Radio UserLand, RSS, Weblog Tools and Design
Tuesday, July 23, 2002The Blogroll Works.
Played with activeRenderer last night to make the blogroll behave. Check out the results - I'm pretty happy with the end result. (If you're reading this in a news aggregator, just visit the home page. If you aren't sure what a news aggregator is, it's safe to assume you're reading this on the web site itself. Look over there. No, there. See where it says "Worthwhile links?" That's what I'm talking about.)
I documented the steps necessary to make this work - keep in mind that this requires a bit of extra effort. This wasn't really an intended implementation of activeRenderer, but Marc Barrot (the tool's author) was intrigued enough to say that he's going to look at making it easier down the road. No promises (by him, that is), but the fact that it does this well out of the box is a good sign.
Those who are following this thread know that I was trying to make this work using Userland's macros. Ultimately, I preferred activeRenderer's more complete functionality - I have more control over the presentation. And the directoryFrame macro is dependent on some code running at Userland's servers - which often dramatically slowed down page loads. Overall, I think this is a better answer.
Let me know what you think.
[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]Active Render Extras
I was just messing around with Radio UserLand and found another cool way to present pictures in a slideshow with the ActiveRenderer tool. [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]
Active Renderer is Too Easy.
Yet another minor enhancement to the site that I've been meaning to do for a while. I just installed Marc Barrot's Active Renderer plug-in. It's going to allow me to do a bunch of nice user interface things on the site (including fixing the blogroll on the home page), but initially the biggest change is the cleaner interface for daily posts. Now every day has a little wedge next to it that looks like this: 
By default, prior day's posts are collapsed. Click on the black wedge, and you'll see the posts for that day. This cleans up the home page considerably, and makes navigation pretty straightforward.
The most incredible thing about this is how ridiculously simple it was to implement. Download the file, save it to your Radio Tools folder (the Tools folder is in your Radio Userland folder). Shut down and restart Radio, then go to the preferences page for Active Renderer. Check the boxes to activate it, and you're all set. Publish your home page and enjoy!
[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]