Still exploring the guts of Radio Userland. I had hoped that I would be able to effect the changes I desired simply by modifying the template files which are completely user-visible. Unfortunately, some of the macros that the templates invoke in order to place content into the published files use deprecated markup elements such as <br> instead of <p></p> to delimit paragraphs. That means that I’m going to have to rewrite at least some of the macros. The trick will be doing it in a why that is transparent to the normal functioning of Radio. That is, I don’t want to modify any of the code that is supplied by Userland. Rather I want to either write my own macros which emulate the Userland ones, or else write pre- or post-processing macros which wrap around the corresponding Userland macro. Stay tuned.

I’m poking at this puppy a little bit at a time. I got the Rogers Cadenhead book on Radio, and so far it does a very good job of describing the details of how Radio works. I’ve moved the site to my own server, and left behind a stub page on the Userland Community Server which points to my own server. That’s enough progress for today.

TrotterNet has moved to its own server, at http://trotternet.com. Come check it out.

Well, I’m going to take another shot at actually writing this blog. When I first started this enterprise last year, I was appalled at the quality of the HTML that was emitted by Radio Userland. Its the very worst ‘tag soup’ that you can imagine. Not only that, but when it uses CSS, it does so in the worst possible way, by including the entire set of style definitions at the top of each and every file that it published. This means that not only do you lose the benefit of reduced file size that CSS normally provides, but you also lose the ability to modify a style definition for the entire site in a single location. Yech!
Since I’m a big advocate of CSS and standards-based markup, the thought of having my own site published in this manner was both embarrassing and frustrating. On the other hand, I’m an old-time Frontier programmer, so I thought that I could just delve into the object database, and modify the publishing macros so that they emitted proper, modern markup. Unfortunately, just as I was about to embark upon that little project, things got really, really busy at work, so I had to shelve the idea. And rather than endure the embarrassment of having my blog published using old school markup, I decided to just shelve it as well.
So, now things are a little less hectic at work, and I’m going to take another look at the publication macros. I haven’t started that project yet, but I’m going to start writing anyway. Hopefully, by the time anyone actually reads these words, I’ll have gotten the markup to the point where I won’t have to apologize for it.
That’s the plan anyway. We’ll see how it goes…