Ron Who?

Tech Support is Clean!

2010-04-12T10:36:00.001-04:00

If you're out there and you're having trouble getting a response from
tech support please try again. I am now actively monitoring every
message we get and we will do our best to help you.

We have had two major spam problems with the current tech support
configuration. Spam had been an annoyance late last year so I turned
up the filter, but then too many real support requests were getting
flagged as spam and dropped in the "ignoreme" folder. So I turned back
the filter. And then it was like a flood of spam. The support email
address (support at this domain) got hammered. I mean mercilessly. I
was trying to clean them up along the way (I had to manually delete
them one at a time) and stay on top of support request but some were
falling through the cracks. I didn't know and I'm sorry.

I finally got an email from a friend and long time customer who told
me that he had emailed for support 5 times in the last month and got
nothing. So this weekend I have gone back over everything that came
through the support inbox in the last few months. I tried to respond
to everyone that got missed.

I just finished and I want to shout to the world - "this support inbox
is clean!"

CS5 is Coming

2010-04-12T09:03:00.001-04:00

If you didn't already know, Adobe is set to announce the new version of Dreamweaver. If you've been wondering why we have been so quiet, now you know. Assuming that a preview of the software is made available to developers today we've go updates in the works for you and we hope to have them ready very soon. You can check out all the activity over at Adobe's website. They start the show at 11am.

http://cs5launch.adobe.com/

RSS Replay v 1.6.3 Now Available

2009-10-05T08:41:00.003-04:00

I just posted a new update to RSS Replay that improves editing for all Macintosh versions and for non-standard template-based pages, as well as several other bug fixes and improvements. You can download it at
http://www.rnsoft.com/en/products/rssreplay/download.php

Many thanks to Joshua Orzech, the Art/Creative Director for the Disc Golf Association for reporting the bug, testing it with me, and helping make things better.

Tutorials Make You Think

2009-07-08T08:23:00.003-04:00

OK, so I spent a lot of time getting the new Tutorial for RSS DreamFeeder ready. I wrote for many days and I tried to include much of my thinking about how I wanted RSS DreamFeeder to work. It is my hope that sharing these ideas will help you in your thinking about how to maintain your websites. I'm going to include a few key passages here in my blog so other folks might find it and read it and use it.

First, a bit about maintenance from the introduction:

An RSS feed is all about "what's new" -- the ongoing evolution of content on your website. As you grow your website, adding new content to a page, new pages to content sections or even adding new sections to your site, it is important that you plan for that growth. This is what we call the Maintenance Challenge.

To tackle this challenge you must address who is responsible for new content (you, your staff, departmental staff -- be very specific), what tools will they use to create that new content (Dreamweaver, Contribute, InContext, a database web interface), how will that new content integrate into the site, and especially what elements of that new content need to be repeated in other places (excerpts for the home page, title and blurb in a listing page, etc.). Its this last piece that can be the real killer in any maintenance plan. You have to repeat content to entice people to see that content (and someone will forget to do it at some point) but maintenance is easiest when the content stays in one place.

It is this inherent conflict that makes maintenance very challenging. The more you can automate content repetition the less difficult your maintenance task will be. RSS DreamFeeder has automation built into its core. Once a feed has been configured it can extract new content from your website with the click of a single button. One click and your feed will find the new pages, extract just the content you specify, build the links and reconstruct any underlying content linking so that they are absolute URLs and can be repeated on any website, assemble the new content with XML and store that content within your RSS feed.

This passage helps explain how we can get the job done with styles and templates:

In presenting an effective website consistency in design is a key element of conveying information. To do that task Dreamweaver provides both templates and style sheets. Templates control page structure and style sheets control the graphical presentation of content. These two tools allow content to be restricted in placement within the document (template regions) and adherent to a predefined visual order (style selection - also called classing). By making those associations between content and presentation we convey the relationships of content - because what something looks like is what something is (especially in an environment like a website, where there is little additional context beyond the page).

Most importantly, we can then use this relationship in reverse to identify content and its value. In other words, if we make a template with a box on it for a headline, on any page using that template when we look in that box we can expect to find text that is the headline for the page. Now here's the kicker, templates and styles leave an imprint on the code for the page, so if we're really clever we can programmatically collect content for our RSS feed by looking for that code.

RSS DreamFeeder v 2.5.2 Posted

2009-07-08T08:20:00.002-04:00

I quietly posted version 2.5.2 yesterday. It solves an interesting issue with duplicated cotnent in automated feeds when there isn't both a link and headline to compare to. I hope it works better for you. As always please send any support questions you may have to support at rnsoft.com.

