vetula.com: chris kelley's weblog

Friday, April 25, 2003

A nice toolbar for Mozilla contains a collection of tools that web developers might find useful. Nice debugging tolls in case you are having problems with your layout. Created as an experiment in XUL+JX, /pnhtoolbar/ is a good example of the useful extensibility of Mozilla.

10:31:16 AM

Wednesday, April 23, 2003

OK - I'm too slammed to test this Content Management System out, but so far it looks realy nice. Page templates use CSS from the git-go, there is a nice page layout process, and it looks like it has some sort of form-builder. And spigots too! If Postnuke is like going to your first concert (Cheap Trick) and smoking for the first time, then Textpattern is like having coffee with Nina Simone in heaven. (Wow - a terrible turn of words...sorry about that...)

7:16:07 PM

Saturday, April 19, 2003

Impressions of Geeklog: Geeklog sure is fast! It really makes my Postnuke installation feel really tubby. It's a great CMS for someone who wants an instant portal - it features a nice calendar, 6 skins out of the box, some simple customisation, and clean user interface. If it had better multi-lingual support, I would seriously consider it. They seem to have pretty good docs, so I could probably bake in the multi-linual suppport I am seeking.

11:41:50 AM

I am currently testing a few open-source content managment systems. Some requirements:

Good developer documentation
Multi-lingual support:

ability to target a post to different language versions of a site
User may select preferred language form home page

Simple template editing - does not necessarily need to be forms-based
Developer can easily add fields to user database, as well as to article/file submissions
html or php files created outside the system can be easily integrated into the CMS's permissions system
Flexible permissions system
New posts e-mailed to subscribers
Database abstraction layer, with ability to work with mysql or others

Wishlist:

xml-rpc or SOAP interface to CMS internals (or at least suppport for Blogger API)
Ability to implement user blogs
News aggregator

11:33:46 AM

Friday, April 04, 2003

I've been looking for a good way to serve an rss feed of server data. Here is a nice rdf format: RDF Site Summary 1.0 Modules: Service Status
12:53:03 PM

Tuesday, March 11, 2003

Mozilla and Radio Userland should go together like peanut butter and jelly. But editing in Mozilla has been pretty ugly - no fancy WYSIWYG editor like they have on IE. I have tested out Composite several times, but it went through a period when it was pretty broken, and I lost interest in it. The Midas project got my attention, and when I read recently that it worked in recent builds of Mozilla, I figured it was time to give it a try. In my implementation, I am transferring the contents of the Midas iframe to and from the server using a hidden textarea and some javascript. I just posted some files to the gems folder that explain how I got Midas working with Radio Userland. You should use a recent Mozilla build - I'm using 1.3b 20030204. Here are the files:

I wish I knew of an easier way to package them for Radio Userland consumption... Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

7:40:31 PM

Monday, March 10, 2003

I am doing some tests using Midas to enable a rich text editing (WYSIWYG) in Mozilla and Radio Userland. Useful Links:

If you are seeing this post, then it works! I'll have a how-to available soon.

12:17:32 PM

Sunday, March 09, 2003

I've been using NewsMonster for a couple of weeks. Since I have been a Radio Userland user for at least a year now for reading news feeds, I had to change some of my habits to get used to NewsMonster. Change is good.

I really like having the feeds display its own sidebar - if I am rushed for time, I can easily select the feeds I *need* to read. FM RadioStation has a similar feature; however, they do it MS Outlook-style, offering a 3-pane view of news feeds, which is pretty darn nice.
The java-based aggregator is buggy - sometimes it chokes while it is processing the subscriptions.rdf file, which is the xml list of feeds to which the user is subscribed. This morning it had a problem processing the sitefilters listed in subscriptions.rdf - no big deal (I don't really need them) - I used a text editor and took them out. There probably needs to be a little more validation when news feeds are added to the subscription list.
I have to explicitly start the aggregator when I want it to collect the feeds or update the current list. This process should be automatic, upon browser start-up (perhaps configurable in prefs) and per the specs in each site's RSS file.
There needs to be a way to post to your blog from NewsMonster.

I drinking the koolaid - I support what Kevin Burton, developer of Newsmonster is doing - and I've hit the Paypal button on his website to encourage development of NewsMonster. His moves echo some of the things that Dave Winer, progenitor of Radio Userland, did to capture my attention (and to earn some of my money):

Discusses issues that I find interesting in his blog
Passionate about his work
Supports many of the ideas behind the open source movement, while still acknowledging the need to make a living.

1:37:38 PM

If I were still using Internet Explorer for browsing, I would really like this alot. (I'm using Mozilla.) Still, FM RadioStation is a pretty impressive front-end for Radio Userland, which is a blogging newsreader. I am especially impressed that they offer tabs for the Browsing component. And there's a spellchecker for the blogging app! A couple of kinks:

Tabs should load in the background.
Not all of my categories (17) show in the Publish section

I'm committed to using Mozilla as my main web platform; therefore, I'm using the standard browser-based Radio Userland for blogging and NewsMonster for reading RSS feeds.

1:04:41 PM