How to



Robots text
Just a quickie to help out some dude on the Manila mailing list.

Though he asks about Google's image crawler, we don't store any images at all on out frontier box, they are all FTP'd to the static server. I use meta=noindex in page headers for message views too (and some other types of pages). Though, as Googlebot's banned from those I'm still seeing old messages in Google's index (when I search, I want to find just story versions of pages, or just news item versions, not the message type too.) I guess it'll get better over time.

Occasionally, I add bad robots to this robots text, even though they may ignore the robots.txt. (I ban them elsewhere, too—in fact I have a list of nearly 400 bad robots).

Adding sitemaps has dramatically decreased Google's crawler, though it took several weeks to have a great effect, and occasionally I see Googlebot coming in to a site an indexing everything, even though it need not—it's supposed to work that way.
Thumb: my robots text script
My robots text script
A list of checked against user agents of bad bots
A list of checked against user agents of bad bots
# At 3/12/07; 10:29:55 AM
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Robots text



How to YouTube
If you and yours are grown ups, YouTube will be fine. Here's how you can add a YouTube video to your site.

First you need to sign up at YouTube.

Then upload a video. There's quite a few forms to fill in, and it can take several minutes to upload a video, if the server is busy.

Once you have, you'll be given am <object bunch of code that you need to copy and paste into your blog. Now, be careful, you need to ensure that you paste when you're in source mode, otherwise you'll just see a bunch of code, which has been munged.

That's it. If you have any problems, email me.
# At 6/3/07; 9:30:22 AM
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How to YouTube



Trackback spams
We're getting a few more of these these days. If you've got a more modern news items site, you maybe getting emails telling you of a TB. In that email is a link for you to delete it straight away. You may safely ignore them.

They're mass deleted by my overnight scripts. I add the domain name to the list of spam keys and poof, they're gone.

Spammers make a website at one of these new blog services, add their spammy stuff to the site to make a splog, then search engine optimise, so they come higher in search engine results. Part of that SEO is to send trackback spams to all and sundry.

It's not good for these services, as I and many other responsible service providers immediately add their domain as a known splog host.

So, if you follow the link to delete the TB spams in your email notification and find there's nothing there to delete... You'll know that my overnight scripts have been and done the job for you.
# At 17/12/06; 12:56:31 PM
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Trackback spams



How to YouTube
YouTube! TubeYou! All you need to do to add a youTube video to your blog is to add the <object... thing to your post. Make sure you add it when you're not in WYSIWYG, that is 'source mode' in MSIE or 'View HTML Source' in Firefox.

Nothing to it really.

See the top 20 at the Viral Video Chart for top picks, pop pickers.
# At 11/12/06; 9:03:38 AM
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How to YouTube



Thread analyser
I see Dave Winer asking for help analysing threads and other performance issues. After he produced his thread analyser I took it and reworked it into something I needed. threads

In my everyMinute.tenThousandHits  in the scheduler which looks every minute for too many hits, I added this script to look for too many threads. When there are too many, the workspace.threadAnalyzer is called and writes an outline of all the threads into the scratchpad. Frontier then gracefully quits and sends me an email. I go look at the outline and can figure out why there are too many threads.

My limit on too many threads is currently 26.

The script is workspace.threadAnalyzer:

I hope this of help to somebody, and if they can make it better...

I find it invaluable to see when and why there are too many threads running.

Currently I'm watching wp.newTextObject and trying to figure out why many of the threads stop here. I guess this script is very inefficient and just takes too long to complete.
# At 27/6/06; 6:26:54 PM
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Thread analyser



Bookmarks updated
I'm sure you know the drill. Go to your /bookmarks page, Firefox editorial menu download the bits you need, follow the instructions. And have a nice time with your thumbs, aggregator, news items etc, and everyother part of your site, you can even flip your home page, for you BF oldies. Yes it's compatible with MSIE.

I needed it updated... Enjoy :-)
# At 11/4/06; 11:34:44 PM
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Bookmarks updated



A bit deeper with RSS
Computerworld: Explaining RSS to IT departments This, isn't meant for meathead football bloggers :-) "RSS opens up a whole new world for maintaining a dialogue with your customers. At the end of the day, that's what it's all about."

Mark asked some incisive questions.

