The Philosopher's Toolbox

The 'recentTitledBlogPosts' macro works well except for one validation hitch - it generates a pair of div tags inside an anchor. That's a definite XML foul: no block level elements are allowed inside inline elements. Solution: modified the macro to wrap the link text in span tags. What I should really do is figure out how to copy the macro and modify it properly, and either wrap the link text in span tags, or add the link text css class to the anchor element. But that's a project for another day.

Added a list to recent posts at the bottom of the page using the 'radio.macros.recentTitledBlogPosts' macro. Very nice. The macro only picks up the titles of recent posts which have actually been assigned titles. This means you only list those posts which you thought were actually important enough to be given a title. You can use this behaviour as a built-in filtering mechanism to flag your most important posts and raise them about the general chatter of 'thinking out loud'. Very handy.

Ok, I'm satisfied. Great job Userland. Here's the summary of how titles get rendered (in html) for those following along at home. I've set up my template to provide an 'in-line' title format, i.e. the title for each post goes at the beginning of the paragraph, not above it. But the same rendering rules will apply no matter how you set up your template. The Rules: (i) If your post does not incldude a title, no title will be rendered - just the body text. (ii) If you include a title with your post, but you don't specify that the title should be a link, the title is automatically rendered as a 'permalink' (i.e. a link to the post's permanent place in the archives) - provided you have turned that feature on. (iii) If you include a title for the post and provide a destination, the title will be rendered as a link to that destination. Very clean.

Style: The 'itemTitle' macro generates a css class for the achor within which the title is embedded. The class name is 'weblogItemTitle'. Very useful.

The burden of writing crisp, descriptive, enticing titles for the rest of eternity fills me with dread. What will happen if I run out of, um, ideas? I am determined to find out now. This post has no title and no link.

Hey, look, Happy Cog is back!Hey, look, a post with a title and a link to an external site, just like the real bloggers do.