New Tutorial for Creating RSS Feeds with Dreamweaver and RSS DreamFeeder

2009-07-08T08:14:00.004-04:00

I just posted the new tutorial on how to create RSS feeds with Dreamweaver and RSS DreamFeeder. Actually its a set of related long tutorials covering how to create manually edited text feeds, podcasts, and photocasts as well as automated text feeds that extract content from web pages with a single click of a button. I hope you enjoy it.

http://www.rnsoft.com/en/products/rssdreamfeeder/tutorial.php

RSS DreamFeeder v 2.5.1 Posted

2009-05-09T08:21:00.002-04:00

I quietly posted version 2.5.1 this weekend. It solves an interesting issue with capture on modification if the link and the headline are not modified. It honestly was something I didn't think about when I built the extension but I'm happy to support this angle on using RSS DreamFeeder. I hope it works better for you. As always please send any support questions you may have to support at rnsoft.com.

RSS DreamFeeder v 2.5 Brings RSS Editing and Generation to Dreamweaver CS4

2009-05-04T10:58:00.002-04:00

Lexington, KY, May 4, 2009 — RNSoft President & CEO Ronald Northrip this morning announced the immediate availability of RSS DreamFeeder version 2.5, an update to the popular Dreamweaver extension for creating and editing RSS feeds.

RSS DreamFeeder allows you to directly edit any kind of RSS feed you want. Open up any feed and click the Content tab and you'll be able to quickly edit the text of your headlines or the url for the audio files you're using in your podcast.

RSS DreamFeeder also includes an integrated search engine that looks through your website for new and updated content to include in your RSS feed. When you process your feed, any new or updated content will be extracted from your HTML or XHTML pages in the method that you specify, and listed as entries within your RSS file.

This update solves many bugs and adds important features to simplify using RSS DreamFeeder.

New in version 2.5:

- CS4 Compatible! (Supports DW8, DWCS3, DWCS4)
- Improved Content Sampling: 1-click content identification so anyone can build automated feeds
- Automated Entry Removals: if the source of a feed entry is removed from your website then its corresponding entry will be deleted automatically
- Fixed Values for common elements like Author
- Improved RSS & ATOM generation -- required content is better enforced so your feeds will validate
- Ping Server updates
- Lots of engine improvements and bug fixes!
- A more complete list of features is available at
http://www.rnsoft.com/en/products/rssdreamfeeder/features.php

Get your copy of RSS DreamFeeder today and start publishing your RSS feed tomorrow!

http://www.rnsoft.com/products/rssdreamfeeder/

RSS DreamFeeder 2.5 brings better RSS creation to Dreamweaver CS4 websites. With fantastic features like Podcasting, Photocasting, Videocasting, and Document casting along with brilliant innovations like the Content Sampler and Entry Editing, RSS DreamFeeder 2.5 delivers all the power and potential of RSS with the simplicity of using Dreamweaver.

Simpler is Better

RSS Replay 1.6.2 Now Available

2009-04-27T19:08:00.002-04:00

I like it when people report bugs that I can actually reproduce in the lab. After the update last week several folks reported one or two more problems. I am happy to report that those bugs have been fixed and this update has now been posted for everyone to download at http://www.rnsoft.com/en/products/rssreplay

RSS Replay 1.6.1 Posted

2009-04-19T05:45:00.003-04:00

Early this morning I quietly posted version 1.6.1 of RSS Replay. This update fixes a flashing issue when the Replay is selected from the layout with certain versions of Dreamweaver. I didn't know the bug was there at all -- it wasn't in any of my testbed environments. It was first reported by Kathy Pelham and she helped me fix it. So lets all say thank you to Kathy when we see her next, OK?

As a small side rant, I'd like to point out that Adobe approved 1.6.0 without any bug reports so their testbed is no better than mine. I'm sure if they had encountered the flashy-thingy bug they would have said so. It is entirely possible that some setting somewhere changes the essential behavior when synchronizing a document, and Kathy has it and both Adobe and I do not. But if that were the case you'd think it would be in the documentation.

There is still a quick flash of the property inspector when using DW8 & CS3 as settings in the document are change. That's because the JavaScript within the document has changed, shifting the position of the selection. The selection doesn't move on its own so I have to reselect the Replay place holder in the layout and that reloads the settings. This was resolved by Adobe with CS4 as they started to get more involved in doing JavaScript widgets in Dreamweaver. I, for one, am glad to see the progress.

RSS Replay v 1.6 is out now and works with Dreamweaver CS4

2009-04-09T09:03:00.000-04:00

This morning I announced the immediate availability of RSS Replay version 1.6, an update to my popular Dreamweaver extension for placing content from RSS feeds into webpage layouts.

