I've made some changes to some templates in weblog II. There's a new template called "Weblog Item Full RSS READONLY" which offers a rich set of features for the item element in an RSS feed: title, [new] creator name (NOT email address), [new] trackback ping url, link field, date published, unique id and permalink, comments url, category tags, and the full message body.

If you're using a custom RSS item template, then you could just use the new template as an example if you'd like to update it. (I'm especially interested in seeing everyone support the category tags and the dc:creater tag, they're both quite useful for a new plugin coming out soon.)

The Weblog Wrapper RSS READONLY template was changed. It now includes two "namespace" declarations in the RSS element, like this:

<rss version="2.0"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1"
xmlns:trackback="http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/">

Again, if you're using a custom rss wrapper template, and you plan to use the "dc:creator" tag/element in your RSS feed, then you should update your wrapper template with the xmlns:dc attribute. (Just to make sure you're serving valid XML.)

Finally, you should be very excited about the new plugin coming out soon, even though I'm not going to tell you about it yet. ;-)

For those of you who don't quite understand what all this "bookmarklet" stuff is about, I've created a little demo movie.

Little is relative, of course. It's little for a movie, but it's still 6 MB.

(This is when Thom chimes in about video blogging and how I should be distributing it via BitTorrent, to which I respond that there are only ~30 people on this list. Though he's welcome to post a .torrent file if he wants to help out in that way... ;-)

Though it's a little later than I had planned, I've posted the documentation on the new weblog.listChannels macro.

It includes examples.

Hey actually, looking it over I see that it even reveals a bug in the code.

It's not a serious bug. Three and a half points to the first person to spot the bug.

Though not as popular as RSS, JavaScript-based syndication has some interesting possibilities and shouldn't be ignored.

The new options in Weblog II make it possible to "publish" part or all of your weblog to any other page or site. Even a static site can use it!

The attached file is an EXTREMELY simple HTML document. The head section loads a couple of stylesheets, and the body of the page only has a single tag: it loads a javascript from the server.

Download the file to your computer's desktop and look at the source (open it in a text editor). Then, open the file in your browser.

Pretty nifty, no?

The "server side" of this feature -- meaning, what you do in your Conversant site to make this work -- is just as simple as what you see in the HTML file.

1. Put a macro into a new message, but use it in a javascript document.write command, like this:

   document.write( "<!--#weblog.pageWrapper pageId="weblog2beta/index" jssafe="true"-->" );

2. "Bind" that message, publishing it to a URL like /index.js or syndic8.js or whatever you want
3. Open the Files and Folders section of the admin area, and edit the properties of your new page.
4. Set the page template to "Content Only READONLY"
5. Set the MIME type to "text/javascript"
6. Save your changes.
7. Switch to the "Options" panel of the page's properties.
8. Change the page's Wrapper Template to "Bound Msg Body Only READONLY"
9. Save your changes

So, most of the work is acutally done in the admin area. Total time: 5 minutes or less.

Also, the output from the javascript doesn't have to look just like the real weblog as it does in this example. The weblog.pageWrapper and weblog.days macros both allow you to override the templates used when rendering the weblog, so your javascript-syndicated template could look completely different from the main weblog page.

Perhaps not a solution to every syndication-related problem, but it's a tool worth having in your toolbelt.

Any questions?

Every Weblog II page now has "flush cache" buttons on the /edit page.

To see/use them, just go to your weblog and click the "Edit" button. (If you don't have an edit button, you didn't put it in your template. In that case, just add "/edit" to the end of your weblog's URL.)

You can either flush the entire cache with the button at the top of the page, or only the cache for a single day with the button at the top of each day's editor.

The "documentation" link in the navbar has been updated. Instead of pointing to a page that just promised some information someday, it now points to the docs channel of the weblog.

I think that all the documentation I've posted so far has been posted to the weblog also, so this is a handy way to build the list of docs. (Lazy, but handy.)

Just a reminder that this site allows you to receive the email in HTML mode, if your email client supports it (most do).