activeRenderer News

Radio Upstreaming Beta and activeRenderer

Wed, 04 May 2005 15:59:40 GMT

A quick note: the new upstreaming scheme provided with Radio's Uptreaming Beta will break the normal automatic upstreaming of outlines saved in 'outlines' or 'opml' folders under Radio's root folder ('www') or any Radio category folder.

I have a fix ready in activeRenderer version 2.5.2, but other features of 2.5.2 are not quite ready for release yet. I'll announce vs 2.5.2 soon on the ar-announce list.

In the meantime, any beta-tester who wants the fix right now can get a pre-release aR 2.5.2 update by dropping me a line directly.

activeRenderer Users Gallery Update

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 03:25:51 GMT

First update in over a year. I had almost forgotten the existence of the activeRenderer Users Gallery page :-). Anyway, my hat's off to Dawn and Drew.

While they are not using Radio Userland as their publication tool, they've made a great use of the public activeRenderer web service and its XML-RPC API to create outlined show notes for their podcasts.

Thanks to the audio transcluding feature of activeRenderer 2.5 built into the web service, you can listen to their podcasts directly inside the show note page by clicking the small 'loudspeaker' wedge icon in the 'MP3 File' paragraph.

Outline link macros

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 20:58:04 GMT

Starting with version 2.5, activeRenderer provides a way to include part of the outline's content into the URL specifying a transcluding link.

If you think this is gibberish...

You're probably right.

A small example will probably make things clearer, at least if you are reading this directly on the activeRenderer News site. Click on the 'page' wedge icon to the left of the next paragraph to learn what MSDN can report about activeRenderer.

activeRenderer

The URL of the link attached to the previous node looks like this:

http://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=##self##

##self## is a link macro that references the current node's textual content.

Link macros come in several flavors besides ##self##. They are useful as search requests arguments to specify richer outline links. Learn more about link macros in activeRenderer's Tutorial 9.

With the webOutliner tool installed...

Tue, 05 Apr 2005 20:22:55 GMT

... I can prepare a post using a full featured browser based outliner, then press the 'post to weblog' icon to publish it into this weblog.

This is my first public posting experiment with the webOutliner, a companion Radio tool to activeRenderer.

The webOutliner is still under wraps, but its release date is getting closer :-)

There is no official webOutliner site yet, but a demo site has been running for some time.

There is also a wo-support discussion group;

and a support index.

With the current version of webOutliner, I can format my posts in static HTML (using HTML blockquote tags) or, in activeRenderer style dynamic HTML, such as in this post.

This is fun when linking to podcasts, such as these Morning Coffee Notes from Dave Winer.

There's still a little work to do: filtering DHTML in the RSS feed, providing for post links and enclosures, sending outlines over email.

Parallel development is on the way on non Radio, non Usertalk environments. Stay tuned.

Download activeRenderer 2.5

Thu, 24 Mar 2005 21:36:03 GMT

After the customary delays (even worse than my worst estimates this time :-), the new version 2.5 of activeRenderer is now available for download.

Here is a quick summary of activeRenderer 2.5's new and upgraded features.

Plain text rendering: activeRenderer now renders regular text documents in addition to OPML outlines and RSS news feeds. It even renders dot-head format files, for nostalgia's sake.

Word documents rendering: in addition to plain text, activeRenderer now renders Microsoft Word documents - .doc files. For this feature to work, Microsoft Word has to be installed on the system running the Radio/activeRenderer application.

Automatic importing feature: any text or Word document dropped, saved or modified in aR's new www/imports folders is automatically rendered as an OPML document in the matching www/outlines folder. This triggers its upstreaming as DHTML on the public site.

Audio transclusion: the transclusion mechanism in activeRenderer now recognizes several audio file formats when processing OPML link attributes: ".mp3", "m4a" (Apple), ".wav" (Microsoft) and ".mid" (MIDI). These audio links are rendered in the outline's DHTML version with a new 'speaker' wedge.