As a blogger here, yes, all your bloggings are auto added to your RSS feed, and you have no need to worry, nor notice. As I said we have been doing this for five years, and none of you knew.

This means, keep on doing as your doing. If someone wants to subscribe to you, they can, and you'll see a hit in your hourly hits, as you would if they access your normal front page. Only they'll 'hit' less as they'll be notified if you up-date rather than manually hitting your front page to see if you've updated. For them it is more efficient. For me as a server dude, less bandwidth so I'm happy too. (This isn't true in the real world, in fact there's more bandwidth as most aggregators don't wait to be notified as per the RSS spec, or look to see if the file has changed, and grab once an hour the whole bloody RSS feed.)

For your reader, who you care about, you're happy still as they're reading your posts. But, there's more. Each post (or a changed  post of 50 changed/new words) pings several RSS feed engines, to tell them that you've added something new. They'll come along and get that new news item from your feed. (In 'olde flip page Manila' each double returned paragraph is a new news item.)

These new search services are good for you as a writer as they'll bring your new traffic. It's kind of like your normal pages being in Google. Only where Google comes once a month or more these new services are near real time (or about an hour). There's more to these feed aggregators, go there and look around, as you would Google, but expect to find conversations in blogs, rather than static pages in Google.

The blog radar, merely tells you that a site has updated. You've still to visit the site to read the new postings. Where, if you have sub'd to ALL blogfootball sites, you'd only need to read your one aggregator page. Every new posting from a blogfootball site will be there, ordered by time. So, if I post a bit of poetry in the morning,  later that night a RSS exposé but Lions posts a bunch of Villa musings in the afternoon, my poetry will be at the foot, middle will be Villa, top RSS. Depending on when you come and how much Villa from Lions, and RSS postings from me, the poetry may have scrolled off. (I'll address this shortcoming one day by emailing every 100 items to you, for an archive.)

Also, in the aggregator page is a direct 'post' button (this willl only be of use to us 'new fangled news item Manila' sites.) Quickly you can whack the text and indeed the whole item into your own blog, add some editing... This is neat for said conversations both Villa gossip and corporate workflows.

Subing to a feed is copying a URL of the feed and pasting into your aggregator. Not granny friendly. However, all our sites have the feed in the top part of the HTML, for auto discovery. There are methods available, depending on your aggregator, to 'one click sub.' (See the orange coffee cup icon at the foot of my pages.) You should be aware that there are many stand alone aggregators which are more extensive than the aggregator  page in sites here--though, I find this page good enough for me, especially as it is one single page rather than the three pane, MS Outlook metaphor of many of the apps. It is a river of news with painless scrolling rather than, diving into a feed reading their updates, diving in again... Too much clicking!

RSS came along with blogging. But you don't need a blog to read feeds. Though mere mortals will only create feeds by blogging, or contributing to a discussion group (each of our discussion groups also has a feed! Worthy of another posting.) Firefox, Safari, these newer gen browsers allow you to sub to a feed. MSIE 7, when it comes, will also allow grannies to sub to a feed. Indeed, this is the big recent news.

Big companies are getting on to the RSS bandwagon, producing feeds with special timely offers, bargins, podcasts and so on. News companies were first to the trough, and all produce feeds for departments/sections.
# At 28/6/05; 12:37:29 AM
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A bit deeper with RSS



Bittorrent
Guardian: Coming to a hard disk near you: "The FBI doesn't like it. The Department of Homeland Security is so concerned that it has closed down websites related to it. The Moving Picture Association of America is waging a war against it. And every day millions of people around the world use it to share music, TV programmes and movies. The "it" is BitTorrent - a computer program that's the brainchild of the softly-spoken Bram Cohen. It is a super-smart way to share huge files over the internet."
fbi:

The Guardian says that you need to be a bit techie to do it. Nope, merely download the latest version and install it. Then click the link, a torrent file link. The application should open it, if it doesn't you can set up your browser to open it next time. It's that easy. On my 4Mb link, I think an album took 5 minutes, about that anyway.

# At 17/6/05; 8:23:04 AM
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Bittorrent



How to post from flikr
It's very simple. You'll need to become a member of flikr, then tell it where your blog is, it's password/user stuff, and you'll see a button on th top of all images.
flikrblogthis.jpg
Hitting that and your presented with a box which asks for some text to go alongside the image and bingo, it goes straight into your news item Manila site.

