Last update: 6/9/01; 19:40:31.


Thoughts and ideas as they occur to me.


Permanent link to archive for 00/10/30. Monday, October 30, 2000
 

Another Learning Opportunity. Before I say anything else, I want to thank Dave Winer and all the folks at UserLand for creating this product. I'm just now getting an overview of what Manila can do, and I'm sure I don't understand it well, but I know a lot more now than I did six hours ago.

It's been an interesting afternoon.

I thought I knew what I was doing, so I started playing with the Prefs settings. Oops.

I managed to delete my Home Page, lose my calendar, and mess up the width of my news items. They looked fine on the Home Page, but were way too wide on the Discussions pages, and parts of the right side of each message was obscurred.

So, I spent the rest of the afternoon reading through the Manila Newbies site and managed to understand that I didn't delete my Home Page, I simply changed to news items and since there weren't any, the previous story wasn't shown either, and I thought I'd deleted something, somehow.

I think I have all of it straightened out now -- except for one pesky heading cell that's too wide, but it's going to stay that way for the evening and night.

The site is much better than it was a few hours ago and I know a lot more about how it works. Now, I'll be able to switch gears and learn about Radio UserLand. Then I can get back to working on developing content and getting more done back at JohnDilbeck.com.

I know now that this is where I'll be posting news items and managing discussions.

What a great product! Thanks, Dave.

JD    7:17:20 PM

Excited, yet confused. I'm excited by the possibilities of using Radio UserLand to create and excite my websites.

So far, I have a "normal" website at http://johndilbeck.com that I maintain using Frontier 5.01 and BBEdit. I create it on my local storage and user Interarchy to upload it. This is fairly traditional.

Now, I'm editing this site at http://johndilbeck.editthispage.com using my web browser. This is very cool. I'm a little confused about how all of it fits together, but I'm learning.

Soon, I'll start a new web log at http://johndilbeck.weblogs.com and I'll probably keep my morning cogitations and running commentary on what I'm doing there, and save this site for actual articles about things in which I'm interested.

I'm sure, as I learn more, that at least one of these sites will supercede the other, but at this point, I honestly don't know what's going to happen.

I should probably start by saying a little about myself, but I really don't like doing that. If you're interested, you can read all you can stand on my About JD page.

The only thing I'll add is that over the last few days, as I discovered Radio UserLand, I've become excited about working on these sites all over again. I was at the point where I was about to scrap Frontier 5.01 and edit my main site using nothing but BBEdit and lots of .cgi and SSI. While searching at userland.com, I learned of Radio UserLand and all it's new features. Now, I'm excited and want to learn how it's working.

It was gratifying last week to realize I can, once again, concentrate on programming, and I enjoyed putting up several Perl scripts and modifying them to do what I wanted on my main site. I don't ever want to be a professional programmer, again, but it's nice to be able to use my hard-won skills to improve my personal sites.

So, let's see if I can post this story, and start another one that I'll attempt to edit in Radio UserLand.

This is going to be very cool as I learn how to do this!

JD   1:06:52 PM


© Copyright 2001 John L. Dilbeck, jd@johndilbeck.com.