The Shifted Librarian comes through again - It feels right when I first read it, but then it fades.  It doesn't really represent my experience. I have not been thrilled with the cumbersome tools and so I am stuck somewhere between 2 and 3.  I don't have any practical applications of my own, but I can see lots of neat ways that blogging can be used.

Guess I need to define for myself the purpose of my own blogging... but not right now;-)

The Three Stages of Blog-awareness

"One of my lawyer friends who is tech-savvy and runs a cool website has recently been made aware of blogs.  After a few weeks of studying the blog phenomenon he sends me an E-mail and reports the following:

'OK, a couple of weeks ago I knew nada about the subject of blogs. Here is my take on the 3 stages of blogging:

1) There must be something to blogs because so many people are into it, but I don't have a clue.

2) OK, it does seem kind of cool and there is much, much more to it then I expected. I just don't see any really practical applications.

3) Oh my God, the things I can do with this are coming to me faster than I can keep up with.'

Well, looks like another one has been assimilated.  We who have already been assimilated know that resistance is futile.  Apparently, he's working hard in his laboratory on some new fangled way of doing things that will revolutionize the world.  Man, I love it when the complete absence of a plan comes together." [Ernie the Attorney]

This is so true! Come to the SLS Tech Summit about blogging on Thursday, February 27, and skip directly to step three. Pass GO and collect $200!  :-)

comment [] 98 7:46:17 AM G!.

How to create a Blogroll with Radio's outliner

Blogrolls are a collection of links on the home page of a weblog that point to sites that are somehow related to yours. They serve several purposes, they direct readers to the sites that are important to you, and serve as a set of bookmarks for you. They also help build page rank in search engines for sites you wish to bestow page rank on.

It's easy to use Radio UserLand's outliner to create and edit your blogroll.

Example 

Here's my blogroll as an OPML document.

You can see it in the left margin of my Radio weblog.

How to 

Here's how to set up a blogroll using Radio's outliner:

1. Update Radio.root.

2. Bring the Radio app to the front. On Windows right-click on the tray icon and choose Open Radio; on Mac OS X, click the app's icon in the dock.

3. Choose the New command from the File menu to create a new outline.

4. Create some links: For each link, type the name of the site you're linking to, then choose the Add Link command in the Outline menu, and type the URL to link to into the dialog. Screen shot.

5. Save the outline as blogroll.opml in the gems sub-folder of your www folder.

6. Go to your Events page. Right-click the link to your blogroll.opml file, and choose Copy Link. (Mac users Ctrl-click.) If you don't see a link to blogroll.opml, wait for a few seconds, and refresh the page.

7. Edit your home page template. Find the navigatorLinks macro, and replace it with the following, changing the URL to the one you copied in step #6:

<%radio.macros.blogroll ("http://www.myserver.com/gems/blogroll.opml")%>

8. Click the Submit button.

Your home page will be automatically published, and you'll have a blogroll based on the contents of blogroll.opml.

Creating multiple sections 

Some blogrolls have more than one section, with a title at the top of each one. To divide your blogroll into sections, create a top-level heading with the title of the section, and indent your links underneath.

Here's an example: Screen shot.

Using macros in your blogroll 

Macros in your blogroll.opml will be expanded when your page is rendered. For example, you may want to include your navigator links in your blogroll.

In your blogroll outline, add a heading as follows:

<%radio.html.drawNavigatorLinks ()%>

When your page is rendered, the macro will be replaced with your navigation links.

CSS classes 

The macro generates HTML with CSS class's for each link.

blogrollLink -- the class for each link's a-href tag.

blogrollLinkedText -- the class for the div surrounding each link.

blogrollText -- the class for div's surrounding non-linked text.

Attributes and updates 

There are three optional attributes for an outline heading in the opml file, which affect the way links are rendered in your blogroll:

title -- If present, the value of the title attribute is used for a title attribute on the link when rendered as HTML. Many browsers will display this text when the mouse hovers over the link.

target -- If present, the value of the target attribute is used for a target attribute on the rendered link. This can be used to open a link in a new window, or in a specified frame.

isRecent -- If this attribute is present and its value is "true", then the link is rendered with the specified prefix and suffix as specified by the optional parameters, recentlyUpdatedLinkPrefix and recentlyUpdatedLinkSuffix. This allows you to change the appearance of links to sites which have recently been updated.

Optional parameters 

radio.macros.blogroll takes five optional parameters:

flProcessMacros -- A boolean which specifies whether to expand macros in the outline. Defaults to false. (Note 5/28/02 by JES -- the default value changed from true to false.)

cssPrefix -- A string, which specifies the first part of the CSS class names. Use this parameter if you want more than one blogroll each with its own CSS class's. Default is blogroll.

flXmlButton -- A boolean which specifies whether to add an XML button after the links, which is a link to the OPML source file. Defaults is true.

recentlyUpdatedLinkPrefix -- A string which is pre-pended to the link if the isRecent attribute is present in the OPML, and its value is true. (See above.)

recentlyUpdatedLinkSuffix -- A string which is appended to the link if the isRecent attribute is present and its value is true.

Syntax 

Here's the syntax for radio.macros.blogroll:

<%radio.macros.blogroll (opmlUrl, flProcessMacros, cssPrefix, flXmlButton, recentlyUpdatedLinkPrefix, recentlyUpdatedLinkSuffix)%>

The opmlUrl parameter is required. All other parameters are optional. To pass in a value for one of the optional parameters, use the parameter's name, a colon, and the value, for example:

<%radio.macros.blogroll ("http://www.mancuso.com/gems/blogroll.opml", cssPrefix:"leftLinks")%>

The above example uses "leftLinks" for the value of the cssPrefix parameter.

Notes 

While you can use any OPML file that's accessible through HTTP for your blogroll, be careful what file you render when using true for the flProcessMacros parameter. Since a macro is code that runs on your computer, make sure that the OPML is from a trusted source when using this option.

If the preference is enabled, Radio maintains an OPML file which links to all of the sites you're subscribed to in Radio's news aggregator, and radio.macros.blogroll can render this file, along with miniature XML buttons, and little coffee mugs for subscribing to the site in Radio. To render your subscriptions, use the URL of mySubscriptions.opml for the value of the opmlUrl parameter, for example:

<%radio.macros.blogroll ("http://www.mancuso.com/gems/mySubscriptions.opml")%>

comment [] 97 1:31:53 AM G!.