RW Update: A new RapidWeaver resource
It was best said on seyDesign in this article, but I just wanted to tell you a bit about the site on the technical side. It is based heavily on the “Show Recent Posts” snippet that we had recently released and in fact, that snippet is a direct result of our work on RW Updates. Granted the code on RW Updates takes that a little further so that we could pull in multiple feeds, sort them by date, truncate them, reveal the posting source, etc… but the real meat of it all is still in there.
Define your RSS Feed title
From our launch announcement on the RapidWeaver forums came some kind and encouraging words as well as some great suggestions on how to improve our service. One user, ryanbsmith, suggested we include the origins of the original post, so we did. That brings us our very first RapidWeaver tip since, by looking at the site titles that now appear under the post headings, it is clear that not everyone gives their RSS feed an appropriate title.
RSS Feed Settings: Title
The RSS feed settings of a blog page in RapidWeaver can be a bit confusing (View > Page Setup > Plugin Settings). The outcome of these settings is not immediately obvious to the site developer so they are often neglected or inappropriately used. The “Title” field should be a unique name the accurately reflects the origin of the RSS feed. For instance, if jimbob.com had a blog page (which it doesn’t), then an appropriate RSS Feed title would be “Jim Bob’s Blog” or “Jim Bob’s News” or “News from jimbob.com”… you get the idea?
Welcome aboard
I want to extend a warm welcome to Casey Weed who has a few themes under his young development belt. Also a big shout out to Inside RapidWeaver who I somehow managed to neglect from the initial set of contributers to the daily digest.
Thanks for adding your feeds guys and welcome aboard!
Spotlight comments used like tags
One sweet thing about OS X 10.4 is the spotlight and more precisely, spotlight comments. It’s like tagging for for your computer files. But I am willing to bet that despite this uber coolness in OS X, most people do bother to use these spotlight comments, simply because it’s not a natural process to add them. In Finder you have to right-click (or control-click) the file, get info then add the comments in the appropriate field. That sucks, it’s slow, it’s too much work… therefore the average Joe will not bother.
I hate to be the ultimate Path Finder fan boy (though not ashamed to be so titled), but if you really want a productive experience on a mac, you have to lose the suck-ass Finder. Path Finder is all about productivity, and you can’t be productive if you can’t “Find” things quickly and easily, so making a key feature (spotlight comments) buried below the surface in Finder makes no sense at all. Enter Path Finder. I can’t remember what the default panel setting are for Path Finder but one key panel for me that always remains open and close to the action is the Attribute panel, the place where, among other things, you can set the file colors, name and of course the all important spotlight comments. I click on a file and there in the attribute panel directly below I add my spotlight comments.
By using the spotlight comments, you make the searching experience across the mac far more effective, but in addition you make searching using Path Finder invaluable. For example, my wife and I are working on a multimedia project that involves thousands of pictures. It is easiest and quickest if we just pull the images out of our camera, iPhoto, of off the web and leave them named as is, but sorting through them and picking the ones to be used here of there is a little tough. Renaming everyone with a name that applies to what we would like to use the image for would be even more daunting as no two files can have the same name. But adding a few ‘tags‘ or spotlight comments to each image as as browse through is both easy and quick and we can repeat ourselves as often as we want. When it comes time to find the images we need for the ‘party‘ section, for example, we use the “spotlight > selection” in the Path Finder search field and filter out all the files containing the ‘party‘ spotlight comment. Boom, done!
[tags]Path Finder, OS X 10.4, Tiger, Finder[/tags]
RW Updates goes LIVE
RW Updates is now alive and kicking. We slapped it on the a$$ and it belted out a mighty cry announcing to the world, “We are here!”
So what’s our story?
RW Updates is a a site that collects a daily digest of RapidWeaver developer news. Keep up to date with everything the RapidWeaver developers are up to; theme and plugin updates, new products, new snippets, smart blocks and of course RapidWeaver version updates.
There are a lot of developers out there so keeping track of it all can be a daunting task. Visit RW Updates every day for your daily dose of RapidWeaver development news right from the developers mouths.
Productivity comes down to searching
In my experience, how fast you work is directly linked to how fast you can find things. Finding things fast is key feature on macs with built in services like spotlight and is amplified by apps like Quicksilver but too many people neglect the simplest aspects of these tools. A new article on nutMac reminds us that spotlight commenting is an invaluable feature of OS X 10.4.
Prepping for launch
Houston, all systems go, we are ready for take off in T minus 9… 8… 7…
The secret is nearly out
We have a secret project nearing completion and final release. Well actually we have a lot of those, but this one is for us and a few friends (not often we get to stuff for our own enjoyment). Stay tuned, well let you know as soon as this little project launches.
Big Dan green lights the green site
I got confirmation from Dan Counsell of Realmac Software that he approves of RW Updates going ahead. With that news, we’ll be going live fairly soon. If there is anyone who objects to being included in the Daily Digest or if there is anyone I missed, please feel free to contact me.
One rejection so far
Three developers say yea and one says nay. Not bad so far. Still waiting on word from the big cheese. In the end it’s entirely up to each developer whether they are comfortable being involved or not and no one should feel pressured in the slightest. This is just a community project to help further expose RapidWeaver and it’s 3rd party developers.