scriptygoddess

Unfortunately it looks like WROX press (they make those big red books with the ugly authors on the cover) is going out of business

Story Here
In my opinion they have put out some excellent books, esp. their "Professional" series. I use the Professional PHP 4 often. There will either be a good sale on WROX books at your local bookstore, or they will just dissapear…

A few people have asked for code similar to this. Basically this will allow you to show/hide layers where one layer hides and another shows in it's place depending on what you click. This code comes with Dreamweaver MX, and if you have it and know how to use it – it's nice there because it gives you a UI to work with, but the same effect can be accomplished by hand.

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If you're using the subscribe to comments script there's an important bug fix. Basically, it's been discovered that Safari browsers on Macs will crash when they attempt to submit a comment. The download has been updated. But if you have it already installed, it's a simple fix (see "more" text).

(FYI – If you're on Safari – this bug fix has been made to this site, so you should be able to comment here without crashing)
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An interesting javascript browser sniffer.

Some of you may read my personal blog where I have spent days now talking about XML, RSS, and why you want to upgrade your template. I realized as comments came in that an explanation was in order.

XML – There is another "language" (per se, for lack of better term) out there called XML. We are all familiar with HTML – it allows your content to display in a web browser. XML, "extensible markup language," is another way of sharing your information. It uses tags that can be defined and from there other applications can use the data. It is handy for sharing information from a site with a news reader, or a feed on a webpage.

RSS – RSS is a flavor of writing out XML. It stands for "Really Simple Syndication". I do not know enough of the history here, and I am not the person to explain this. I do know that often people use the terms interchangeably, and the XML template here at ScriptyGoddess is written in RSS 2.0. (If you have more info on this, feel free to share.) There is information on RSS here that is worth reading if you want to dig deeper.

Syndication – Have you ever seen news from one site on another? For example, your company may have an Intranet, and it may offer up MSN news on it. This is syndication. If you have an XML page, you can offer up your content to be syndicated on other sites.

So now we know what XML is, and what RSS. The next step is News Readers. There are a number of them out there – NetNewsWire for the Mac; Syndirella, Newzcrawler, FeedReader, and others for the PC.

I changed jobs recently, and I don't have a lot of time now to surf the sites I used to surf daily. It's hard to keep up with everything. However, I realized while I was at SXSW Interactive this past week that if I downloaded a news reader that might help me keep on top of everything. Anil Dash pointed out in a panel that with a News Reader, he could stay on top of 10,000 blogs if he wanted to. I personally caught up on close to 100 in 15 minutes earlier today – I skipped the ones that didn't update and read the ones that did, commenting on several as I went along.

However, while a lot of people that use MT have an index.xml template for their site, they are using the original default one that came with earlier installations. These feeds only contain excerpts of posts, as Jay Allen pointed out to me back in January. What ends up happening for most sites is you just see a few words like this in the news reader (From Michele's feed):

"My life has not been "normal" since September 10, 2001. I imagine it's the same for most of you. I…"

However, with an upgraded index.xml template using the instructions offered by Lisa at her site or from Dive Into Mark, the feed would look like this:

"My life has not been "normal" since September 10, 2001. I imagine it's the same for most of you. I want my life back. I want to go back to the place where my children didn't ask me a million questions every night that I just can't answer."

With full posts in your index.xml file, people that use a news reader can read your posts quickly & easily. In the end, you will probably be more read and people may just come back more often to leave comments because you've simplified it for them.

XML is not like PHP. You don't need anything special on your server because you don't run it. It is much more like HTML. You are creating a file that a news reader can then parse and feed to the end user. It's a good thing.

If you use Blogger you can also set up an RSS Feed using RSSify. There are instructions at their site.

As I learned at SXSW, no one knows for sure where blogs are going. I can all but guarantee that the need for a feed that offers up full posts for users is definitely something you should add now. It's quick and easy – just a template upgrade. Another way to share your words – and your visitors will thank you.

EDITED: If you are using a news reader, be kind to the people whose feeds you are pulling down. This became clear to me after reading Dori's post on the issue. Most readers allow you to edit the number of times you pull a feed from a site. I have mine set for every 3-4 hours for most of the sites I visit, others I have set for 1 hour. Be kind and don't pull their feeds too often!

Found a bug with the the keyword referrer hack (the version 2). See the full post here.

Christine has been rallying to get everyone to set up RSS feeds. She's even gotten Jennifer involved. Solonor is also involved in spreading the word.

To show my support, I've posted my RSS feeds (on my site). If you're using the restricted post hack, you do not want to use my feeds. Instead, try Mark's (of Dive into Mark) feed.

If you have questions about my feeds, please let me a comment here or on my blog and I'll get back to you.

I'm clearing out some of my templates and had this in a test page. I don't know if I ever posted the code here, so just in case I hadn't, here's the code to create a dropdown "jump box" that will forward you to the selected month's archive.

(Script assumes you are on MT. No php needed here – this one is all javascript)
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For those of you using the google go away script – I've made an adjustment [thanks to Ron] where you can easilty add more things to "reject". Original post here.

Have you ever wanted to test out a script before you went through the hassles of installing it on your server? OpensourceCMS to the rescue! Try out some of the PHP/MySQL based free and open source software systems such as Geeklog, b2, Nucleus, pMachine, Textpattern and many others. Via Jasmeet in the comments on Jason's site.

Speaking of Jason, there is a new pinging method available for Blogrolling and you can test it out here!