Clicking the speaker wedge creates a small player object under the linking node, sized according to the linking node's width. The audio content starts playing. You can control the sound output through the player object.

This should be helpful to poscasters who are publishing show notes in OPML format using Radio with activeRenderer, or are using the activeRenderer web service.

Importing feeds from mySubscriptions.opml: activeRenderer's outline browser now has a new import button at the bottom of its news feed list [screenshot]. Clicking import, you can locate a subScriptions.opml file on your local system or on the Web [screenshot], and ask activeRenderer to automatically add all the feeds of that file into Radio's aggregator: mass subscription!

Registration is back: It's optional, works fast [screenshot], the server side processing is simple and hosted in NYC. Registration is a first step in getting to know activeRenderer users, something that is very important in any community driven project. So please take a few seconds to register once aR 2.5 is installed.

Complete release notes are available on the ar-announce Yahoo group. Indeed, ar-announce and ar-support have been the places where most of the action took place these past months. In an effort to take better advantage of RSS publishing, I will publish more detailed information about each aR 2.5 new feature on this channel in the coming days.

activeRenderer 2.4 Steps Forward

Wed, 13 Oct 2004 17:49:58 GMT

Version 2.3.1, announced last June, is now officially reported Missing In Action, fallen to determined bug attacks - and pressing other engagements - during the testing phase. RIP.

At long last, activeRenderer 2.4 is now ready for download. It has all the features of 2.3.1, and a whole bunch of others. Here's a short list:

The registration process at first time installation is now history: I couldn't afford the time to replace the aging (defunct?) registration service graciously offered by eVectors in Northen Italy. New users: we'd still love hearing from you, drop us a note anyway.
activeRenderer is now available in German, thanks to Werner Bohlmann and a little help from Albert Baeumel, as well as in Italian, thanks to Fabio Artuso. Gwénaël's work in vs. 2.3 makes localization almost painless; we're still looking for Spanish, Dutch and Danish contributions. To switch languages, use the popup at the bottom of activeRenderer's preferences page.
The outline rendering of RSS feeds and of Radio's aggregator is vastly improved: no more risks of crashing Radio when feeds contain malformed HTML Tags. I also added a clever (I hope) sentences processor to separate posts content into outline nodes in a clean way (this was a major endeavour, took way too long :-)
The outline browser got a little face surgery. You can check it out on the demo site.
Local lists in the 'news' and 'outlines' tabs are now selectable. After selecting an entry, you can either delete it (unsubscribe for an RSS feed) or rename it. Clicking twice on an entry puts you directly in text editing mode.
When browsing a news feed which is not in your subscription list already, you can subscribe to it directly. Finally you can enlarge or reduce the font used to display outlines.
At Thomas Burg's request, you can open transcluded Flash or QT Movie objects full size in a different window when clicking on the new 'spyglass' button that appears at the right of the transcluded node.
At Gwénaël's suggestion, I added a new startup preference so that aR may republish in the background at a programmable interval all pages created using a template that includes the rssBox macro.

If I can convince Gwénaël to lead the development of the next 2.5 version of activeRenderer, it will include wizards to easily format and style rssBox and activeRoll macros in weblog publishing templates.

Read About Pete Dako's First Time Experience

Mon, 21 Jun 2004 14:20:49 GMT

We always love it when users actually report on their experience with activeRenderer. First time experiences are most valuable to us, beyond what works and and what doesn't (everything usually does), it lets us know what is simple enough, and what is overly complicated. This is the only way we can truly create a better user experience

Publishing and maintaining a user outline, as Pete did, is a great idea. We also welcome all contributions to the ar-support forum.