Yes, another reason to be the more modern news item type site.
# At 21/4/05; 10:48:58 AM
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How to post from flikr



Podcasting for you
A few weeks ago I found the only podcaster in Shropshire. I wrote and asked how he did it, since there was a lot in his podcast, pub interviews, phone interviews etc. My meagre attempts to create a decent sound file have been useless, still most of his reply went clean over this little brain, so I asked if I could publish it here in the hope that it will be of use to others. In the meantime you can think of me re-reading this over and over slowly, mouthing some of the words.

Over to Tim:

When I'm out and about doing interviews or sound scene tours (see next show, coming out on Thursday evening), I use a Sony minidisc recorder. For face to face interviews I use a Yoga em8 mic; for telephone interviews I have an adapter that goes between phone and handset, which I plug into the minidisc; when I'm out and about I use a Trust headset mic (looks like a mobile phone bluetooth headset).

When I get home I plug the headphone socket of the minidisc into the pc line-in and get Audacity to record while the minidisc plays back. I then chop the audio up and export individual files as wavs.

I then start up Cakewalk pro 9. I drop all the wavs and MP3s in and record my self using is a Labtec mono USB headset mic - £12 from ebay. This is permenantly plugged into the desktop machine. I then do a final mix down in Cakewalk and export it to wav. Then I open the wav in Audacity and export it as 64k mp3.

The biggest problem I have is getting the levels right, particularly when I'm out using the minidisc. I chose the minidisc 'cos I could get it off ebay for £30, but some people record into an iRiver, which is straight into mp3. I use Cakewalk for the main mix down 'cos it allows me to do retakes of my speaking part and it is easy to construct the show - Audacity just doesn't do that kind of thing. Some podcasters use Mixcast Live but that is a DJ type tool, which I'm no good at (but I think it's ideal for blogging), and it doesn't give me the flexibility that I need to put the show together.
# At 30/3/05; 1:03:57 PM
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Podcasting for you
How to record for podcasting
Microphones and podcasts



ff on toolbar
I don't know if you can remember the bookmarks plug in? Well, it's back, in a different form. Just go to your new /bookmarks page and follow the instructions.

It's damned handy if you're always messing around with your site, all the bookmarks (or in Explorer speak: Favorites) are there. Many pages you'll have forgotten about or not even known they were there.

If you contribute to several sites, it'll be even handier ;-)

(Example addresses are http://astonvilla.blogfootball.com/lions/bookmarks or http://steve.shropblogs.org/bookmarks )

# At 3/3/05; 8:02:03 PM
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Bookmarks are back



"In campaigns, add keywords even if they have no searches, because in the future they may have some, also, put your keywords into separate campaigns, so you'll have campaigns of keywords that are tightly related and are getting CTRs above 1%.

Place keywords that get no traffic or have poor CTR's into another campaign. This way, your campaign that is doing well is not slowed down because of poorly performing keywords.

When creating your ads, Marshall recommends placing a strong verb in the headline. i.e. Play the violin. Self Defense made easy. Using a strong verb creates a mental image of something happening."

Some more tips for me.

Also, need to create more landing pages targeted from my ads and keywords. But that will be a bit later, based on the suggestions about too much copy in my plea for review.

# At 12/2/05; 1:53:39 PM
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How to Create Successful AdWords Campaigns



Another problem solved
leftorright.jpg Alright most would not even know it to be a problem, but I did. I wanted to write a bunch of text, a long, long bunch of text about nothing much really, just going on, and on.

And then I wanted to put a thumbnail to illustrate it. But I'd have to write the "shortcut" in some weird <div style="float: left; padding 0px 10px 10px 0px;"> which is, well you can imagine, a bit long winded and not really for my blogFootball boyos.

Well now I don't have to. It's already made for me, the shorcut that is, both left and right. All I have to use is the normal shortcut with a r or an l after it. See the thumb here...

So now I can add any thumbnail and have it align left or right merely by adding a space then an R or an L to the "shortcut" Thus, "shortcut r" or "shortcut l"

Easy (again). I do hope you're all following this.
# At 7/2/05; 9:12:29 PM
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Another problem solved



"This is a script, written in UserTalk (the language of Userland Frontier), which will export a Manila weblog to a file suitable for importing into Movable Type or TypePad. It will also write all of the images contained within the Manila site out to files, convert Manila discussion group threads into MT/TypePad comment threads, and convert any Manila News Item departments into post categories."

