So Damon Clinkscales (a guy I work with) has put together this nifty little app called SnapTweet that integrates with Twitter and Flickr. Check it out, it’s pretty neat-o.
Me on twitter
Me on flickr
Me on snaptweet
Posted by Phil Burrows on Feb 26, 2008
So posting to this thing has proven to be less frequent than I had hoped, but I’m here to say that [hopefully] it should become more of a routine. I’m going to make myself do it.
So there are a few things I’ve been meaning to document. Like I said in my first post, I did a custom Radiant CMS for vitalsource.com:http://vitalsource.com/ although I didn’t do the design on that site, I just ported over the content to the new CMS. Anyway, I put together a few custom extensions for the site. They may be useful for one of your project, and if so, feel free to use them as you wish. I’d love to know if you find them useful and how you’ve implemented them on your site. Now, on to an overview.
http://dev.philburrows.com/svn/radiant-extensions/translator/trunk/
The Translator extension is for localization. It’s not really an issue I’ve ever had to deal with, so, initially, I figured the best thing to do was use something someone else had put together and a number of people had used with success. But I looked at all the other localization options for Radiant, and none of them seemed to do what I wanted a localization solution to do for me. Other localization options (i.e. Language Redirect) seemed to require way too much duplication of content. Not only that, but there wasn’t a way to reliably fall back to default content (or a default language) if the content in the requested language did not exist. So, localization was an “all or nothing” option. Unfortunately, the VitalSource website only has certain, important pages translated. Using any of the available localization extensions, foreign language visitors would end up getting a BUNCH of 404s.
So, what could be done? We don’t want to give a user a 404 just cuz we haven’t had the chance (or ability) to translate a certain page into your language of choice. So here’s what we’re doing…
In Radiant, every page can have any number of parts. So, the typical page will have something like a “body” part and maybe an “extended” or “intro” or “sidebar” part. So, instead of duplicating entire pages in different languages, why not just create a different page part for each language? And then, if the page part isn’t available in the requested language, we can just fall back to rendering the default language.
Honestly, that was a terrible description. The concept is explained a bit better in the README.
http://dev.philburrows.com/svn/radiant-extensions/reg_exp_urls/trunk/With the handy Copy and Move extension it becomes really easy to move your pages around and reorganize the hierarchical arrangement of your site. BUT, by doing this kind of thing, it also becomes really easy to break links within your site. “Regular Expression URLs” to the rescue. Create links that look for a page that match a certain regular expression and output the proper URL, instead of just blindly spitting out a URL that may no longer be correct.
Again, check out the README for syntax overview.
Posted by Phil Burrows on Feb 21, 2008
So here it is—this is the beginning of something good, I think. Today is the day (early as it is), that I finally get this blog online.
Continue Reading…Posted by Phil Burrows on Feb 13, 2008