To answer Pete's issues:

Even though aR's installation code should kick in properly even when you drop the activeRenderer.root file in Radio's Tools folder while Radio is running, it is actually very difficult to test properly, and thus much safer to quit Radio first, as described in the downloading instructions, then place the downloaded root file in the Tools folder, then restart Radio.
Thanks to Pete's report, I'll modify aR's startup sequence, so that Radio cleans itself up better after a failed activeRenderer installation attempt: just quit Radio, remove activeRenderer.root from the Tools folder and restart Radio.
You may download activeRenderer.root with any browser. Whatever your favorite browser might be, the downloading over http might develop problems, resulting in a corrupted activeRenderer.root file once in a while. If your first installation of activeRenderer fails before the registration page is displayed, it's safer to download a fresh copy before trying again.
We endeavour to make the DHTML in activeRenderer browser agnostic, not a small proposition even these days :-) Our reference platform is the Gecko rendering engine, used by Mozilla and FireFox, which is the most standards compatible browser by far. Then we try to make sure that our code works with Windows MSIE, which is less standards compliant, but is used by 85% of the visitors to this site. Then we check Apple's Safari, which is still the less standards compatible browser of the three, despite Apple's marketing claims. activeRenderer's transclusion feature does not work currently with Safari. We almost never test other browsers, such as Opera, Konqueror or OmniWeb, but welcome all reports.
I personnaly apologize for all the registration problems. The registration service, graciously hosted in Northern Italy by eVectors, is long due for an overhaul, and often unavailable. Registration is important to us because we can keep track of our current user base. We will come up with a new and simpler registration process in activeRenderer 2.4, due later this summer.
The main function of activeRenderer is to render outlines saved as OPML format Files into DHTML pages and upload them to your public site. Your outlines must be saved as OPML format files first for the rendering to process smoothly. If you are working from an outline object in Radio's internal database, the safest way of ensuring a proper conversion to OPML, then DHTML is to create a new outline file in Radio (using the File/New menu), then copy the content nodes of the previous outline object into the new file, then save the new file. This will automatically create a new OPML file in your file system. If this file is created under the outlines folder or one of its subfolders, it will be automatically upstreamed as DHTML. Check Radio's Event Log to make sure.

The next 2.3.1 version of activeRenderer is due this week, I'm a touch late on our schedule, thanks to lots of contributions in the alpha and beta testing phases.

activeRenderer version 2.3 released

Wed, 12 May 2004 17:05:42 GMT

Change in plans! We've decided to release activeRenderer vs 2.3 now instead of mid June.

The 2.3 version adds multilingual support, thanks to Gwénaël's patient work. There is now a language selection popup at the bottom of activeRenderer's preferences page.

The only language we offer in addition to English so far is French. Others will follow: from Scotland, AJG Beaumel has volunteered a German translation. We are currently looking for translators in Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Danish. Those are the latin alphabet based languages I could extract from activeRenderer's registration database.

Gwénaël has made the actual translation task extremely easy, no knowledge of programming required. We will keep making small modifications in the 2.3 track. We aim to enable the publication of outlined sites in several different languages, as opposed to today's single language choice for all documents.

Gwénaël is still working on his activeRenderer macros wizards, which will be at the core of version 2.4, still scheduled for mid June.

rssBox and activeRoll wizards

Tue, 27 Apr 2004 21:27:09 GMT

The next version of activeRenderer will include wizards to help bloggers add side rolls to their templates using activeRenderer's activeRoll and rssBox macros.

Gwénaël, who first came up with this brilliant idea, is hard at work getting those wizards ready. If your French isn't too rusty, you may try out his public prototypes of the rssBox and activeRoll wizards.

We'll be working together next week in Paris, our target is to release a 2.3 version of activeRenderer by mid June. More on the coming 2.3 version later...

Elections Demo Page Updated

Thu, 22 Apr 2004 19:17:54 GMT

Taking advantage of Feedster's feedpapers, I've updated activeRenderer's rssBox demo page to display a side by side view of both Kerry and Bush consoladited news feeds.

The outlined view makes it easy to compare news headlines, and the preview mode lets you scan through interesting looking posts by simply hovering your mouse's cursor over the 'wedge' handle at the left of each title. Clicking the wedge actually opens, or expands, the news item.

The template for the demo page is available for download, as an example of rssBox macro use.

