Auto Updating Rants

[DrDestruction]

Ok. I've noticed that several comics have a rant or whats new text block somewhere on the index page that passes virtually intact to the daily page in the archives. Is this a feature of AutoKeen? I din't see anything about it in the taglossary. Or are there simply a whole bunch of people with a lot more patience than me?

[Atrus]

Short answer: sort of

Long answer:
There are 3 ways to put a rant up with your comic:
1) edit your indexteplate.html and put the rant in that way
2) use ***include something.html***
3) use the feature of the update system that it writes in files or image <tags> in alphabetical order by filename. So if you had a comic, 20020624.jpg, and a text file with yoour rant, 20020624.txt, the updater would put in the image <tag> first then copy the contents of the text file into the page, letter for letter.

the third is obviously the preffered method.

[DrDestruction]

Is there a page with instructions?

Do I just put the txt file in with the comics in the workspace folder? Do I have to put another tag in the indextemplate file so that it knows where to put the text?

Thanks btw.

[Atrus]

When using method #2, put the text file with the webpages (I think). If you use method #3, put the text file in the same directory as your comics.

[Jouni]

Is there a way for the #3 to put the text to different spot than straight under the comic? I have the news-box in different table than the strip, so it would be handy...

[Atrus]

Yes you can, but you must use CSS (some pieces of javascript were made to do it a long time ago, but CSS is so much easier and less problematic). If you haven't learned about CSS yet, you really should because it's wonderful (a least to me). Waht's so nice about is that CSS gives you much finer control over how your site looks (a lot more is available than you'll need) and it allows you to seperate presentation from content. What does the seperation part mean? All those ugly properties that you had to write over and over again from every single page and modify by hand on all of those pages are replaced by an external text file that you can modify and change the look of your whole site without touching the html pages. A good tutorial on CSS can be found here.

The idea of how to do it using CSS: Just wrap your rant in a div and then position it.

[Vandalite]

by any chance, would you know where the javascript is? I have a page set up with three different rant columns, and somehow, i don't think css will handle it so well... (as the news needs to be split up, and placed in three different cells of a separate table than the comic.

(or if you can just give me an example of how css could split up the text, that would be nice too.)

[DrDestruction]

I don't know how javascript would handle that but it can be done with a txt file and html. You just write:

<table width="100%">
<td align="justify"> 1st column text here</td>
<td align="justify"> 2nd column text here</td>
<td align="justify"> 3rd column text here</td></tr>
</table>

You can add cellspacing and cellpadding values in the table tag to separate the columns more. You give the file the same date as the comic for that day and it shows up below it automatically as long as the extensions aren't the same (20020810.gif and 20020810.txt).

Me personally I use <hr> to divide taxt blocks in my page so that I reduce the number of tables the page has to load. But if you want columns that's the short way.

[Vandalite]

so you're saying you can put html in the files that store the daily rants? if that is so, i can save a bit of work... but if that isn't so, i'm gonna need that javascript...

i'll look into it.

[Atrus]

They're just plain text files, HTML is plain text that's parsed by a browser to create a page. So yes, you can have HTML in your rants or JavaScript. I mentioned CSS because you can place anything anywhere, literally.

I still haven't found a need for tables. There a are a few things that make sense as a table (like a table), but most of the time they're used in designs where a few divs and some CSS would be better.

[Halkeye]

I have a quick perl script to read in a file and output it as javascript, we used to use it with Blogger

But we found keenspace's servers were to slow loading the page then loading the javascript.

So we moved to have the comic image get loaded through a perl script and blogger update the index page automaticly.

I will freely provide both scripts if anyone wants them.