Vanity Foul
Dedicated to the wanderings of an egotistical mind.


20030422
Tuesday April 22, 2003

Re: New Roller Themes Redux

Koen Van der Auwera (otherwise known as atog) has contributed his theme, named "clean". Likewise, Greg Klebus has contributed his old FreeRoller theme as "moonshine". moonshine is based on a design by Eric Costello. This brings the total "stock" Themes/Skins in Roller to 11 (eleven).
( Apr 22 2003, 10:25:44 AM ) Roller Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/re_new_roller_themes_redux1



20030421
Monday April 21, 2003

New Roller Themes

I forgot to announce this weekend that the Werner and Cheb (from Brian Blakely) themes have been completed and are in CVS. In addition, Dave and I have been tidying up the Velocimacros considerably. I think we were so focussed on other things that we overlooked some "minor" macro issues. All should be good now.

I will continue adding Themes as they become available to me. If you would like to submit your (unsolicited) Themes, note that I may apply some "editorial" justice.

Later: I rather like graphic on The Perfect System. Not crazy about *all* the color choices, but I like the simple clean implementation.
( Apr 21 2003, 10:53:14 AM ) Roller Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/new_roller_themes

For further reading on today's posts:



20030420
Sunday April 20, 2003

Re: Producing OPML with Roller

Dave illustrates in a brief article how to generate OPML from Roller. As a convenience, we could add a new standard macro named showBookmarkOPML which generates the outline for each Folder:

#showBookmarkOPML( $folderName )     #set( $folder = $vHelper.getFolder( $folderName ) )     #if ( $folder )         <outline text="$folderName">         #set( $links = $folder.getBookmarks() )         #foreach( $link in $links )             <outline text="$link.name" link="$link.url" />         #end         </outline>     #end #end

Then the user's page could look like this:
<opml version="1.1">
<head><title>Dave's bookmarks</title></head>
<body>
showBookmarkOPML("Blogroll")
showBookmarkOPML("Java blogs")
</body>
</opml>

How does that look?
( Apr 20 2003, 08:07:37 AM ) Roller Permalink Comments [1]
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/re_producing_opml_with_roller



20030419
Saturday April 19, 2003

Running on Roller 0.9.7.1

I'm not sure what that sub-sub-release (the .1) is for, but what you're seeing is the latest and greatest from cvs.

Besides Werner's Theme, Brian Blakeley has submitted his as well. I'm working on getting it firmed up, but it is in cvs (as "cheb") already.
( Apr 19 2003, 01:44:28 PM ) Roller Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/running_on_roller_0_9



20030417
Thursday April 17, 2003

Re: New Roller Themes Redux

This has been a thorn in my side for some time, I'd really like to get some new Roller themes. Several people on FreeRoller have created some nice looking blogs. I'm going to name names, and hope they voluntarily submit their designs for the benefit of all Roller users.

Would the owners of these fine blogs please submit their Weblog pages and any supporting material to their nearest Roller developer? Thank you. If you'd like to suggest a name for the Theme, and include attribution somewhere in the page, please do so.

Update: Werner Ramaeker has agreed to donate his theme.

Even Later: I've heard from atog & Jeff, both agreed to submit their designs. Thanks guys!
( Apr 17 2003, 03:23:36 PM ) Roller Permalink Comments [7]
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/re_new_roller_themes_redux

Re: Whoopee!

My congratulations to Rickard, may the two of you have a long and happy life.
( Apr 17 2003, 01:28:46 PM ) Personal Permalink Comments [2]
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/re_whoopee

The value of an RSS aggregator

I resisted the trend towards RSS aggregators for a long time, but finally setup nntp//rss last week. It did reduce the amount of time I spent reading blogs: I didn't have to click through to every site to see if something changed and I didn't have to wait for the whole graphical-interface to load. But recently I found another use, one that had become vital enough that I was peeved when nntp//rss decided to stop polling my subscriptions for some reason: printing.

You see, I like reading Ted Neward's blog, he provides a great deal of useful information. But some of his longer posts are trying, that is, I have difficulting focussing on the monitor while reading, and scrolling makes it all that more difficult. So I started printing them (ah, paper). But I got all those graphics and links and other posts and whatnot associated with the weblog presentation. Enter nntp//rss: since each post is presented to me as a discreet item, without all the decorations. This makes it much cleaner to read on the monitor, but also makes for a much less encumbered printout. The only downfall is that blog posts with graphics usually don't display (the infamous "relative url" problem?) - but since Ted hasn't made (much?) use of graphics I haven't noticed the loss.
( Apr 17 2003, 10:56:22 AM ) Technology Permalink Comments [1] [Link]
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/the_value_of_an_rss

For further reading on today's posts:



20030416
Wednesday April 16, 2003

Compress your data

Bill Kearney wants us to Use compression on your web server. I couldn't agree more, and posted a comment:

It's about time someone stood up and said this. As one of the committers on Roller (http://www.rollerweblogger.com) I've added gzip compression for both the web pages and the RSS feed - it'll be coming in version 0.9.7.

I don't think Dave has this in the README for the next release, guess that means I should put it in there ;-)

Later: there was some bugs with the implementation I *cough* borrowed *cough* from Marty Hall © 2002 Marty Hall; may be freely used or adapted, but I fixed them.
More to the point, my test page went from 34028 bytes to 7939: 23.33% of the original size!
( Apr 16 2003, 03:33:44 PM ) Roller Permalink Comments [2]
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/compress_your_data

For further reading on today's posts:




archives
links