Another way of leveraging RSS feeds is including an RSS box in a blogroll, as I do on s l a m's home page.

activeRenderer For Movable Type Progress

Tue, 20 Apr 2004 14:07:13 GMT

Bruce Loebrich has made impressive progress porting some of activeRenderer's features to the Movable Type weblogging world.

Check out the MT weblog outlined view on our experimental site.

We're getting closer to a first release, though I cannot commit to any specific date at this time.

We're interested in all suggestions from current MT users regarding expected outline publishing features.

Gallery: Gwénaël Le Dréan

Wed, 31 Mar 2004 22:18:27 GMT

Gwénaël Le Dréan demonstrates the first level of localisation achieved in activeRenderer version 2.1 and later (as well he should since he's behind a large part of our common effort towards a fully localised tool :-).

Even if you don't speak French, you will notice his outline carries correctly accented vowels like é è à. Gwénaël also localised the output of the activeRendererFunctions macro with its latest parameters, to display the French mentions 'tout déplier', 'tout replier' instead of the default 'expand all', 'collapse all' in the right side bar.

activeRenderer version 2.2 released at last

Fri, 26 Mar 2004 20:46:03 GMT

This version features a new twist in weblog outlining: you can now select outlined styles for each weblog category that has HTML rendering turned on in its settings, separately from the style given to the main home page.

Category selection comes handy when publishing several web sites from the same Radio installation. For instance, I'm publishing s l a m as the 'main' site of my Radio installation, with no outlined style at all, whereas activeRenderer News is publihed from the 'activeRenderer' category with both day headers and post titles outlined.

To turn categories on, check Radio's categories preferences. Click category names in Radio's categories page to turn HTML rendering on or off. Check out the updated preferences page to experiment with weblog outlining.

I've also fixed a number of bugs in the tool's uninstallation code, and upgraded it to my latest understanding of Frontier's tools suite.

When you uncheck activeRenderer from Radio's Tools page, if you had the activeMenu or any of the weblog outlining preferences checked, all original templates are restored, so that the Radio's desktop website menu no longer includes the 'Browser' option, and the next publishing session will occur without applying any outlined style. Rechecking activeRenderer in the Tools page will restore it, complete with its preferences, to the state it was at the time of its last de-activation.

When you remove activeRenderer.root from Radio's Tools folder and restart Radio, all components of activeRenderer, including its serial number and preferences, are removed from Radio's object database, leaving no trace behind.

The 'activeRenderer', 'opml' and 'outlines' folders created by activeRenderer in Radio's www file structure are left in place though, since removing them has consequences on the public sites contents. Think twice before removing them manually.

activeRenderer modifies Radio templates. The 'activeMenu' option (checked by default) modifies '#desktopWebsiteTemplate.txt' and '#template.txt' in the www folder. Weblog outlining modifies '#homeTemplate.txt', "#dayTemplate.txt', and '#itemTemplate.txt', either in the www folder or in all relevant subfolders of the www/categories folder.

Before making any modification, activeRenderer backups the original files in 'activeRenderer/local/backup'. Before restoring any original template, it copies all modified versions to 'activeRenderer/local/custom'. 'activeRenderer' folders can be found in www and in each category folder for which an outlined style was selected. In the unlikely event something goes wrong, you should always be able to restore the proper templates from the 'backup' or 'custom' subfolders.

To update your version, click on the update link in the activeRenderer section of the status center in Radio's desktop website home page, or select the Tools / activeRenderer / Update... Menu in the Radio application.

You may also choose to set your activeRenderer preferences to auto update the tool every time you launch Radio: this is the way to ensure you are running the latest available code.

I'm now switching to other projects (replacing the registration service for one), while Gwénaël tries to keep up with the localization effort.

Release delayed

Wed, 17 Mar 2004 22:13:50 GMT

I've run into unexpected problems when readying the next 2.1.1 minor update of activeRenderer: I'm overhauling the installation / uninstallation process to go along with the newly implemented outlining styles for weblog categories, and it's an even worse nightmare than I thought it would be :-)

I should have finished the testing by Friday though, Murphy willing...