Most excellent! I hate lock-in. This just goes to prove that if you have a Manila blog, you needn't fear that you're stuck. I'd like to include this script as a page within all myManila blogs. Thus, not only is there an existing download your site page (/downloadMySite/MySite.root), but there will be an export your site to these formats page.
 
# At 19/1/05; 12:43:34 PM
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Converting Manila to Movable Type



Enclosure box at the foot of 'Create News Item'
enclosureurl.jpg

You'll see this box at the foot of your 'Create a News Item' editing page. Merely add the URL of your file, be it a MP3, AVI, MPG, whatever.

# At 4/1/05; 8:10:44 PM
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Enclosure box at the foot of 'Create News Item'



iskconthumbnailer.jpg
Yip I do like this thumbnailer. Wondering whether Father Xmas will bring me a new digicam just because of my handy little tool. Even have my Australian Hari Krishna customers using it. Soon we'll see lots more such galleries from the bald-headed ones.

So, first, have a go with just the thumbnailer plug in. Go to Editors only:==>Prefs==>plugins and switch on Thumnails. You'll then see the Thumbnails link in your editor's only menu, go there, and try uploading an image. It should be pretty simple, but then I wrote it all so it is to me.
# At 21/12/04; 8:27:55 PM
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Project blog : ISKCON Vrndavana 7th December 2004



CT: "If I can do it there's no excuse for anyone else..."

Here's how I told him to do it...
Step one, switch on thumbnails plug in.
Editors only ==> prefs ==> plugins. Then tick the thumbnails check box, submit. Now, you'll see in editors only the new link 'thumbnails'

Step two, upload a big jpg. (It'll need to have the dot jpg extension)
just upload as you would an ordinary pix, but tick some of the boxes for the size, flip etc.

Copy the short cut "within the quotes"  into a message... You're done ;-)))


Simple? Sure ;-))))
# At 21/7/04; 9:22:36 PM
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Thumbnails and Frenchmen



Should you be canned by the radar
You can hit the radar even after you've flipped (old style or vanilla Manila), or added a new news entry (news flavour Manila), two ways of registering a punt on the radar.

To hit the radar again, either change your flipped message text by 50 words (vanilla), or adding a new news item or changing the post of an existing news item (news).

But please, any errors, report them! It's your duty ;-)

Also, for old you old timers using the flip vanilla Manila, did you know there's a page at astonvilla.blogfootball.com/mysite/editHomePage which you should bookmark. I believe it also flips the page, if necessary.
# At 21/5/04; 9:06:22 PM
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Should you be canned by the radar



What is spawning?
To be continued... When its ready. Its a surprise.
# At 12/5/04; 3:21:32 PM
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What is spawning?



Bit Torrent downloading
My first days with Bit Torrent, apps, RIAA, download sites and most importantly—etiquette.

Cease and desist

RIAA:
Fuck off Record Industry Association of America

Sony:
And you, Sony, fuck off!

burstcommandline.jpg
Burst's command line-like windows

burstui.jpg
Burst's user interface

So here I am, downloading through various torrent apps, various music torrents, all probably illegal. My first day, so I've learned the ropes, a little, and already blocked Sony North America, The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, RIAA and some others, I didn't recognise late last night. They were scanning my torrents, looking down my ports, or trying to. I'm using a list of over seventy-six million (76,823,163 to be exact) IPs with PeerGuardian v1.99b pr14. I believe there's a lot more in other lists. I'll look into that another day.

Downloader apps

Luckily, or by design, each of these apps have, upon installation, have claimed the file extension dot torrent as their own, so they'll kick in when your browser want to download one, or Radio with Andrew's tool. Swapping, or in my case upgrading is simple. Currently, I've tried the original app, by the well done, me-lad-o, Bram Cohen. Rating: Did as much as you really need. But I wanted more geeky and useless information, to understand what was going on. Worried about my port not being open through my firewall, I used the info from a dg, I forget where:
http://grc.com/default.htm
Look for the link to "Shields Up!" (it's under "hot spots"), then hit "proceed" and there are a variety of tests you can perform. You can check the BitTorrent ports by entering 6881-6889 (assuming you're using the default range) into the text box and clicking on "use specified custom port probe"). Hope that helped.

