(Sigh) Just posting this here to collect my thoughts... and perhaps some kind soul might just have the experience and the answers to the below conundrums.
Hi there...
A number of questions I have here. The first two are related to DS-syndicate as stated in the title, the other is a general Joomla/PHP/permissions question which some might have encountered before. So, hope you can help me out with your experience.
Firstly,
I see that this site ([b]www.goodwebpractices.com[/b]) has an excellent RSS feed page generated (displayed when you click that "RSS Subscribe" link on the upper right part of this page... with the same template and display style as the rest of this site.
Apart from that, the article order there follows exactly the article order of the articles on its main page.
I'm trying to use ds-syndicate on my site too, and the display is really nothing like the way that I would like it to be; that is, how it is for that site.
First of all I can't get the article order same as the article order on my main page (I'm using Blog-Content Section as my main page, I've moved my 'frontpage' to another menu item.)
Secondly, as I said, I'd like the feed to be rendered out using the same template as the rest of my site.. not as how it is now - that generic drab 'subscribe to feeds' page that Firefox shows.
Am I missing something? What are the things that I should do or look out for?
Next: is the URL that I keep on getting from ds-syndicate. Whenever I've done something wrong in creating the feed and I delete it from the administration interface to start over...
The URL I get is inexorably incremented by 1
http://virtualestate.org/ultrabeast/index2.php?option=ds-syndicate&version=1&feed_id=5
as in feed_id=1, then =2, ...
But in feedburner, the URL that I submit is =1 ... how do I force DS-syndicate to just create a certain URL with a certain ID? Even if I deleted all the feeds in the list to start over, I can never get a feed with id=1 .. [i]forever[/i].
On another note, I always seem to have a general problem with the folder permissions from time to time. It seems that whatever is created by Joomla, it's not necessarily that I am the owner - although I would think that I ought to be. Hence sometimes I get the error line like "fopen() failed in xxxx.php on line 74" when using some components that heretofore worked alright.
The implication of that -
On one instance the problem happened this way - rsgallery2 notified that some of its folders are 'unwritable' and I found that I could not even CHMOD those certain folders (rsgallery2 image folder) with joomlaXplorer, FTP or even with my [i]webhost administration cpanel[/i] :eek: !!!
After some headaches from this I realized that I had recently chosen to use PHP 5.2.5 in my cpanel administration, I switched back to "System Default" (PHP 4.4.8) and the problem of the "unwritable and permission unmodifiable rsgallery2 folders" went away... but problem is, then onwards from time to time I will get the error line as told in the paragraph above.
Is there a concept of a 'PHP user' or that kind of thing? I never even realized things would be so un-straightforward when I started out. I noted for those troubled rsgallery2 folders, the 'user/owner' was displayed by joomlaXplorer as [b]'nobody'[/b]. How could that happen?
It could be not so easy to gather what I mentioned here.. If anyone could please take a look at my site. I'm facing a lot of problems from time-to-time specifically with file and folder writable permissions.
http://virtualestate.org/ultrabeast
Any suggestions on other site-related things as well are welcome. I'm still a neophyte.
Thanks guys.
After some more painstaking work, implemented the hack (i.e. code) to display the avatar picture of the author in the posts and not only in the comments section.
Although this effort was strictly optional, but it was a good exercise in learning how to pull out data from mySQL databases using PHP.
Not only that, new html class tags had to be defined, and the CSS template had to be tweaked again, to get it displayed as desired.
When one does programming, one wants fast access to the function definitions, attribute descriptions, all the available options, info, etc. Trying to code something without the documentation is like trying to write a C++ or MFC program without the MSDN library. In short, that means impossible.
Likewise, don't CuSS CSS when you need to tweak your template, for complete online documentation is handily available at w3schools.com - for every web element that you can tweak, there are handy Try-It! pages for you to tweak and update to see the effects of your changes on-the-spot.
Today, we're talking about CSS inline style definition, internal and external stylesheets. inline: <tag style="..."> within the tag itself internal: <style> ... </style> between the <head> tags external: most commonly seen, defines everything in a file separate from the HTML file, and can be reused by different HTML files.
Page 2 talks about removing the browser's default formatting settings,
Page 3 talks about making your pages standards compliant and all-browser friendly,
Page 4 talks about specifying your id and class selectors,
Page 5 talks about specifying our own custom settings to override the browser's defaults that we have just cleared off in Page 2.