RSS Replay uses AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and ASP or PHP to collect RSS content from RSS feeds and applies formatting with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that you can control to present the content in the way that best suits your needs. You can Replay content from any RSS or Atom feed, from your website or any other, combine multiple feed sources, or have multiple blocks of Replayed content on the same layout.

This update solves many bugs and adds important features to simplify using RSS Replay.

New in version 1.6:

- CS4 Compatible! (Supports DW8, DWCS3, DWCS4)
- Improved JavaScript -- Supports More Web Browsers
- ASP/PHP Proxys security improvement -- now support Mod_Security for Apache servers
- A more complete list of features is available at http://www.rnsoft.com/en/products/rssreplay/features.php

Get your copy of RSS Replay today and start republishing RSS content tomorrow!

http://www.rnsoft.com/en/products/rssreplay/

Kim is quoted in the newspaper

2009-01-27T17:25:00.001-05:00

My wife's work at Child Advocacy Today (the Kentucky Medical-Legal
Partnership) was covered in the local paper. How cool is that -- she
even got a quote in.

Legal help now offered at Ky. Clinic
http://www.kentucky.com/101/story/671787.html

More than one way to Replay

2008-10-24T08:51:00.001-04:00

When we built RSS Replay we ran into an interesting problem. RSS
Replay uses JavaScript (AJAX) to request and place content onto web
page layouts. But JavaScript has a same-origin rule that restricts
access to remote content to only other items from the same website.
We got around this in Replay by building proxy server-side scripts
that load and cache RSS content from remote sources. It works very
well for our needs.

Well the clever folks over at nb.io figured out a way to use CSS
import commands to capture RSS content. Interestingly, they still
require a server-side script to break large feeds into multiple small
chunks.

I guess there is more than one way to skin a cat.
http://nb.io/hacks/csshttprequest/

Been out sick, but now I'm back

2008-10-24T08:34:00.001-04:00

Emilia, Kim and I have all been a little under the weather for a few
weeks now. We've been passing some kind of cold thing between us.
Last week it finally landed on me hard. I had managed to find a fix a
few bugs in RSS Replay in the lab and I was just about to bundle it
up and send it out the door when I got smacked down. So now I'm back
up and code will begin to flow again. For those of you following
along at home (or waiting because it was your bug that I fixed) the
updates should be ready early next week (tuesday-ish).

Hi MAMA

2008-10-17T16:53:00.001-04:00

MAMA (Metadata Analysis and Mining Application) is Opera's structural
search engine that reviewed over 3.5 million URLs (pages); whereas
normal search engines return results about the content of pages, MAMA
returns results about site structure, including what doctype the page
uses, whether it validates, what HTML elements and CSS properties it
uses, what plugins, what scriping constructs, and much more. This is
an invaluable tool for many individuals and companies involved in our
industry, and Opera wants to share it with everyone -- so I'm going
to help with a link. Here's their key findings

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama-key-findings/

This is brilliantly useful information.

Alfonso Montesano passes away

2008-09-30T08:19:00.002-04:00

I am sad to report that one of my very favorite cousins passed away
on Sunday.

He was the kind of guy that made you realize what living was all
about. Family and friends and cool adventuring like taking a cigar
boat from Naples to Capri. He will be very missed.

CS4 Sorta

2008-09-23T11:09:00.001-04:00

Well aint that a kick in the pants. All the hype about Dreamweaver
CS4 being out today and it isn't even available for download. And if
you read the fine print it might not be ready until the middle of
November. I'm on the announcement list now and expect to get spam
from them when it is ready.

I hate hurry up and wait. And just cause Adobe throws a big party
doesn't make it a product roll-out. Half-baked grabs for hype around
vaporware doesn't make anyone think you've got your stuff together.

Update: I poked around a bit more on their website and apparently the
only products ready to go are Acrobat 9 and Lightroom 2. No
Photoshop, No Dreamweaver, No InDesign.

Welcome Donovan Warren

2008-09-11T11:03:00.001-04:00

I'd like to share the arrival of Donovan Warren at the home of Dale
and Nora Glaser. Congratulations and welcome to the club.

Tech Support Transition Update

2008-09-05T08:58:00.001-04:00

Just an update to let you know how our transition to this new tech
support system is going. This morning I moved all outstanding tech
support issues from the old system to the shiny new system. That may
mean that you got an email telling you that your support issue has
been received and that you can login and check the status of your
issue. If you don't want to signup/login you can always send us an
email at support@rnsoft.zendesk.com or support@rnsoft.com. We'll be
working diligently to clear this backlog of support issues and will
get solutions out to you as quickly as we can.

Thanks for your patience as we make this change to serve you better.

