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Better known as Gustaf from #mobitopia, The Occasional Scrivener is the result of moving from a home brew Blogging system into something just a little bit more civilised.
West, a new OPL programmer, working on his first project ("Scorched Earth-style") for UIQ, has asked Symbian Diaries to help host his applications and Diary as he programs his first application.
Brian Faber is working on a Neo Geo Pocket Emulator for Series 60 devices. N-Pop is currently in early testing, but Brian is keeping everyone up to date through his Symbian Diary.
So what was wrong with the old WAP template that we've updated it? The old template have you the last x entries on one massive page. Which was great to prove the concept, but a bit silly if you had ten entries of a thousand words each. So the criteria for the new WAP design is something like this:
* Allow the index page to feel more like an index, rather than all the text from the last "X" posts.
* Give each entry its own page; ie individual archive in WAP Format as well as the HTML format. This will involve reformatting entries to make them wap/xhtml compatible.
* Allow the number of comments to an article to be visible on the index page, and have these comments shown directly after each article.
While the second point is causing a few headaches (namely in the sanitise_html, extract_html and enable_xml tags), the system is more than robust enough for most of you using Symbian Diaries. You can see a working example of the template at http://www.symbiandiaries.com/index.wml.
So, here's how to do it.
1. Create a new Index Template
On logging ono the Movable Type (MT) sysem and selecting your site, choose the Templates option from the side bar. You'll see at the top a list of templates. These are what MT use to create your index pages. As we're creating a new index page for WAP, we'll need to create a new template.
Call it something sensible (like Wap Index Template), and specify the output file (ie what our index page will be called) to read index.wml.
Follow this link to see what you need to copy into this template. it will provide you with a new index page that lists the last 7 entries, and the number of comments that each entry has. Save this new template, but don't Rebuild yet. We've got a bit more to do.
2. Create a new WAP Entry Archive Template
The WAP Archive Template is used to create the individual page for each entry you have made in your Symbian Diary. Again you'll need to create a new template, but note that this isn't an Index template, it's an Archive of Individual entries. Grab the template from this link, and create the new entry archive.
3. Edit your Archive Settings
3a. Archive Type Individual should be typed
3b. ADD NEW. Type: Individual. Template: Wap Entry. Add
3c. Leave selector button on Individual Entry
3d. Add new Archive File Template line "<$MTEntryID pad="1"$>.wml"
3e. Save Changes
4. Rebuild your Site
5. Tell the world where your Wap Symbian Diary is!
http://www.symbiandiaries.com/<blogname>/index.wml
Okay, the first round of changes to Symbian Diaries have been added. They're all around the theme of linking the Symbian Diaries together to create a better sense of a community. First of all, here's an RSS Feed covering all the Diaries so you can watch over everyone from one list on your aggregator.
Secondly, the side column of the front page was had a bit of a tidy-up. The Celtic font has been replaced with something reasonable (but our nice Logo remains - that took me long enough!). The currently active blogs are now all listed, and you can see the last 10 entries over all the diaries just below the index.
What else? The
Finally, some Comment Spam protection and pruning tools are available. You should notice over 1500 comment spams have been removed overnight. If you're running a diary, when you get emailed a notifier that a comment has been placed, there's a link at the bottom of this email. If the comment is Spam, please click this link to have it (and any other similar Spam) removed from your Diary, and subsequently blocked from posting.
That's all for now.
The Symbian Diaries front page has been a bit neglected for a while, but we're still here, and while a few of our hosted blogs have tailed off, there's still a lot of activity from our members. I'm going to work on the front page here over the next few days, so if you want to see anything here, let me know -- Ewan