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<-- Back One Week

7/21/2007

Newsletters From Weblogs? What? Yes, Really.

(by Seth Dillingham, @ 11:17 AM)

We have a new feature about 95% complete in Conversant's Weblog II pages.

Officially, the feature is for sending newsletters from your weblog. Newsletters are just collections of the posts to your weblog in a given period of time (such as the last week or month). They're sent by email to an address you specify (such as a mailing list on another server).

I've been told that this newsletter feature will be useful to more than just the person who originally requested it. (I can see it being used, for example, in an office, or educational setting, or open source project.)

Possibly the best part of it, though, is the interface used for creating the newsletters in the first place. You choose templates from popup menus, and the "live preview" of the newsletter updates immediately. So, this could be a very useful tool when redesigning your weblog (and actually, it suggests a good way to preview changes made in the Files & Folders section of the Admin tools).

To test it out, just go to your weblog's full URL (including "index" if that's the name of your page), and add "/customize" to the end.

( My weblog is at http://www.truerwords.net/index so to use the new feature I need to visit http://www.truerwords.net/index/customize )

The one feature that doesn't work yet is actually the sending of the email. It's important to get the rest of this right first, but I plan to have that part working within a couple of days.

Any useful feedback would be appreciated. If you think the idea is goofy, please at least try it out before saying so! :-)

Seth

P.S. One technical detail: for this to work, your page template MUST include two macros in the <head> section:  (without the embed attribute, or with embed="false"), and . Also,  MUST come after the  macro. All of the default page templates are set up this way, but if you run into Javascript errors then check both of the above.

Comments: 0 | Reply | Categories:

3/6/2006

List Your Weblog's Archives by Month

(by Seth Dillingham, @ 6:44 PM)

On 2/27/06, Mike Black said:

>In my page (http://www.mindspill.org) in the main left hand navigation
>I've got a box "Archive" that's what I meant with the monthly archive list.

As I'd been planning a macro to do this anyway (for a long time, now), Mike's request gave me the push I needed to finally 'get it done'.

The macro you need is  The links produced by this macro link to the per-month archives in your weblog, and could be used instead of the full weblog calendar.

It's very flexible. By default (that is, with no attributes at all, so it looks like is shown above) it lists all of the months in which the weblog has archives. (The output is an HTML list.) The following is an example of the output (note that it's going to look weird in plain-text email, so please go to the site to see it.)

Being 'very flexible' means the macro accepts a lot of attributes. I can't write the docs right now, but here's a list of those attributes it supports:

channel
format -- date formatting *
lang -- date formatting *
timezoneName -- date formatting *
preText ( <ul>)
postText (</ul>)
noValueText (empty string)
preWrapper ( <li>)
postWrapper (</li>)
separator
outputFormat
descending -- should the list go up or down, chronologically?
links -- should the output include links?
limit -- restrict the output to the last /limit/ items

* These three are for formatting the dates that are output by the macro, like "March, 2006". See the docs on formatting dates in Conversant.

This is a brand-new macro. If you find something difficult, or can't figure out how to do something, or run into a bug... please report it here on the beta site!

Seth

Comments: 20 | Reply | Categories:

12/20/2005

Updated Macro List / Docs

(by Seth Dillingham, @ 8:49 PM)

I realized this afternoon -- rather unhappily -- that the outline version of the macro list was lieing to everyone. It claimed that it's reference for the very important macro "weblog.addToWeblogForm" was complete, when it actually wasn't complete at all.

Now it is complete. There were quite a few optional macro parameters missing.

Comments: 0 | Reply | Categories:

12/1/2005

This Site is No Longer Private

(by Seth Dillingham, @ 1:03 PM)

Believe it or not, Weblog II is finally available to everybody!

Since the Weblog II page is available to everyone, and all existing documentation is here on the beta site, I've decided to make this site public. (Eventually the docs will be copied to the Free-Conversant support site).

Along with the release of the plugin and making this site public, I'm changing the site's URL. You should now be able to find the site here.

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8/31/2005

Minor Update to Weblog Macro Outline

(by Seth Dillingham, @ 11:20 AM)

I know this is minor, but I thought some of you might like to know that I've updated the outline of Weblog II macros with new documentation for the weblog.calendar.dayCssClass macro.

It has some nifty overrides, if you're into that sort of thing. :-)

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7/1/2005

Important: Site Patterns

(by Seth Dillingham, @ 5:26 PM)

I know there are a few people on this list who don't follow the Free-Conversant support site.

There is some important new software in beta, now, and you can get all of the details in these two messages:

New Pattern Wizards - Beta Test

and

Second Site Configuration Wizard: Pattern Installer

Hoping to get the ball rolling, there's also a sample pattern available, based on a site design from Bryan Bell (which he created for Clark Venable).

I'm hoping (or rather, planning) that there will be lots of patterns created. They'll make it very easy to customize and personal a site (including a Weblog II page), especially since it's possible to mix-and-match patterns.

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4/6/2005

new feautures: monthly archives, new conditionals

(by Seth Dillingham, @ 9:00 PM)

Hey all,

I've just rolled out some new features for all of the servers.

First up is the Monthly Archives feature. Go to the one of your weblog's archive pages (anything with a date in the URL), and then take off the last "/" (forward slash) and the day.

Here's an example. Start at this URL on my site:

<http://www.truerwords.net/index/2005/04/07>

Now, take off the "/07" from that URL, so you go to this page:

<http://www.truerwords.net/index/2005/04>

There you can see everything that I've posted in the month of April, 2005.

The technical side of this feature is done: it renders all of the items from the specified month. However, there are still some things that need polishing up:

I think a site should offer either daily (old-style) or monthly archives, but not both. It's just too darn many URLs, and too much server load. There's no point to having both. (Monthly archives are good, and they keep us compatible with some of the other big names like Moveable Type.)
More calendar-related macros are needed so that, if you're using monthly archives, you can produce a list of archive months. Probably something like weblog.calendar.listMonths, or perhaps weblog.calendar.years (where each year would then use a template to display its months).
The channel month archives don't stop at the end of the month. Oops. They only show content from the channel, but they show as many days as are on the main weblog (the default channel).

New Conditionals

There are three new conditional macros, for determining if the page that was requested is from the weblog archives.

weblog.request.isArchive
weblog.request.isArchiveDay
weblog.request.isArchiveMonth

isArchiveDay returns true if the requested URL specifies a day, like the first URL I provided near the top of this message.

isArchiveMonth returns true if the requested URL specifies a month, like the second URL above.

isArchive returns true if either of the other are true. It's identical to doing "weblog.request.isArchiveDay || weblog.request.isArchiveMonth". However, if we ever add another archive format -- perhaps an archive year, or topical archives? -- then isArchive will still return true in those archive formats. (In other words, isArchive will always going to be the most generic test.)

Comments and Questions, please! It's too quiet around here, and we're getting very close to the end of my To Do list...

Seth

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