Emilia in Pictures

2008-09-03T08:34:00.001-04:00

So everyone can see what little Emilia is up to (and so I can fight the urge to post baby pictures to this blog) I've started a photo blog for Emilia. I'll be posting every day or two with new pictures I'll be taking on the fly (probably from my iPhone) and over the next few weeks I'll also be posting some older favorite pics so they're online as well. I hope everyone enjoys this.

http://emiliainpictures.rnsoft.com/

New Tech Support System

2008-09-03T08:07:00.001-04:00

OK, I admit it -- I've been very bad at staying on top of tech support. Sure, I've been out on paternity leave, but really things have gotten far more out of hand than I had hoped they would. But as of today I'm gettin this ship turned around with the help of Zendesk.

There are a lot of new features and tools that I hope will help folks find solutions to problems they're having with our products. The Forums add an entirely new level to the support system that should help highlight important and useful information. There's also a completely open user-driven forum called Tips & Tricks that will be whatever people want to make of it. I'm hoping this will give them the opportunity to exchange their own great ideas. Also, commenting is available on almost all Forum entries so they can add their perspective to any issue we're working on.

On the back end, there are a lot of useful new admin tools that should bring things to light quicker and allow us to be much more responsive than we have been in the past. It also has a great toolkit for mobile use so even while I'm on the road I'll be able to stay on top of things (yay iPhone).

I've got the basic system up and running at http://rnsoft.zendesk.com and I think it should work much better than the old system. I'm going to transfer the support archive to it today and then I'll monitor it closely over the next few weeks. Let me know what you think.

Broken Blog

2008-09-02T17:07:00.001-04:00

Not sure how long the blog has been broken, but the display page on the RNSoft website was not displaying properly. Actually it was completely blank. I'm using a beta version of RSS Replay 2 (coming soon) to replay the content from my blog at whoisron.blogspot.com onto the page. Its really cool, but a bit too specific to the source -- and blogspot added something to the entry tag that tossed the thing for a loop. Of course, its beta software -- and that is exactly why I'm using it. Still, I wonder how long that page has been blank.

Welcome Katherine Mae

2008-09-02T09:27:00.001-04:00

Congratulations are in order to my very dear friends Cyrus and Patty
Robl on the arrival of Katherine Mae. It's a good year for it.

Welcome to the world, Katherine Mae.

Back in the Big Chair -- At least for a few hours

2008-09-02T09:25:00.001-04:00

OK, so I'm back at work today, for at least a few hours. The daycare
for Emilia hasn't started yet, but she seems to be settling down
enough that she doesn't need my constant attention. Also, a few hours
in the early morning will help too. I'm watching my time carefully
and if I can manage 4 hours -- even if broken up -- it will be a big
step forward.

My mother came for a visit last week and took care of Emilia for a
few days and it got me hungry to get back to work. I really was only
playing catch up with tech support (and I'm still doing that -- more
in a later post) and doing a little strategic planning for the next
round of updates, but I got some stuff done and that made me very happy.

Mom managed to get Emilia to play on her own for a while on the floor
and in front of the TV. She honestly never did that for me. She
always wanted me right there next to her and would fuss up a storm if
I was even just on the other side of the room. I guess Mom got her
through it and she seems quite content to watch Winnie the Pooh (for
20 minutes now anyhow).

Well lets see what I can get done...

Trailer for Power House: The Techno Dance Along Show

2008-07-22T07:08:00.001-04:00

Here's a trailer for Shawn's show at Cap Fringe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYuIpJq638g

My Brother has a Show at DC's Cap Fringe Fest

2008-07-21T17:17:00.001-04:00

My brother Shawn has written another cool musical piece for Cap
Fringe this year.

This is what the Washington Post had to say: (by Celia Wren)
... Ramble over to the funny and whip-smart science-fiction fable
"Power House: The Super-Ozone-Friendly-Happy-Disco-Energy-Techno-
Dance-Along Show." Mounted at the Source, and featuring nightclub
music, flashing colored lights, psychedelic projections and a
hilarious parody of a documentary, Shawn Northrip's creation
(directed by Shirley Serotsky) conjures up a dystopian future. The
global energy crisis has been solved by harnessing the kinesis of
dancers. But the technology leads to abuse: Power plants where evil
supervisors, such as Gus Stapo (Joe Pindelski), force drugged-up
victims to keep jiving.

Get tickets at
http://www.capfringe.org/

Hard at Play

2008-07-15T06:55:00.000-04:00

JavaScript 2.0 in the Works

2008-07-08T10:14:00.001-04:00

I just came across this document -- the description of the next version of JavaScript. Very geeky but very interesting -- it lays out the direction and new features of what's coming. I wonder how much of that will be implemented in upcoming versions of Dreamweaver?

http://www.ecmascript.org/es4/spec/overview.pdf

Ich bin eine hausfrau

2008-07-02T06:24:00.001-04:00

Kim goes back to work today and I will be taking care of Emilia for
the next 8 weeks.

