Greg Pierce on Weblog Calendars

This morning, Greg and I were discussing the positioning of calendars on some of Macrobyte's product news pages. I thought they belonged in the navbar (see the AttSearchEngine's news page, for example), and asked why he put them at the bottom of the page.

His explanation was so convincing that not only do I now agree with him, but I suggested he write it up. Now I have to move this journal's calendar, too. It'll be interesting to see if more people find their way around the site as a result.

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RE: Greg Pierce on Weblog Calendars

At 08:35 PM 5/16/2002 -0400, Mark wrote:

>It seems to me this is an argument against date-based navigation, in favor
>of topic-based navigation for weblogs. The default templates for Moveable
>Type don't use a calendar--it has a list of the most recent message titles
>in a sidebar.

Good summary. Date-based navigation just doesn't work for general sites. I
think that Greg's site for his kids (who are very cute, btw) is an example
of where a date-based system makes sense, but for general sites, who
actually uses the calendar to go back more than a few days?

>This would be possible in Conversant using a combination of RSS and the
>WeblogView Page Type
>(http://support.free-conversant.com/docs/Pages/weblogView).

I would create an AQP page to return the last 10 message titles, set the
cache to 60 minutes, create a template with an insertquery macro and then
insert that sub-template into the main template page, say in a right hand
column.

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RE: Greg Pierce on Weblog Calendars

At 09:15 PM 5/16/2002 -0400, Mark wrote:

>This would only work if *all* the top-level topics are also part of the
>weblog. There's currently no way to filter for "These messages are also
>posted at weblog X".

True. Create a Custom Field called Weblog and assign each weblog message
the name of the weblog(s) it is posted to.

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RE: Greg Pierce on Weblog Calendars

At 09:32 PM 5/16/2002 -0400, Mark wrote:

>Do custom fields work in the weblog plugin? I forget.

No. (I always create messages by using __NewThread__ and then assign them
to weblogs).

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RE: Greg Pierce on Weblog Calendars

On 5/16/02, Brian Carnell said:

>True. Create a Custom Field called Weblog and assign each weblog message
>the name of the weblog(s) it is posted to.

My index.rss file is created from posts to the weblog, but it uses an AQP. Since I only bother with custom field data in items I'm going to publish, I've set up the AQP to search for any value in the custom fields and then return only the last N messages.

Seth

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