Gallery: Gerald Gleason

Mon, 15 Mar 2004 16:37:45 GMT

This week's featured publisher, Gerald Gleason, doesn't use Radio Userland to publish his weblog. He doesn't use Movable Type either. Yet, look at the navigation lighthouse that forms the left side of the page: you'll recognize a familiar outline structure, with a nautical twist :-)

Gerald has put activeRenderer's javascript code to work, and produced wonderful looking 'nautical' replacements for the 'standard' outline wedges.

With his authorisation, I'll soon include those picts as part of a 'nautical' style for outline wedges. Alternate sets of wedges with specific styles are scheduled to show up in the next 2.2 version of activeRenderer.

Mailing Lists

Fri, 12 Mar 2004 23:12:07 GMT

There are currently 3 mailing lists / Yahoo groups devoted to the activeRenderer Radio tool, quite a lot really :-)

ar-announce is a slow traffic, read only list where I announce all updates to activeRenderer. All release messages include a description of new features, enumeration of fixed bugs, and a list of updated parts. Click here to subscribe or unsubscribe.
ar-support is a moderately active discussion forum to discuss all installation issues, report potential bugs, request new features and so on. Scan its archive when trying to solve a problem, there's a good chance it was already reported, and maybe even solved :-). Click here to subscribe or unsubscribe.
ar-devel is a moderated list for developers interested in contributing code to the tool, or porting its features to other environments via the activeRenderer API.. Click here to subscribe or unsubscribe.

I check all mailing lists on a daily basis, even when not working on the activeRenderer project: they are my main channel of feedback information, together with the feedback link in included in all pages of the activeRenderer site.

Documentation en français

Wed, 10 Mar 2004 20:33:38 GMT

I didn't realize until Monday that Gwénaël - can't think of a worst firstname to type into an HTML editor, Gwénaël :-), went through the trouble of translating all of activeRenderer's documentation into French.

Wow, that certainly took some work, I'm really grateful, and so should all French, Canadian and Belgian activeUsers. I didn't find any Swiss in activeRenderer's registration database :-)

Auf Deutsch Übersetzer herzlich willkommen... Apply within.

Gallery: Wealth Bondage

Mon, 08 Mar 2004 20:56:20 GMT

Philip Cubeta's Wealth Bondage self styled online bordello is packed with interesting links neatly origanized in no less than 3 activeRolls.

I wish I had half of Phil's imagination and writing talent. Wealth Bondage is currently the number 2 source of referrals to the activeRenderer site. I apologize to all WB visitors: the techy stuff you find here must feel pretty boring :-)

activeRenderer version 2.1 released

Sat, 06 Mar 2004 00:00:20 GMT

This is a major release, with the beginning of our journey down the non-English publishing road, the first two steps being support for accented characters encoded with 'iso-latin-1', 'utf-8' or 'macintosh' sets, and a host of new macro parameters so that default English mentions on the HTML rendered pages may be replaced by other languages equivalents.

Next step involves the full localization of activeRenderer: Gwénaël is still working on it, it's a painstakingly long task, but I'm confident he will succeed eventually.

aR 2.1 also comes with an updated outlined aggregator view, and a host of bug corrections: to all patient bug reporters, thank you kindly.

Details are available in the ar-announce mailing list.

CSS tip for expanded paragraphs

Wed, 03 Mar 2004 21:28:15 GMT

I've noticed several activeUsers have tried to disable the vertical 1 pixel delimiter that appears along the left of expanded paragraphs by modifying the definition for the expandedHigh CSS class like this:

.expandedHigh { border-left: 0px solid silver; }

Because of the way aR's javascript code works, it is actually better to use

border-left: 1px solid COLOR;

Where COLOR is the proper encoding of your template's background color. This prevents the annoying 1 pixel drift when hovering with the mouse cursor over an expanded wedge.