I'm trying to work out how to be productive while I take care of her.
I can get some small things done while she sleeps, but timing and
duration of those naps are highly variable and unpredictable. At best
I'd get 90 minutes -- which really isn't enough to get into any solid
coding. I plan on taking the evenings after dinner and work until
midnight. I hope this will be the 3 to 4 hours stretch I'm looking for.

I suppose a benefit of working for my tiny little start-up is that I
can take the time I need and my boss is flexible about it (me :-). So
for the next 8 weeks I'm going to be a housewife. Maybe we'll watch a
little TV.

What Makes Good Tequila

2008-06-24T13:23:00.000-04:00

If you love good food or drink you've got to read this:

http://www.friday.com/bbum/2008/06/19/what-is-good-tequila/

Dreamweaver CS4 Beta

2008-06-24T13:07:00.000-04:00

Adobe has officially started the Dreamweaver CS4 beta program.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/dreamweavercs4/

I expect to download and start trying out my extensions with the new version.

RSS Video from Common Craft

2008-06-24T12:42:00.000-04:00

The guys at Common Craft also did a video about consuming RSS feeds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU

They're perspective is one of blogging, but really anything can be an RSS feed. In fact, its the technology behind podcasting, photocasting, videocasting, documentcasting (note the use of the word cast). In any case, RSS is good for you.

Social Bookmarking Video from Common Craft

2008-06-24T12:36:00.000-04:00

Here's a neat video explaining social bookmarking from Common Craft.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x66lV7GOcNU

Now here's the thing that they don't talk about in the video -- those public bookmarks impact search engine rankings. So if you're a webmaster you want to make it as easy as possible for social users to add your pages to their bookmarks because that means your pages get moved up in Google. Social Bookmarking is a win-win -- good for web surfers and good for webmasters.

Hilda Widgeon's Obituary

2008-06-15T07:01:00.001-04:00

We're all very saddened at the loss of Grandma Widgeon. She was a
lovely lady. Incredibly clever and quick-witted. Loved to play bingo
or go gambling in Delaware. Here's the link to her obituary.

http://www.delmarvanow.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008806130314

Hilda Widgeon dies

2008-06-12T15:46:00.001-04:00

I regret to announce the passing of Hilda Widgeon, Kim's maternal
grandmother.Funeral service will be Monday. Naturally we're all very
sad.

SociaLink's First Award

2008-06-10T15:50:00.001-04:00

5 Star Award from Sofotex

Problem: Multi-Domain Shopping Cart

2008-06-10T14:19:00.002-04:00

How does one create a shopping cart system that crosses domains?

The basic problem looks like this: I want to create a shopping cart
system that will retain it's state across multiple websites that
don't have the same root domain. For example: www.rnsoft.com and www.rssdreamfeeder.com and www.rssreplay.com and www.socialink.us -- all different domains. They don't even share a common root, so a
cookie-based system couldn't be shared.

I've been pondering this problem for a while. I figured I'd ask the
assembled masses and see what ya'll think. I'll be writing more on
the solution I've been cooking up later (it involves a mix of
javascript, ajax and php), but I'd really like your feedback because
I'm not sure my crack-pot scheme will work.

Thanks everyone.

My Booth Babe

2008-06-06T07:26:00.000-04:00

Check out my booth babe from the Spring Break conference in Athens OH.

Update to SociaLink

2008-06-05T13:00:00.001-04:00

I just updated SociaLink to v 1.0.1. If you have a copy you should
download this update. When I was demoing it as Spring Break I ran
into a small bug with the link manager. I also got feed back from
Adobe's exchange techs with another bug -- this time a javascript bug
with IE 6 on Win XP (doesn't happen on other versions of Win). Plus I
added a feature where it remembers where the support files are in
your website so you don't have to be prompted every time you place a
SociaLink on a page.

Anyhow, all of those things were fixed. Hope you enjoy the software.

JavaScript textContent vs innerText

2008-06-02T09:46:00.001-04:00

OK JavaScript fans, this week's tip isn't so much a tip as a nod and link to the guys over at CoderLab.

I was having problems last week with innerText -- the property of DOM nodes that capture the text without the HTML tags. And I was having this problem with Firefox and no other browsers. And that just didn't make sense to me. Sure, if it has been IE I'd have called it par for the course, but I just wasn't expecting it from Firefox.

Anywho, as it turns out, Firefox 1.5 uses the textContent property instead of innerText even though the DOM standard says innerText. Great move guys.

