Posted on: June 13th, 2011 by Famous Phil
I bring you a guest post from Jason who is associated with the subtext project which is a blog written in ASP.net! Disclaimer… I do not guarantee (or verify) the accuracy of guest posts.
A webmaster has many things to think about from choosing the right host to making sure everything is running smoothly on the backend servers. Fortunately, different tools, applications and developments exist that can help us simplify the process of running a website. Subtext skins can help designers more effectively and efficiently create the styles used for personal blogs on their website.
While you can always decrease your workload by choosing options like managed hosting, if you are responsible for web design then you should look into the many advantages of Subtext skins for blogging.
What is a Subtext skin?
Subtext is a blogging platform offered as open source software under the BSD license. The whole concept behind Subtext was to create a very simplified blogging engine that allows bloggers to concentrate on creating actual blog content rather than trying to figure out how to use the blogging software.
Almost all websites these days have their own blogs. In addition, many sites offer blogging as a service to their users who can sign up to create their own personal blogs. You can use Subtext both for the site’s own blog and to offer blogs to site members.
A Subtext skin refers to the styling and layout of the blog page. Skins are versatile as they allow you to create page formats and designs without coding from scratch. A Subtext skin is actually made up of five separate style sheets that can be used to format different elements on the page like divs, spans, boxes, headers, footers, sidebars and forms.
The five style sheets used for each Subtext skin are:
• style.css – the default style sheet that determines the basic underlying skin layout.
• secondary style sheet – this file handles the specific Stylesheet attribute of the skin. The secondary style sheet is generally used to create styling contrasts over the style.css file. For example, the web designer may choose to give the header a different border than the sidebars where in the style.css file they use the same border.
• custom.css – this style sheet is used for custom design features set by the blog author. Primarily used to set styles and layout for personal badges or for the actual post content.
• non-attribute css files – generally used for CSS frameworks or for system styles.
• css files with limited attributes – these stylesheets have a title and media attribute, and cannot be merged with other css files. The attributes specify IE version compatibility and that they are applicable only in screen mode or in printing mode.
Packaged and custom Subtext skins
Web designers can choose from a large library of pre-designed skins or they can create their own custom skins. Creating a custom Subtext skin requires some basic knowledge of CSS scripting and also learning the basic Subtext parsing rules.
Fortunately, Subtext is highly simplified to allow users to quickly master the underlying script.
Skin templates are folders that can be used to render different Subtext skins. Each folder actually contains a number of skins that are related in certain attributes and themes. The folders or templates have their own series of controls that are used to render a skin in that template along with associated style sheets.
Once you have a library of packaged and/or custom skins, you will be able to style blogs quickly after learning how to tweak the skins and templates.
Instead of racking your brain each time you need to come up with a new design, you can simply browse through your selection of Subtext skins. Each skin can be modified according to the primary and secondary CSS files associated with the skin. You can easily find the types of skins you are looking for because they will be arranged in skin templates or families according to related attributes. For example, you can have a Rainbow template. a Geometric template and an Origami template – each having multiple skins that express the same theme. The number of templates is only limited by your imagination and willingness to create custom skins.
When using the Subtext blogging software, the skin templates are arranged in folders in an easy to manage directory system. The setup makes it simple to find the skin you are looking for and simply click on the selection to implement it on the Subtext blog.
By using Subtext skins, you can save time and energy creating page designs and layouts for multiple blogs. No need to code style sheets from scratch when you can access an easy-to-use Subtext skin library and quickly find what you need.
Each skin will handle the styling and layout of all page elements including headers, footers, sidebars, text format, boxes and forms.
You can find out more about Subtext and skins at the Subtext Project Site: http://www.subtextproject.com/.
Tags: asp, blog, engine, skin, subtext, theme, wordpress alternative
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Programming, Student Life, Technology
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Posted on: May 3rd, 2009 by Famous Phil
Anymore, it seems that at least once a week spam gets on my nerves and I end up researching ways to block it more effectively without blocking legitimate messages.
For instance, the other day, I noticed a huge influx of email spam to “phil@saveourshows.org” and I went into that account and increased the spam filter a touch more. This quite often brings up a very legitimate problem for me, that is, what happens when someone legitimate tries to send me an email? Everytime I notice spam on accounts that is heavier than usual, I usually end up bumping the spam filter up a little more, and to be perfectly honest, that spam filter can’t go much higher! Sure, I do recommend that if I don’t respond within a few hours, try sending email to another one of my many addresses, but what happens when that someone finds my address on one of these sites by googling? They will potentially not get a response from me and not realize that I have so many email addresses.
I could go on about email spam, but that isn’t my main focus, comment spam is! I installed wordpress sometime back in January (don’t ask me when lol) when I was redesigning my site (which needs a lot of improvements still). Back in January and even into February, I didn’t really blog much (mostly because I didn’t feel like it), and this site got so little traffic that no spammer would consider hitting it. Actually, this was the case until my blog on WHM / CPanel came out. For some reason, I rank really high with terms like “cpanel advantages and disadvantages”. I also began blogging about technical topics, which drive traffic to my site because it is generally unique content that most system admins are looking for (but usually can’t find). That is great for my site’s traffic, but not really great for my current spam fighting techniques (for my blog, these have been me manually deleting spam).
