Okay, I'm trying to get News Items to work in Manila, for the macster site.
I've got a hidden site off to the side, where I'm doing my experiments.
Granted, I'm an experienced Manila person, but it's like a "Chutes and Ladders" game where working with News Items has landed me on a square with a chute that sent me damn near the beginning of the game. My writing here is prolly gonna be more ascerbic, because I'm learning new things, and not finding stuff where I expected to. Basically, I'm writing down the results of my findings on this page. So you get to see life from a newbie's eyes.
Searching for information I can't tell if Manila Newbies has documentation or discussion. The first place I went was to Manila Newbies. Didn't see anything in the nav column. Looked at the Table of Contents. Nope, not listed there. (later: oops! I looked too quickly through the page. There IS something there. Bzzzt! User Error! Fooey on me!) So I did a search. The results didn't look too promising.
Userland-wide Search results for News Items. Hmmmm
Later, after doing the searches, but before finding anything at Manila Newbies, I did a search through the Frontier web site through the change notes for each version to see if News Items were mentioned there. That led me to this page, a humongous description of News Items (from Manila Newbies.. It didn't show up on the search, either!)
Observations thus far
Enabling News Items -- First, you must go to one the Prefs pages to enable it. Oh, there's a News Item category in the Nav bar.
Once you're in the News Items area, you get to answer 20 questions.
First, do you want to enable it? Answering Yes and pressing Submit currently blows away whatever you had on your home page at the time. I discovered to my chagrin that doing so made my calendar's date be May 27. But I only created the site in the last week. Hello?
Oh and that reminds me. While we're on the topic of Manila comments (and this one is a gripe). 'Tis all fine and well and dandy to use the calendar as a navigation device if you're posting every day. But what if you abandon a site for a while, and skip a month? Your home page calendar will only link to the previous and next month. So if the previous month had no postings whatsoever, the poor navigator has reached a dead end. The only solution for that is to have supreme understanding of Manila's workings in order to try a workaround.
This listing of things to think about has drawn to a standstill while I read the docs that I finally found.
Found this about having a news item that's not a link; changing the template. (where was it found? by a day-to-day search through recent Manila Newbies homepages. Interesting if inefficient data-mining)
There were some observations, comments and questions about managing news items. I posted them elsewhere and Jake Savin answered my questions oh so speedily!
Eyelids are heavy...the night is half gone....it's bedtime for this Bonzo News Item newbie.
Many hours of sleep and some hours of wakefulness later . . . Well, those are the mutterings and ravings of a very task-oriented person learning new things. Free and worth every penny. ; ) By now I've got some kinda mental model of news items.
Departments as Info Architecture Now it's time to devise categories/departments for the Macster site. I list some of my ideas; whaddaya think?
The great promise to News Items/Departments is this: Like MetaFilter, many people can contribute to the site. Searching for content by department (listed in the Nav area, naturally!) can be a good way to find out things you wanna know. The hard part is thinking up a good set of departments/categories beforehand. Good ol' information architecture.
Manila Revisited Working on building a new site, as an experienced manila user, I expect to get through some stuff quickly. True, I do that. But hanging out on the Prefs welcome page, I really wish that I could edit it with my own mnemotic notes about what each of the categories are.
Problem: Invariably, for such things as finding the defualt sign up link (I'm a member, so I can't find it on the home page Members sign up box, of course!), I visit about three prefs categories before I find the right one. And Prefs is one of those things that's visited seldom enough so that whatever I learned by my visits there today is forgotten by the time I next have to go on a Prefs-edit spree.
Solution: I'd like to either be able to edit the welcome page to make my own notes about what's in each category, or else plead for UserLand to post a small summary for each category on the Prefs Welcome Page. An unordered list that describes what each category does.
Two-fisted Browsing Since the weblogs.com server has to go and grab information for the theme off of the weblogger.com server, it takes longer to load. Noticeably longer in Netscape. Enough so that for someone managing the site, I'm using Explorer. And! I! Hate! The! Fact! That! There's! No! Drag! and! Drop! in Explorer's! Text-entry! boxes! Nor can I use command-Z to undo the last little bit of text I just typed, either. Netscape Communicator's (version 4.6, MacOS) behavior here in textboxes is surprisingly easy-to-use for working with text.
<this page is a work in progress. . . >
<this site is a work in progress . . . >
<this life is a work in progress. . . >
Chocoholic Help? The upside of having the Trader Joe's open a nearby store it's a 5 minute walk. The downside is that I get to exercise my chocolate-resistance more, since I darken the door of TJs more than I used to. (Since the end of last year, I've lost 25-30 pounds, and still have a little ways to go, so this is a real issue for me!) Hmmm. Just saw this news story about a patch for chocoholics to reduce cravings.
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