At any rate CoderLab wrote about this one back in April of 06, but I only just found a need for it this past week as I was finishing SociaLink. Here's the link to CoderLab:

http://blog.coderlab.us/2006/04/18/the-textcontent-and-innertext-properties/

SociaLink v 1.0 brings Web 2.0 Social Bookmarking to Dreamweaver MX, MX2004, 8, & CS3

2008-06-02T09:34:00.001-04:00

I'd like to announce the immediate availability of SociaLink version 1.0, a Dreamweaver extension for placing Web 2.0 Social Bookmarking tools into webpage layouts.

Social Bookmarking websites like Digg or Del.icio.us allow readers to tag, store and share content that they find interesting — and if that is your content it can lead to a lot more traffic. And not just lots of clicks, but quality readers who are likely to get more from your site and give more in return.

All you need to do is give those readers a little button on your page for them to click on. You can make a link, right? Well actually its a little piece of javascript. A different javascript for each social bookmarking site. With different parameters for each one. Not to mention opening in a new window or not. And they take up a lot of room in your layout, too.

But it doesn't have to be that hard. SociaLink can add all that functionality to your web pages from the convenience of Dreamweaver without code or complications. Simply insert the SociaLink into your web page, select which of the social bookmarking sites you want to include, and how you want to present the buttons (lots of site buttons or behind a single icon).

SociaLink was designed with web designers and developers in mind. You can control the number of rows or columns of icons, the CSS styles formatting those icons, you can even control the HTML between each icon. Not to mention activation with clicks or rollovers, opening in new windows, and a slew of other settings that will let you fit SociaLink right into your website in every possible way. It even integrates with Dreamweaver's Templates!

And once your audience starts to use these social bookmarking tools you'll see you traffic go up. Readers from the social bookmarking sites will discover your content. Social bookmarks are also stored as public web pages which are searchable. That means more pages with links to your content, so you'll also see your rankings in the search engines improve (and that's good for SEO!).

Get your copy of SociaLink now and make the power of Web 2.0 Social Bookmarking work for you!

http://www.rnsoft.com/en/products/socialink

SociaLink makes it simple to add Web 2.0 Social Bookmarks to Dreamweaver-based web layouts. RNSoft, developer of the award-winning RSS DreamFeeder & RSS Replay, creates software with a focus on simplicity and usability for computer users, web developers and programmers

SociaLink at Last

2008-05-31T06:31:00.001-04:00

We quietly posted SociaLink -- a social bookmarking extension for Dreamweaver -- on the website last night. This continues our Web 2.0 theme in our extensions for Dreamweaver. We've got RSS Replay, RSS DreamFeeder, and now SociaLink.

I've got lots to say about SociaLink, but that will begin on Monday with Press Releases and so forth. Its just nice to finally get it onto the website. Honestly, there's lots of new products in the pipeline and the next 6 months will see updates and intros probably on the order of 1 a month. There's also a new website and new tech support system cooking in there somewhere.

Anyhow I just wanted to post a quick note saying Hello SociaLink. I hope you use and enjoy the software.

No Coding Tip This Week

2008-05-27T07:30:00.000-04:00

Hello Readers

Thanks for reading the blog. Sorry to say that I'm not posting a
coding tip this week. Its new product season and we're trying to get
a new product out before the end of this week. Kinda important
because I'm giving a talk about it at the Spring Break conference
next week. So I'm coding like mad this week (and writing
documentation and building new web pages and updating the ecommerce
system and the serial number generation system). I'll bring more
tasty code chunks next week.

Also, 3 weeks into new product Emilia -- all reviews are positive. :-)

Look at the pretty baby!

Showing Attributes with For Each

2008-05-19T07:53:00.002-04:00

So I have been working further with my development frameset and adding attributes to the object that I am building to control social bookmarking on a web page. There are over 24 different attributes and I may have to add more. I'd like to see what they all are when I run a test and I'd like the flexibility to see any new ones I add without having to add new code to the testbed.

As it turns out, its not actually that hard to do with current JavaScript (though early versions of JavaScript didn't support this).

I have added a DIV block to the page called "showattrs" and that's where I'm going to drop the output of this little script.

Then I've written a simple function that accepts an object as its parameter and uses the for each loop to go through the elements within the object.

function showattrs(theObject) {
   var out="<pre>"
   for (var attr in theObject) {
      out+=attr+":"+ theObject[attr]+"\n"
   }
   out+="</pre>"
 
   var block = document.getElementById("showattrs")
   block.innerHTML=out
}

This works with objects or associative arrays -- which are essentially the same thing in JavaScript. Now I just call this function after I make my changes and update my display.

showattrs(sclSociaLink)

I added the pre tag to it to make the text monospaced just because its my preference for codey stuff.

