Weblog II Beta Site

Newsletters From Weblogs? What? Yes, Really.

Seth Dillingham — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 16:17:31 GMT

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.

List Your Weblog's Archives by Month

Seth Dillingham — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 23:44:27 GMT

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

Template Changes

Seth Dillingham — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 17:09:40 GMT

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. ;-)

Updated Macro List / Docs

Seth Dillingham — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 01:49:00 GMT

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.

Q for All Users: Categories in Your RSS Feed

Seth Dillingham — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 14:58:46 GMT

This question is for everybody. I need you all to check something, if you have a minute (shouldn't take much more that that).

If you use categories (channels) on your Weblog II page, would you (please) check your RSS feed? It should have <category>...</category> tags, one for each category/channel you choose for each post. (Look at this site's rss feed for an example.)

If your RSS doesn't have categories, is that intentional? The built-in template, 'Weblog Item RSS READONLY', includes support for the category tag. That's the defautl template for new weblogs, but over the years many of you may have created your own, or started out with something else.

Category tags are a good way to build some flow to your site, because they help services like Technorati index and track your posts, and present it to the right people on their search pages. Apparently Google uses them, too.

Post a question if you need any help setting it up...

This Site is No Longer Private

Seth Dillingham — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 18:03:53 GMT

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.

Update on the Qumana Situation (Problem Solved)

Seth Dillingham — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 17:33:40 GMT

The Qumana situation, which was described here, has been fully solved. The latest version of Qumana is fully compatible with Weblog II. The folks behind Qumana acknowledged the bug, fixed it, and released a new version in a timely manner.