On the Mark: 3/1/2002

	Friday, March 01, 2002

Changing Radio's Editors Only Menu: I have run across a couple of Radio tools that have been built as system pages. That is, the tool is implemented as a macro that is supposed to reside in your "system" or "system/pages" folder. For example, I installed Mark Paschal's Kit in "system/kit" so I access it using http://127.0.0.1:5335/system/kit. It becomes tedious typing the URL all the time, so I went digging around to see how I could get it to show up with the other system page links at the top of my desktop home page.

I found that the Editors Only menu of links is generated by the radio.macros.adminMenu. It is called by radio.macros.editorsOnlyMenu - which was at one time going to support user-defined menus - now it simply directs responsibility to the adminMenu macro. I should warn you that the adminMenu macro is Radio's code. Userland could change it at any point in time (so you could lose your changes). That said, it is pretty easy to change if you want to add a new menu item. Just look for the addCommand lines. Then add the page you want. You can see how I added the "kit" page in the screenshot below (look below the highlighted line). A picture named adminMenu.jpg

Rather than specifying the actual URL, I stuck with Radio's philosophy of coding URLs and paths as a constant. I just added an entry named "kit" to the radio.data.systemUrls table. The entry's value is: "/system/kit". I like to comment these kinds of changes and then export them (using Tools/Developers/Export...) into a directory where I store all of the changes I have made. Then if Userland does update this macro, I can easily track down my changes and reapply them.
5:32:59 PM

Rob Fahrni is generating Visio diagrams from OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language, an XML).
9:31:12 AM

Richard Caetano - Making a decision: C# or VB.NET: "There has been this ongoing debate...which language should we choose: C# or VB.NET? At first we were gun-ho on C#. It seemed strategic: ECMA standard, the mono project, MS's primary language for .NET, etc. But later on we noticed a few guys were siding with VB.NET since we had an existing investment in the VB mind set." This is worth a quick read. Richard points out the need to discover .NET's idiosyncrasies before simply diving in and comitting to it.
9:29:31 AM