Now, I know its called a for each loop, but the word "each" doesn't actually show up when coding this (it does in some other languages). The line

for (var attr in theObject)

can be read as

for each attr in theObject

I think its important to be able to read code in english. It helps to clarify thinking and makes debugging much easier. By the way, if you don't already know, var is just for making the variable attr a local variable.

So this will show all the attributes and in some browsers it will also show the code to any methods you have defined for your object. In all browsers it shows them in order of definition. So as a rule I define my methods after my attributes. This makes sure that I will see the attributes first, and then the methods.

Also, this is a cool spelling error capture. How often have you typed object.attrivute instead of object.attribute. It just happens. Well if you have done this you will now notice that attrivute is within the list. I just copy it (copy so I don't mistype again) and the do a global search on my code to find where I made my mistake.

Happy coding.

Spring Break Session: How to Make Social Bookmarking Work for Your Website

2008-05-12T09:05:00.001-04:00

Here's some more information about the session I am giving on June 3 at the Spring Break Conference in Ohio.

Session Title:

How to Make Social Bookmarking Work for Your Website

Session Description:

Social Bookmarking is a useful tool for getting the right kind of traffic to your website. Web users can share links pointing to your pages along with descriptions and evaluations of the content. It's that meta-information that helps drive people interested in your content to your pages. And the extra links are great for SEO (search engine optimization). In this session we will discuss these advantages and more along with a review of tools (from code to push-button simple) to help you get the job done.

Development Frameset

2008-05-12T08:38:00.003-04:00

So I've been working on a JavaScript tool that will control the linking and display of an element on a web page. The content will be generated by the script and will naturally be dependent on parameters passed and properties of objects. And just like any script its got to be tested in lots of web browsers.

Eventually I'll be using document.write to place the content onto the page, but while developing the page I change the innerHTML of a div within the page. That also means that when I change the settings I can regenerate the block and see if everything is working. Now some people might ask why not just stick with innerHTML instead of document.write, but this approach will allow me to have no impact on the layout if JavaScript is disabled and to have multiple of these elements within a page if needed. Some coders might think document.write is antiquated, but I believe in using the right tool for the job, even if they are a little well-worn.

var block = document.getElementById("show")

block.innerHTML=generatedElements

Now as I am working on this I want to be able to change the attributes of the object that controls the display. One easy way to do this is to add controls. I could add them to the same document, but then my test document becomes less reflective of the documents that will hold the code in the end. Also, my test document has to meet some requirements -- for example, it has to be a template-based document -- and I didn't want to mess that up.

So what I did was make a frameset with controls on the left frame and my test document on the right. Now I can enter exactly the parameters that I want to test and see the results immediately.

What makes this a little slicker is that I named each form element that controls an attribute "atr_XXXX" where "XXXX" is the name of the attribute to be modified within the object. Now I simply cycle through the form's elements and modify the object's attribute with that name (I use eval to make is simpler). And because its in another frame I have to poke at it with parent.rightFrame. I think it works really well.


function Update() {
  if (parent) {
     var l=document.theform.elements.length
     for (var i=0; i<l; i++) {
        if (document.theform.elements[i].name) {
           if (document.theform.elements[i].name.substring(0,4)=="atr_") {
              var out='parent.rightFrame.sclSociaLink.'
              out+=document.theform.elements[i].name.substring(4,
                   document.theform.elements[i].name.length)
              out+="="+document.theform.elements[i].value
              eval(out)
           }
        }
     }
     parent.rightFrame.showTestbed()
  }
}

RSS DreamFeeder in use at Lawrence Livermore National Lab

2008-05-11T21:16:00.001-04:00

So how cool is this -- it makes me miss my Naval Research Lab days.

I spent a few hours this week helping Bob Hirschfeld, Sr. Public Information Officer at LLNL Public Affairs. The main website at Los Alamos has a really nice set of RSS tools that are database driven. Bob was excited by that, but had a static website at Lawrence Livermore so he couldn't make that work for his site. That's exactly why he needed RSS DreamFeeder.

He configured RSS DreamFeeder himself, using his template and the Content Sampler tool and managed to get the feed working with a minimum of fuss. Simply selecting the text he wanted and sampling it. He had a bit of a problem processing the feed, but with a quick tweak and some direction (and his reading my article on webreference) everything was up and running in no time.

Its a good feeling to help folks make their website better with a tool that I made.

Check out his feed here

https://publicaffairs.llnl.gov/news/rssfeed.xml

Speaking at Spring Break Conference at Ohio University on Tuesday June 3

2008-05-07T09:05:00.001-04:00

Dave Hannum and I spoke yesterday and I'm putting together an outline for a talk on Social Bookmarking. This will be my second year speaking at this conference.

