Tag: Conversant

I’m still amazed some days at just how much can be accomplished in Conversant. The basic tools are provided, and you can mix and match them to do some awesome things.

For example, check out my demo of a system I’ve been working on to make it easier to navigate and reference certain kinds of documents (specifically, in my case, e-texts, though it could be used for pretty much everything).

This was inspired by (and much of it stolen from) Steve Ivy’s efforts with a speech by Colin Powell back in February. Each paragraph there has a named anchor, and at the end of the paragraph is a link to that anchor so that it is easy for anyone to reference a specific paragraph. Ivy also uses a bit of Javascript written by Seth Dillingham so that if you are viewing an anchored paragraph, that paragraph is highlighted. Very cool.

What I wanted to do was that, but I wanted a way to turn the anchor links at the end of the paragraphs on or off. I like having the links for reference, but they distract from the text if I’m just reading for content or want to print.

And so, on the Preface to Frederick Douglass’ “My Bondage, My Freedom” you’ll see a link in the right-hand column that reads “Show Permalinks.” Click it, and you’ll be shown a version of the page like Ivy’s, with the link at the bottom. Of course now the link in the right-hand column reads “Hide Permalinks.” Click it, and you see the version of the page without the visible links (though the named anchors are still in the page). This is done via Cookie’s, so if you prefer, you can always see one or the other or switch on the fly as you need. (Note: this probably won’t work in IE at the moment, but will after I do a quick updated later — use Mozilla or some browser other than IE to get the full effect).

Have it your way!

So here’s a brief look at what’s going on behind the scenes:

1. First, the page checks to see whether or not you’ve got this specific cookie set to true. If so, you are served the version with the permalinks visible. Otherwise, the web server passes along the clean version.

2. Second, the system checks to see whether or not I’ve designated this particular article as an E-text or not. If I have, it shows the Show/Hide link on the right. This way I can distribute this feature throughout all of my E-text pages while only having to use a single small snippet of HTML.

3. When you click on the Show/Hide link, you are directed to a page which simply sets a cookie and then redirects you back to whatever page sent you there. Again, this way two HTML snippets handle requests from an unlimited number of pages.

4. And, I am also using Seth’s hilighting Javascript. This also uses a conditional macro, so the page checks to see if this is an E-text page. If it is, it inserts the Javascript in the header area, otherwise it goes on to other things.

And it does all of this blindingly fast. Yes, this is running on a pretty fast machine after the recent upgrade, but consider that depending on the user, just loading the Preface there easily involves more than a dozen conditional macros that look for one state or another to decide how to proceed.

I think I’m going to sit back and let all of this power go to my head!

One of the things that really makes Conversant ideal from my point-of-view is that the system’s developers are often one step ahead of me feature-wise. What I mean by this is that inevitably a new feature will be introduced and I’ll be reading the docs and thinking to myself “why would anyone need that?” And then a few weeks later I’m usually thinking to myself “How did I ever live without this?”

Such is the case with the resource macro. Now using resources in Conversant is pretty straighforward. A resource is essentially a placeholder. For example, I’ve set up a macro called Afghanistan. If I surround the word Afghanistan with pipes, like this: |Afghanistan|, then the system will automatically create a link that I’ve set up so that the final result looks like this Afghanistan. Setting up new resources is real easy and much of the system I use to manage and categorize posts relies upon resources.

Back in April, Macrobyte added a macro to handle resources, and to be honest I couldn’t figure out why the heck anyone would want such a thing, since resources are so straightforward to use.

What the macro does, however, is let you add a bit of complexity when you need it. For example, one of the obvious limitations with the Afghanistan example is that I always have to use the word Afghanistan. What if I’d like to use that link but use different text. Suppose I wanted to say, “Al-Qaeda’s former stomping grounds” and link “stomping grounds” to the Afghanistan page? Now I either have to find a way to work the word Afghanistan in there or I have to go and find out what the URL is and manually insert it in “a href” tags. Ugh.

The linkResource macro takes care of this. Now all I have to do is post “Al-Qaeda’s former ” which will result in this: Al-Qaeda’s former stomping ground.

Excellent. I use a program called ActiveWords so that when I type “resource” and hit F8 it automatically inserts the basic template for the linkResource macro into any textfield I’m editing, so this has turned out to be an excellent solution to a problem I run into quite a bit.

Macrobyte Resources have added a number of macro caching features in the last 48 hours, including caching the insertQuery macro. This is especially useful to me since I use queries on data fields to build dynamic category pages.

This works great, but as the number of articles found grew larger, the amount of time the insertquery macro took grew longer.

Caching the macro results dramatically improved performance. My Miscellaneous page used to take 9 to 10 seconds to display because it has so many articles. Caching it reduces the display time to about 2.5 seconds — quite an improvement.

Macrobyte has wisely included an option to control how long the macro is cached, and I’m setting it at 12 hours since I don’t update all that often, and I can live with a 12-hour dated category page that loads four times faster than normal.