Mail for February 10, 2002

From: Dave Polaschek
Subject: UserLand and HTML templates

I've been fighting Frontier's (and later Manila's) template problems since I first found the validators for HTML 4. Don't remember the exact date, but it was probably sometime in 1999. By March of last year, I'd had it with their template system and HTML generation, and started moving away from both Manila and Frontier. http://davespicks.com/about.html describes part of the migration process, but I'd also been working inside Frontier, and had built templates that actually generated clean HTML 4. I think that was sometime in mid-2000, but I'm not sure, as I didn't make any special note of it at the time.

But in doing that, I had to go in and change UserLand-supplied code. So every code update from that point on meant manually merging my changes back in.

My solution was to stick with Frontier 5.0.2b20 for generating, the last free version of Frontier (released May 29, 1998). I kept my changes there, and gave up on Manila in March of last year (as I said before). It was a workable solution for a while, as a lot of the changes that UserLand had "burnt into" Frontier (turning UserTalk code into C-code, for performance reasons) were things that worked fine, and I could modify the UserTalk code to make it do what I wanted.

But there were bugs in the application that I couldn't fix, and that's what finally drove me away completely. It meant throwing away a lot of work I'd done in patching up Frontier, and reimplementing it first in server-side includes, then PHP and BBEdit scripts.

I really can't express the frustration I felt at the time. I'd spent a significant part of my free-time for four years trying to work with UserLand to improve Frontier and Manila to the point where they were workable solutions for me. Sometimes Dave was very supportive and I would see changes I'd suggested rolled back into the application, but sometimes I was a whinerboy, and that was that.

To use one of Mr. Winer's phrases: Thanks for listening.

From: Alwin Hawkins
Subject: Radio weblog lookalikes

Agreed with some of the Manila issues, although some of this has disappeared in Radio. But there are still "required" Radio/Manila macros for every page (you can get a list for every page in Radio; it's well documented in the help system)

The good news is that you can, with a little effort, design around most of it and make it look pretty much as you will. I'm an RN by profession and training, not an IS or design person, so it's not too far a stretch to say that almost anybody can do it.

In the spirit of full disclosure, garret at http://www.dangerousmeta.com did the major heavy lifting on the design (it's based on his Horsefeather's 0.4 Radio theme). I just did the build-out, then translated the macro equivalents between Radio and Manila.

The resources are out there, as I said here.

From: Adam Gaffin
Subject: Radio Userland

I've been using Radio for a couple of weeks now. It wasn't too hard to swap in my own templates (http://www.the-election.com and http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/compendium/ for two blogs that don't look anything at all like those UserLand defaults). I especially like the ability to post to multiple sites that look absolutely nothing like each other. It's not easy enough for your basic AOL user to set up, but if you can figure out Greymatter, it's not hard (added bonus: You don't have to worry about your hosts either not having the right Perl modules or having an IS group that doesn't want to know from Perl).

But, no, it's not perfect. For one thing, the Windows version uses some generic Microsoft DHTML editor that does all the stupid things you'd expect a general Microsoft editor to do, i.e., it screws up things like attribute values in tags, so your code won't validate as XHTML (you could type or paste in HTML directly, but that defeats the whole point of using a writing tool like this).

What I really don't like though is, ironically, the RSS support. There's no way to input a title for indidvidual items, which means your RSS doesn't have individual item titles. Being a faithful Scripting News reader, I can see where that came from, but for the rest of us (well, for me, at any rate), it's a bit annoying. Also, the RSS generator doesn't strip out any HTML tags you might have used to format your text. Messy, messy!

From: Derek Willis
Subject: Radio

I've used Radio myself and while there are things about it that I really like, I agree with you that unless you're familiar with Manila or previous versions of Radio, it takes a lot of work to manipulate the default (or even user-contributed) templates. I tried taking an old CSS design from my site and translating it to Radio, and it took several hours to tweak everything properly. I was surprised by Dave's response ("two hours to understand a templating system is not a lot of time"), because while he might think that's a reasonable response for somebody as experienced as you, it seems a rather tall order for newbies that Radio tries to target. The fact that Radio has only a few templates currently isn't a big problem; most of the sites will look alike until more templates are devised. The larger problem that I think you're making (and Dave is side- stepping) is that changing those templates can be a laborious chore and a big turn-off.

From: Rogers Cadenhead
Subject: Radio Userland

I'm a fan of Radio Userland, but not because of the weblog publishing features. There's too much hardcoded HTML inside Radio Userland's scripts for my taste -- especially in how it handles Stories.

As I read all of these complaints about the hassles of changing a template, I have to wonder why experienced web designers are using the templates at all. Create a Radio Userland or Manila weblog the same way you would create a Blogger weblog -- use the default templates and documentation to figure out the macros and script calls you can use, then put them into your own original design.

For example, here's the ones from the main template I'm currently using on a test site:

<%title%>
<%radio.macros.editorsOnlyMenu ()%>
<%radio.macros.weblogUrl ()%>
<%radio.macros.weblogUrl ()%>
<%siteName%>
<%description%>
<%navigatorLinks%>
<%bodytext%>
<%now%>
<%radio.macros.weblogUrl() %>
<%radioBadge%>
<%rssLink%>
<%Frontier.version ()%>
<%year%>
<%authorName%>
<%radio.macros.getHitCount ()%>
<%radio.macros.editThisPageButton ()%>
<%radio.macros.staticSiteStatsImage ()%>

Once you figure out the macros and how to call scripts, Radio Userland can be the engine of a nice content management system even if you don't use any of Userland's "five-minutes-to-first-post" features. Those features are only easy if your weblog looks like every other Radio Userland or Manila weblog, but for a lot of people who aren't web designers and don't want to mess with HTML, that seems to be an acceptable tradeoff. Especially as more themes become available.

From: Elaine Nelson
Subject: Radio - Userland

I tried out Radio, because it seemed to have a lot of intriguing features, and I was doing some research for work. As all the radio sites seem to say, it is drop-dead-easy to start - that first post is definitely a "woo-hoo!" moment.

But only to start, mind you. I was quite intimidated by the aggregator features, but more seriously disturbed by the frustration of trying to apply a CSS-only & valid design. I spent hours fiddling with it, trying to do something of my own creation, then fooling about with a glish.com template.

Couldn't get it to: work, validate, or look right. so after two separate evenings of working on it and not getting at all what I wanted, I just gave up.

I'd thought it would be pretty straightforward - I've had a number of Blogger weblogs, and had lots of fun tweaking their templates and/or making my own. but I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong with Radio, and that killed the fun.

I'd send a link, but I was using my own site rather than Radio's, and my Web host just died. (totally unrelated)

From: Mark Morgan
Subject: From the Conversant Evangelist

I read your post yesterday about Userland and templates, and posted a reply at my weblog.

http://www.voicesofunreason.com/journals/markmorgan/2002/02/11#post5057