Take a look at http://www.sbconference.com/2008/ for more information. I'll also put up some information about the talk here as well. Hope to see you there.

spring <br/> conference 2008

Tuesday June 3 2008 at

Ohio University in Athens, OH

http://www.sbconference.com/2008/

Welcome Emilia Katherine

2008-05-01T19:36:00.001-04:00

At 12:41 pm on Thursday May 1 a beautiful little new person entered my
life.

HTML Comments and JavaScript

2008-04-28T17:14:00.003-04:00

So lets say that you want to get at the comments within an HTML document. Why, you ask, would that be useful? Well for several reasons. Perhaps you have settings, variables, or other things within comments that you would want to gather for processing. Perhaps you have trained your website maintenance staff to put identification information (like the day the page was last updated) within comments.

But if you're a Dreamweaver user comments can contain things like where the start and end of template regions are. That's no small thing, so I want to say it again. Web pages built based on Dreamweaver templates will have little HTML comments in them that identify where the beginning and end of an editable region is -- like this:

These are just comments, just like any other comment. They don't impact that layout or rendering of the page in the web browser. They're just there to provide a little meta information.

Now lets say that you want to grab the headline of a page -- but it could be styled any number of ways. If the page is based on Dreamweaver templates one approach could be to grab the relevant editable region.

If you read the DOM documentation you'll discover that there are node types called comments. So you might think that you could follow the DOM tree and look for nodes with the right type.

node.type== Node.COMMENT_NODE

The problem is that support for this is spotty even in the best browsers. For the most part, it looks like comments are simply removed from the page before it is processed. You can see that there are no comments within the document's html code -- check your favorite browser.

document.body.outerHTML

Before we can even being to figure out how to read the comments, we have to find them. As it turns out you can do it by using document.documentElement. The complete pre-processed html for the page, including comments, can be found by looking at

document.documentElement.outerHTML

Now all you have to do is match the comment using a regular expression or a couple of indexOf statements. Whichever method you prefer or understand better. *

exp="<"+"!"+"--"+"([\\s\\S]+?)"+"--"+">"

rexComment=new RegExp(exp)

Moreover, the really big win is that you can identify data based on its placement within a template. That's really important. Templates are built to control the display of content within a website to make the pages consistent -- sure. But they allow flexibility so editors can change only the parts of the page that are relevant to theri work -- headlines and bylines and stories. So naturally, if we're interested in the parts of the page that are about the content, then we'll be interested in the stuff that's in the template regions.

This really expanded my way of thinking about templates. They're not just about pretty -- they're about data structure.

* A Note on "exp="

You'll notice that I broke the expression apart into pieces -- that's to avoid any browsers biting on the comment tag if it were all together as one piece. This

exp=""

is the same as this

exp="<"+"!"+"--"+"([\\s\\S]+?)"+"--"+">"

The Transition is On

2008-04-28T15:44:00.001-04:00

OK, so after some pretty extensive discussions and testing I have made a decision not to host my own blog. The blog accounted for some of the largest amounts of traffic while I was regularly updating it. I plan to move the old blog entries -- at least the ones that are relevant to our ongoing discussion -- into the new blog. This will probably take some time and will have to wait until I complete my active development work.

I'm using Blogger now. I decided on that mostly because it integrates with Gmail, which I use for my personal email, and I can post via email from my iPhone on the road. This should make it easy for me to keep content flowing while keeping the tools required to a very minimal and highly portable set.

And honestly, I like posting from my email -- even from my desktop. I guess I just grew up with email. It is just part of the way that I work and think. I feel pretty comfortable composing my thoughts and sending them off to the world. Emailing is already part of my workflow -- and takes much less effort that launching Dreamweaver and tossing off a page (yes, even with templates).

I liked my old blogging method because it was a showcase for what you could do with RSS DreamFeeder. Both RSS and Atom feeds were generated from the pages I built in Dreamweaver. I am also a very firm believer in eating your own dog food -- that is, using the tools you build and sell to others for your own work as well. I often find some of the worst bugs myself while I'm using it. And I curse about it just as much as any customer might and perhaps even more so.

So making this switch was a tough choice, but the advantages of posting more will more than offset the drawback of using tools that are not of my own making (and selling). Though it will interest some of you to know that I am using RSS Replay (actually an early beta of version 2) to display this blog on the blog page at RNSoft.

On a programming note: I am going to be posting more of a mix of personal and business stuff here from now on. I tried two blogs and it just doesn't work for me. Many of the folks who read my blog are interested in both topics. And if you're not, well feel free to skip the personal stuff at any point. There are categories listed on this blog's main page (at the bottom-right) and if you click the category you'll see only content related to that topic. You can also subscribe to the category from that page.

Aint She Sweet

2008-01-04T06:26:00.000-05:00