It did help me. Still, suffering slow downloads I tried Burst. A little more sophisticated? More features, more data:, but command line like interfaces? The site says, politely, these can be closed. Good, one thing, I couldn't see the name of the file I was downloading... Otherwise rating : Damned good * Taught me lots.

Anyway, there's more sophisticated? Yes! Stuff out there. Gonna try that tomorrow. Only released a few days (alright weeks) ago; the Nova Torrent.
[Update:] Yip this is far better, still a little glitchy, not buggy, I don't think. But works nicely. Now, I've been able to limit my up bandwidth to a 150KB—my maximum from my cable connection is 256KB thus, I can surf the net as normal, well, nearly normal It's still a bit slow.

Bandwidth issues!

One of the biggest problems is bandwidth. And understanding that new stuff, is super fast; off in the dusty archives, old .torrents, at 1.2 KB are gonna take months. I'm on a 2 MB down, 256 KB up cable.
Here's how it works: there's several large sites out there and maybe 100-500 mini sites (personal and 'other') where dot torrents are linked to. Usually a discussion group is attached, as this seems to be quite a community oriented thing. On the front page, or in newly posted messages are your dot torrents. When a new one comes up, download it then! Whoosh: 100 KB. There maybe several hundred getting it at the same time, you can get some off them, mostly you get it from seeders, who have finished downloading it and leave their window open, thus, ordinary Joes, like me, give back. Giving is community, community members get in first. Late comers suffer, casual browsers, or newbies like myself, download older files, that are more to their tastes, or whatever, and with perhaps you on your lonesome, or two or three others struggle to lift it above 1 or 2 KB.
So, take it from the front page or look at new messages—numbers count. Disney could make a killing here, and save a fortune on bandwidth while they did it. Or I could, if I lived in Russia, and sold secure RSS  feeds of copyrighted music, software, new Hollywood releases... I too could get the bandwidth savings and mass market, though, I'd have to be pretty quick on my toes ;-)

Don't forget to tweak your broadband connections if you're on Windows.

File extensions

I have no idea about some of the files I've downloaded. And I've only been getting music, wait till I try video.

Download sites

So far I've only found three good ones. There seems to be plenty of mini and defunct sites.
http://www.torrentz.com/
http://www.suprnova.org/
http://www.sharingthegroove.org/


# At 16/3/04; 2:10:12 PM
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Bit Torrent downloading



"Is there a link/url or other way that I can use to track the daily number of hits on individual pages on this blog? I'm aware of the /stats/mostReadMessages/ (or similar) but that only shows the most popular pages. The reason I'm asking is that I've added a few new sections to this blog and just want to know how popular they are."

Not daily, you'd have to look each day yourself and work it out. But there is a cumulative.

If you look at the discussion group version of any page, you'll see a 'ct' (count) or reads. This increments the number of page views that page has 'suffered.' Remember, everything you create, be it a front page, a news item (if you've switched them on - Frenchie hasn't) image, thumbnail, story; has a discussion group version of itself, with its total number of page reads details. Your /discuss/ is your friend.


Thank you. Thank you for making an under employed bug fixer busy for a second :-) (And thanks Mark for pointing him out.)

# At 16/1/04; 10:44:13 PM
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Understanding your page reads



Yeah, I see the two trackbacks. Cool.
"If this works, you should have a couple of trackbacks on your site."
Weird innit? But it think it's such a good thing for this blogFootball community. Now, one (well me and thee so far) can have conversations, instead of writing interesting stuff within someone else's blog, within their comments, now one can write in your blog, and still continue the thread. Of course, this trackback works with the unwashed millions of other blogs out there too.

How to quickly quote another site
I've been using this for years. I'm hoping that others will finally follow - a lot of work has gone into making this simple.

Within your Editors only: News page are two links. These are special javascript bookmarklets. Drag one to your favorites or bookmarks toolbar, then highlight some text in any web page like this:

Click the bookmark and a new window will pop up with:
  • the title of the page in the title part of your post
  • the URL of the page in the URL part of your post
  • the highlighted text in italics and quotes

All ready for you to add your reply or whatever. Just pick your department and away you go.