Gallery: Bruce Loebrich

Mon, 01 Mar 2004 23:23:43 GMT

Bruce Loebrich's weblog demonstrates active blogrolls and weblog posts outlining.

Hmm... at first glance, nothing vastly different from last year's exhibition... But wait! Look closely at the bottom right of the screenshot: Bruce is using activeRenderer with MOVABLE TYPE!

Although I do not yet support outline publishing with Movable Type, Bruce has forged ahead on his own, with impressive results :-) Contact him for more information.

A first step towards localisation

Fri, 27 Feb 2004 15:25:20 GMT

Several non English publishers have complained to me time and again that activeRenderer wasn't rendering accented Latin characters properly, especially when run under MacOS. They're right of course, but I've deferred solving this complex issue as much as I could, having little use of French or German publishing myself at the time.

Well, time changes, and now that I'm browsing my RSS feeds through activeRenderer's outlined browser on my new Powerbook, reading French and German news sources has become a pain. Back to the drawing board :-)

As a first step, the next release of activeRenderer will convert all Windows Latin encoded characters to their Mac equivalent when run under MacOS, and all entity encoded characters in the XML content will be decoded properly, or so I hope :-)

This may offset the release date by a couple of days however, so it might be Friday instead of Wednesday.

Planning activeRenderer's next release

Wed, 25 Feb 2004 21:42:08 GMT

Now that I've found a way to add ENT topics to Radio's aggregator, topics will soon be available in the outlined Latest News view of activeRenderer's browser.

The new version will also provide additional parameters to all macros, to allow easy localised publishing for non English authors. French and German activeUsers can thank Gwénaël's stubbornness :-)

The new release should be ready by next Wednesday, it will fix a couple of bugs in the uninstallation code, and provide a newer and simpler code for Tool updating, thanks to Jack and Thomas.

Gallery: The ITU's Newslog

Mon, 23 Feb 2004 21:32:37 GMT

The International Telecommunications Union's Strategy and Policy Unit is publishing a news page weblog style, with Radio Userland and activeRenderer.

News A to Z, an activeRoll in the left side pane of the main page, provides a highly structured and easy to navigate map to the site's rich content.

Outlining the Aggregator

Sat, 21 Feb 2004 00:49:31 GMT

I've specially designed the news browser in activeRenderer 2.0 so that I could scan through as many news items as possible without spending to much time over it, reading only the pieces that catch my interest.

Update: check out Jon Udell's new piece on Heads, decks, and leads, one of my favorite memes.

When clicking the icon at the left of 'Latest News' in the selector on the left side [screenshot], I get an outlined view of Radio's news aggregator: each batch of news acquired by the aggregator is grouped under one heading, displaying its date and time [screenshot], and only the latest (most likely unread) heading is shown expanded, listing all the sources with new items found during the run.

Thanks to the preview mode [screenshot], I don't need to expand news feed headings, I just hover the mouse cursor over the feed's wedge to get a list of the stories in it. The news browser actually creates titles for RSS feeds published with descriptions only (a very regretable habit...)

Whenever I find an interesting bit, I expand the feed's heading, then the title's heading to get the complete story. Clicking the wedge opens the full HTML version in another browser window for abbreviated feeds.

The news browser has one side effect though: since I'm a lot more efficient at reading RSS feeds, I've increased the number of feeds I subscribe to by a fair margin. Not such a great time gain after all :-)

If you don't see the Browser option in the top menu of your Radio desktop web pages after you've installed activeRenderer, or if the News tab of the browser does not show the 'Latest News' item, check activeRenderer's preferences page.

US Elections Demo Page

Wed, 18 Feb 2004 17:46:38 GMT

As Howard Dean's presidential campaign is winding down, I've updated the demo page for activeRenderer's rssBox macro.