So there we have it, quick reference whenever questions about these aspects pop up in one's mind...
After an extended period of tweaking and
customization and more tweaking to this back-end engine... Finally, at long last I get to sit down and actually type some
content.
After a busy morning which involved a lot of
exertion... had a hearty lunch before settling down to... yes...
more exertion. In this case, throwing a lot of
exceptional cases at this engine and template (that
I put a lot of effort in) in an attempt to try to break
it... not only that.. under both Mozilla Firefox and
IE7.
As a result a lot of things were discovered that
'breaks' the template - i.e. if text runs off the right edge of the
screen, the template layout breaks up and makes the hated horizontal
scrollbar appear.
It seems that if I don't do anything funny, no one
would notice that there could be anything wrong.. but I couldn't sleep
peacefully at night with the knowledge that something could have been done, but
wasn't. (That explains my distressing masochistic compulsion.)
One culprit is pasting of text formatted with the
<pre> tag - which indicates a block of preformatted text, such as source
code.. where lines are not wrapped, but run off the edge of the
screen..
For this case a CSS hack serves to force the
contents within <pre> tags to also wrap... however, only under FireFox.
IE7 still breaks crap.
However, not to panic, there is a custom
<code> tag that makes source code appear as below:
/// Initializes a new instance of the <see cref="TFTPClient"/> class.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="server">The server.</param>
public TFTPClient(string server)
: this(server, 69){
}
/// <summary>
/// Initializes a new instance of the <see cref="TFTPClient"/> class.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="server">The server.</param>
/// <param name="port">The port.</param>
public TFTPClient(string server, int port){
Server = server;
Port = port;
}
How to write Tetris in VB.net...
PublicFunction WillCollide(ByVal shape As Shape, ByVal direction As NewDirection)_
AsBoolean
Dim pntsToCheck AsCollection(Of Point) = GetNewPoints(direction)
ForEach pnt As Point In shape.Points
ForEach pnts As Point In pntsToCheck
If(pnt.Equals(pnts))Then
Return True
EndIf
Next
Next
EndFunction
PublicFunction WillCollide(ByVal direction As NewDirection)AsBoolean
Dim pntsToCheck AsCollection(Of Point) = GetNewPoints(direction)
ForEach pnt As Point In pntsToCheck
If(pnt.X < 0 Or pnt.X > 9 Or pnt.Y > 19 Or pnt.Y < 0)Then
Return True
EndIf
Next
EndFunction
All automatically formatted! Especially...
1 Note the neat code line numbers and
2 Language-specific syntax highlighting!
3 Note the monospace char
width!
However the template's auto margin style definition
was still not enough to prevent the template from breaking up and the
horiz scrollbar from appearing... This was solved
in CSS by setting the <code> class width to 720px,
fixed.
After these corrective measures:
In exceptional case of the source code being too
long (as in code1.code2.code3.code4...codeN.dosth();
1) the template won't break, but
horizontal scrollbar appears. still acceptable.
2) <pre> tag will break template in IE7, no
matter what.. because CSS overriding the <pre> tag to word wrap (as below)
doesn't work...
This still doesn't wrap <pre> tag code in IE7.. -_-"
pre {
white-space: pre-wrap; /* css-3 */
white-space: -moz-pre-wrap !important; /* Mozilla, since 1999 */
white-space: -pre-wrap; /* Opera 4-6 */
white-space: -o-pre-wrap; /* Opera 7 */
word-wrap: break-word; /* Internet Explorer 5.5+ */
width: 99%; /* remove horizontal scroll-bar when viewing in IE7 */
}
Can anyone give me any solution that works to wrap <pre> tag text in IE ???
The motivation behind making all these painstaking
customizations were so that all these features are built into the rich text
editor, so that I don't need to separately enter any HTML tags.. thanks to
putting in the diligence in the one time job ,
(which was a long time job) to solve all these problems.
I still cannot foresee the drama of the effort to
produce automated prettily formatted content being made into a movie.. I guess
making Internet content robustly browser-friendly still does not carry the same
glamour as internet hacking XD
Still, carrying the euphoria of achievement.. it
was then time for more exertion in the form of a swim in the nice
weather..
Next up: The lunch at Sungai Kob,
Kulim (with photos! oh wow!)
Coding