[Caveat:] I've checked Lion's template (don't need it in your home page template) others will need to add two lines to call some javascript. Above the </body> or {body} tag, somewhere between the <head> and </head> tags add the call:
<script language="Javascript" src="http://www.cybersaps.org/images/static/images/js/manilaExpress.js"></script>
If you want to download and edit the formatting of the quotes and italic, feel free.
The other line to add is at the foot of your template, just above your </body> tag:
<script language="javascript">tryNews();</script>
Most people will have this in their template anyway, unless they've edited it out.

# At 3/1/04; 5:03:24 PM
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Next to try is the power blogging (quoting)



Department or departmentLink macro
In your news item template you can either have {department} or {departmentLink} - one will give you a plain word of the department you've listed that news item in, the other will give a link to that department. Official howTo here. And more macros here.
# At 2/1/04; 8:02:34 PM
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Department or departmentLink macro



News departments macro
Add this to your template to see a list of links to all the news departments you've created. (See mine on the left hand side below my navigation feature. You'll need to add a title of your choice to your template too.)
{alteredUserland.newsDeptLinks ()}
# At 2/1/04; 7:54:11 PM
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News departments macro



Group blogging with news items
The News Items feature promotes collaboration - you can choose who can create news items and who can approve them for posting on the home page. For instance, you could run a very open site where members of the site can create news items and post them to the home page. or, members create, editors approve. Or, a contributing editor creates while the managing editor approves.
# At 30/12/03; 12:18:38 PM
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Group blogging with news items



Mark prob shouldn't, the rest could
The blogger who blogs the blogs (Mark and his able stand-ins) could, probably should, stay as is. I say this because it surely must be simpler to edit one block of text than to create numerous news items for each blog that's linked and described.

So long as they understand the double spacing rule. Thus, each link to an updated blog and accompanying paragraph would be double returned paragraphs, showing up in RSS aggregators as individual news items. But, accompanying text, which explains the weather, the writer's state of mind etc., should be contained in one news item, unless they update twice, like yesterday's. In which case it would be justifiable to have two such paragraphs.

How to beat the double returns?
Manila automatically inserts <p> tags for you when you hit the return key twice. Manila then sees the <p> tag and puts the chop in to differentiate news items. In other words, Manila converts automatically two hard returns as a paragraph end and start sequence and later as a marker for different news items. Let me just emphasise - we're talking just about flip or vanilla Manila here. In proper news items orientated blogs, double returns can be in any news items, and they are obviously not further chopped.

So, say you want your news item to appear to have double returned spaces between apparent paragraphs, but not to be chopped up in your RSS feeds. Simply you cheat. You add return, space, return instead (or two break tags <br> would have the same result). This has the visual effect of double paragraphs, but without the chopping.
# At 30/12/03; 11:02:05 AM
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Mark prob shouldn't, the rest could



Why is news better than vanilla Manila?
In a nutshell it's the way of the future. Flip the home page was the first implementation of Manila back in December 1999, that's four years ago. News items with departments came along, maybe a year later.
There hasn't been any further updates to the flip the home page metaphor since the javascript alert instead of the page saying, "really flip the home page." And there won't be.

With the news metaphor, you can post individual new news items, instead of double spacing paragraphs with the flip. Hmmm. I'd better explain that a bit better. With the olde flipe you create one new message, and this is the front page. Go look in your discussion group, you'll see one message for each new day, while with the newfangled news you get one new message for each new news item, perhaps several in one day. In that one day's message, if you double space your paragraphs, they'll be chopped up into individual news items. I know most bloggers in blogFootball land do this, just for their own presentation not knowing nor caring that under the hood other things are going on.

However, this isn't good!
bfnewsItemsDoubleSpacing.jpg

A snap from my aggregator, showing Mark's 2nd update for today. Each double spaced paragraph is a separate news item. In Mark's case this is usually quite appropriate, but sometimes he splits one news item across two paragraphs. This is far more common in other blogFootball blogs.
RSS and aggregators


When other people read your site, many will read it via the browser through your templates, as you would imagine. But, these days there are many more RSS readers (admittedly many of the regular RSS readers are some sort of 'bot). These readers are reading each paragraph as an entirely seperate news item. I'm one of these people. I read many blogs these days through the aggregator in Radio it's just much easier to read 50 blogs there, than going to their actual site. Sometimes, I can go to a blog and find it hasn't updated, and that's a waste. While, when I go to my Radio aggregator I see only updated news items, which is a far more productive use of my overloaded attention span.
[Update:] Each news department has it's own RSS feed, thus, people could subscribe to your football rants or your personal sermons only.

