://cadenhead.org/workbench/stories/2003/06/18/displayingAPostIndex.html
Changing the list from date order to alphabetic order ought to be reasonably simple once you start puttering around with UserTalk.
http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench [Radio UserLand Messages]
Journey Inside a Tool
Welcome to the enhancedAggregator tool code tour. The visit will take you to all the components of a typical Usertalk tool for Radio Userland, and will provide you with scenic views of Radio's beautiful news aggregator and its unique driver architecture.
Over the past week, I've received several messages from would-be Radio tool developpers who apparently thought my guidelines for collaborating to the enhancedAggregator project were a little thin.
It reminded me of my own experience, about 2 years ago, when I first tried turning activeRenderer into a full blown tool and kept pestering Simone Bettini and Andre Radke with questions.
So I tried to deliver in Journey Inside a Tool the kind of information I would have liked to have readily available when I started studying Usertalk tool writing.
I hope it will help anyone planning to write a Radio/Frontier tool, whether it involves the News Aggregator or not.
For further discussion of the enhancedAggregator project, please follow the enhancedAggregator thread in the radio-dev support group.
[s l a m]
Radio RSS publishing fixes
I've released a couple of fixes to the way Radio handles RSS publishing to the radio-dev support group this morning.
The first patch modifies radio.weblog.writeRssFile so that Radio shortcuts may be properly expanded in RSS feeds. For instance, a post containing my Lorem Ipsum glossary entry would properly expand in the rss.xml file:
<item>
<description>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.</description>
...
The second patch includes 3 related parts and introduces options for formating the RSS feed's title for categories, to get rid of the current Author Name: Categorie Name format limitation.
Until the time Userland publishes fixes to the main Radio distribution, you may download and open with Radio the parts linked in the radio-dev message.
Surgeon General warning: Applying patches without having at least some knowledge of the working of the Radio application (as opposed to its desktop website operation) may seriously damage your installation. Be patient. Eventually, Userland will publish bug fixes in the main distribution.
caveat #1: These parts will get superceded once Userland fixes the main Radio distribution.
caveat #2: If you decide to instal the RSS category title fix, you need to open and replace all 3 related parts.
caveat #3: If you are running the k-collector client for Radio, the shortcuts fix to writeRSSfile won't work, since Matt has highjacked the whole RSS file driver to include ENT topics in the feed.
See also: categories | k-collector | Radio Userland | RSS 2.0
[s l a m]
Fix For Shortcuts Not Expanding in RSS Feeds
Steve Hooker and Marc Barrot both provide solutions.
Creating Text Date Links in Radio UserLand
Creating text date links in Radio. While redesigning Workbench, I learned that Radio UserLand macros can be used in customized images for permalinks and other icons.
Using this feature, I created text-only date links:
- Change the Day Level Permalink field to <%longDate%>
- In the Day Template, remove the <%longDate%> macro.
- Add an <%archiveLink%> macro to the template.
The macro will be replaced by the long version of the date, linked to a daily archive page. [Workbench]