Readers can now browse information from 4 different sources on the same page:

The W4 John Kerry topic feed
The Command Post's US Elections feed
Feedster's Kerry Blogosphere feed
Feedster's Dean Buzz feed

The information density on this demo may be a little extreme, yet it's a good exemple of the way outlining lets you organize a lot of information in a clean and compact way on restricted screen real estate.

The template for the page is available for download, in zipped format.

The page would provide a better reading and comparing experience if feed authors provided good titles for each news item in a more systematic way, hardly a new complain in the journalistic world: bloggers often consider themselves writers, they need to become editors too.

Gallery: Donovan Watts

Mon, 16 Feb 2004 14:45:42 GMT

Donovan uses outlines to structure several pages of his web magazine, such as this reef directory.

This is Donovan's second entry in the Gallery, I guess this makes him the most featured activeRenderist :-)

Clicking the small 'page' wedge at the left of each entry opens the matching web page in a new window. Collapsed (or hidden) paragraphs are revealed when one hovers the mouse cursor over the 'collapsed' paragraph's wedge.

Transcluding Topics

Sat, 14 Feb 2004 03:20:01 GMT

The 2.x version of activeRenderer includes an updated RSS renderer for displaying or publishing news feeds as outlines. The renderer displays a list of any topics found inside a post as a child node of the post's title.

You can include topics in your RSS feeds by installing k-collector, an ENT 1.0 compliant add-on to either Radio Userland or Movable Type.

Clicking on the small up-arrow wedge at the left of each topic inserts into the outline a list of related posts, as published by the W4 server.

What's still missing in the activeRenderer browser is the ability to view and transclude topics in the 'latest news' outlined view of Radio's aggregator. First we must modify the aggregator itself to add ENT 1.0 topics support. If we reach that stage, adding transcluding topics to the outlined view will be a snap.

More RSS Search Engines

Wed, 11 Feb 2004 17:20:51 GMT

I've added Bulkfeed and Feedback, 2 Japanese RSS search engines to the searching options of the news/outlines browser in activeRenderer.

From the browser page, click the search tab, enter a query, select one of the 7 engines available, and click the search button.

Gallery: Thomas Burg

Mon, 09 Feb 2004 21:16:17 GMT

Thomas uses an active roll full of transcluding links on his randgänge site.

Clicking one of the small 'up-arrow' icons at the left of an item expands the linked outline in place.

The main blogroll is an OPML outline. Each linked level is maintained in a separate OPML outline. Those linked outlines may be published by the same author, from the same computer, or by a different person on a separate system, depending on the link specified within the master outline.

New Parameter For rssBox

Fri, 06 Feb 2004 18:41:51 GMT

The 2.0.4 minor release of activeRenderer introduces a new flDisplayRssLink parameter to the rssBox macro. rssBox lets you display outlined RSS feeds in your weblog's HTML pages, as shown on the Elections Outlined page or s l a m's home page.

When flDisplayRssLink is set to true, the title provided with the RSS feed is followed by a tiny icon, pointing to the RSS content of the box. All rssBox parameters are described in the macros reference.

rssBox enabled weblog page demo

Wed, 04 Feb 2004 22:53:01 GMT

The home page for s l a m now displays activeRenderer News' rss feed in its left side bar, thanks to the new rssBox macro.

I modified the #homeTemplate.txt template in my copy of Radio's www folder to include the following line in the leftSide DIV

<%rssBox ("file:///Data/Marc/Radio%20UserLand/www/categories/activerenderer/rss.xml", "activeRenderer News")%>

The first parameter is the location of the rss feed's file on my Mac Powerbook. I could have supplied http://www.activerenderer.com/rss.xml instead.

The second parameter is the title displayed in the box. For more information on rssBox parameters, check activeRenderer's macros reference.

I admit modifying templates, inserting macros and CSS rules may be a little too much on the geek side for the regular Radio blogger. Yet, help is on the way: Gwénaël Le Dréan, who is already leading the activeRenderer localisation project, is working on friendly wizards to help users generate the proper CSS and Usertalk syntax, while viewing the result as they make modifications. I can't wait to translate the wizards into English