Comments and trackback
You can see my comments and trackback features below each of the news itesm I post. Comments are probably self explanatory. Trackback is much more difficult to 'get.' (Besides, I think it's not working here presently.) An example: say Legion posts something on his site, referring to something on Mac's site. Assuming they're both using news items. If Legion uses the perma link to Mac's news item, the one with #a333 at the end, within his post, or adds it in the little box when he's editing the news item, then on posting that item to his site the software will ping Mac's site and an excerpt will show up in the trackbacks. Thus, Mac will know Legion is talking about that news item, and Mac would know this without having to go there. Take that wider, and anybody on any other blog anywhere in the world can continue the discussion on their site, and Mac will find out, without having to read all the millions of blogs that are available. It doesn't even have to be Mania, it couold be any sort of blog software.

News departments
Again, you can see my news departments at the foot of each of my news items. This basically gives me multiple blogs. For you guys it could be a way of routing say referee rants into one department, personal or non football sermons into another department and so on. It's a subtle way of organising your thoughts or bloggings. Don't underestimate it. It's helpful for you as well as your readers.

Updating via PDA and mobile phones
I suppose I could fix it so this could be done for vanilla Manila too, but... Right now you can send an email to your site and it will pop in as a news item within your blog. Soon, if I had some spare time, you'd also be able to moBlog. Either stills or video. Obviously this takes us into some weird territory. Especially when you consider that many mobile phones now carry web browsers that allows you to read websites on your phone and yes, there's also RSS readers for less capable phones (there already exists a WAP version of your site, which has been available since Feb 2000). So, consider the time when you or your readers update, access or contribute to your blog, but never ever go anywhere near a computer!

Those four items then are probably the killer reasons for swapping. Most, I guess will still want to carry on as they always have. And so they should.

But next time you're out at the pub, and you really want to blog something then, be it a picture or a moment of clear football thinking, and you can't do it via your new mobile phone because you haven't switched over to news items, don't blame me.

Try it, you can always switch back.
# At 29/12/03; 7:40:29 PM
To the How to dept.
Comment [1] Trackback [0]
Why is news better than vanilla Manila?



If Dave's invented it, it must be good, so I may as well add it here too, for blogFootball sites.
"A new Manila macro is a clone of the Radio macrothat displays recent blog posts.
{recentNewsItems (maxPosts:25, maxTitleLength:35, flIncludeWhen:true, cellspacing:5)}"
I'd better explain that this macro is only for vanilla Manila or 'flip the page' as most here are still using (despite my pleas otherwise!!!).
# At 29/12/03; 10:55:47 AM
To the How to dept.
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New recent news items macro



Curly braces are used in macros and javascript. But these are two different languages. In this case legion is trying to add javascipt a template, so we'll stay with that language.

When one adds javascript to a template Manila still processes the template looking for macros to evaluate, those it finds it checks to see if they are legal, if they are, they're processed, if they're not they're neutered. Neutering merely means that the curly braces are turned into the HTML version of a curly brace, namely { or }. It does this to stop nasty or even destructive bits of code 'getting through.'

So, how do you do it? There's a place where you can add javascript without Manila looking at it thinking it's going to contain macros. Thus, it processes not ;-)

The solution, 1: You should put your JavaScript code for the template into the JavaScript section, in Editors only: ==> Prefs ==> Advanced ==> Javascript.

The solution, 2: You can almost always convert the JavaScript code into a function and then call that function from within the template or page using the SCRIPT tag. Be sure to legalize the SCRIPT tag before trying it in a story or message however.

The solution, 3: Store the javascript code as a gem with a .js extension. Then insert the gem into your story with the includeHttp macro. This actually works very well.

{ and }

Try here for more info

# At 28/11/03; 10:49:15 AM
To the How to dept.
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Lions : Legal macros, neutered tags and javascript curly braces



Did you know that Harvard University uses Manila as it's blogging tool? Well, here's a quick and easy beginner's guide that you may find useful.
# At 21/11/03; 11:34:25 AM
To the How to dept.
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Manila Blogging 101