I am now getting on average: 30 spam comments a day. Being a human that makes mistakes, I sometimes hit delete on legitimate comments by accident because it gets to a point where legit comments look like spam too lol. Unfortunately, I have to let the legit comments get deleted after this because there is no backup copy of these comments. Anyways, long story short, I’m sick of the spam.
Solution: I used the google approach (as usual). I found this wonderful blog here. My default install of WordPress did have Akismet installed (but not activated) exactly like this blog said. I installed it, got an API key from WordPress and now I should get no more spam, or minimal spam. I will say that I am getting no more spam that isn’t easy to delete. It no longer takes as much brain power from me to think about what is spam and isn’t spam. Hopefully this plugin will keep the spam away for a long time before I need something more powerful.
Personally, I recommend this plugin for WordPress. It has saved me time in the past week of having this installed and I’m sure that it will save me much more time to come.
Tags: akismet, blog, comment, comment spam, spam, wordpress
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, My Site
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Posted on: April 25th, 2009 by Famous Phil
The other night, I was working on installing a new RSS feed reader that is similar to Google Reader. I first found out about Google Reader from a friend (Chris) here at my University over a lunch. I then looked at it and discovered that it is much better than going to each and every blog site and reading the posts on each blog directly. This reader basically gathers all of the full text blogs and puts them in an email interface format, making it extremely easy and painless to read a bunch of RSS feeds while on the go (for me, on my windows mobile smart phone on the bus going to class or during dinner when I’m too lazy to get up and return to my room).
Anyways, I am not a real fan of using everything Google when I have an alternative that runs in ssh and doesn’t require an additional login (or saved password). I found 2 alternatives that run in ssh, one is snownews and the other is newsbeuter. Both of these programs are extremely simple and do exactly what google reader does, but they run in the SSH window like Pine or Pico does (Pine is an ssh email client, and pico is an ssh text editor). Snownews is not really good at reading rss feeds because it looks at the description tag of RSS 2.0 feeds which only puts a brief outline of the feed on the screen. Newsbeuter is much better and places the full content of a post on your screen like Google Reader does.
So, what does newsbeuter look like?
Here is the Main Screen, a main listing from a single rss feed, and a single blog post from an rss feed:
Newsbeuter is a great program, I’m willing to put up with no images, videos, and sometimes some gargled text to save time. As you probably know, I use public keys for ssh and and to get to this reader from my pine email takes a matter of seconds and no mouse movement. I’m slowly working on getting my instant mesengers to ssh, however we will see if that ever materializes.
So now onto my rant about partial vs full text feeds.
When I was configuring newsbeuter, my main concern was, “would it read a full feed that is in the rss file, or would it just show the description cropped by [...] like snownews did”. Because I compiled this on my server from source, I didn’t want to waste effort installing dependancies (a compiling problem) if it wouldn’t work in the end.
Luckily, it did read full rss feeds, except for John’s blog. I asked John what was different about his blog, and he told me he turned off full text rss feeds. His reasoning is, rss feeds make it very easy for someone else to post dynamic changing content on their own websites. While I totally understand this concern, I really wonder if it will kill off readership to his site, which I know he might eventually want to make money off from some day. I know for sure that I want famousphil.com to eventually make money for itself although I’m still debating how to put ads on it without hurting the design (which will be changing in a month or two again to make it easier to read).
I have looked at several blogs debating rull text vs partial text feeds (they aren’t hard to find), including the following:
- http://econsultancy.com/blog/018-rss-strategy-full-text-vs-partial-text-round-2
- http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/004717.html. Although this site says the problem was fixed, I think it grabs my true feelings about partial feeds
- http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cartoon_partial_text_rss_feeds.php “So nowadays those sites only get my attention when the teaser looks absolutely irresistible — and that’s a bar that’s high and rising.” Thats how I feel (although I have yet to move many of my favorite feeds into newsbeuter.
For me, I will probably keep his blog on my feed list and look at his teasers. I will probably not actually read any more than his teasers though (mostly because I don’t have time to go look at these other sites that feel too smart to post a full feed). I don’t use other people’s content for my blogs normally without citing then adding significant material onto their blogs, therefore, I don’t consider myself a blog theif either. I do however visit other sites if I feel like leaving a comment 
Finally, with wordpress, if you use a “more” tag, this material will not show up on your blog feed. I will likely begin using this a bit (only after my site becomes eye friendly) because I do have long blogs and sometimes that material is an aid, but not necessary to know everything about my blog. If people want to read the aiding material, then they can then visit my site.
As for this blog, always expect a full feed, if there isn’t one, I will do everything I can to help. Comments are appreciated as always If you host with me, feel free to use these programs I mentioned as they are installed on the main server 
Tags: blog, content, description, feed, full, newsbeuter, partial, pico, pine, rss, snownews, ssh
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Mobile Technology, My Site, Personal, Technology
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