Developing Snipsnap

Introduction

In June 2007, the Snipsnap team stated that development had ceased. The correspondence is at http://www.snipsnap.org, but several users organised the migration of the source code to sourceforge.net. My contrariness mean that it was only after Leo & Funzel moved on to other projects that I decided to investigate certain features. This isn't yet about developing snipsnap, but really about using it, however, my tag cloud ambitions may require me to write a macro.

Javascript

I'd like to add share buttons as appropriate, but I am having difficulty with the http://addthis.com buttons. See Test Page and Share This pages on this site.

I also like to add disqus widgets to allow non users to comment. This requires both testingthe scripts and understanding the snip/blog templates.

CSS

It would be good to have CSS rules that optimised for mobile browsers.

snipsnap-portlets, may also help here. It maybe that several of these could be used. If I decide to hide the sidebar from mobiles I might want to put the search or a bookmark this link into '3 which I then show to the mobile.

Also to set up a media=print set of rules to exclude the sidebar and banner from print requests.

The css files are held as snips under a css snip under the theme. I have created a print.css by copying page.css. New Rules need to be created.

Snipsnap Templates

I have ben considering trying to apply both http://disqus.com and http://addthis.com features to this snipsnap. On Matthias L. Jugel's advice I have created a new snipsnap portlet called snipsnap-portlet-3. The distribution comes with Nos. 1 & 2. It is published to each page and I need to develop a CSS rule to mange the placement of the object on the page. It is encapsulated within two unique <div> tags,

<div id="page-portlet-3-wrapper">
    <div id="page-portlet-3">

The goal is to implement the above two web tools. Placing a disqus comment on a given page should be simple, it may depend on how disqus references the URI, and also solving the AddThis problem.

With add this a feed URL is simple there is only one that works,

• http://davelevy.dyndns.info/snipsnap/exec/rss?snip=start

I can't see how to make a footer for a blog entry. The -portlet-n technique doesn't seem to work.

See also Share This and the Test Page.

Mathias (Leo) wrote to me and said,

yes, the portlet-n pages are global, they are for layouting purposes adding more columns or rows etc. However, they can be dynamic. It gets a little tricky here, but try to play with this:

• http://snipsnap.org/space/snipsnap-documentation/Groovy+Scripting

A simple way to use it is, just html fragments as in: http://thinkberg.com/space/travel/Tokyo. Click view and also note that the snip is locked (by the main user/admin) and has the TypeLabel text/gsp

You can add in Groovy code like "You currently look at <%= view %>." Which is about the same as the macro parameter $viewed.

Well, now for the per blog-entry footer. This is a bit more complicated as it is handled by the weblog macro. What you could do is insert the code using Javascript and the snipsnap-portlet-x, by walking through the blog entries (each has a

under snip-content).

The alternative is to dig into the code and fix the weblog-macro.

So I looke for and found http://groovy.codehaus.org/Groovy+Quick+Start+Project.

HTML

It would be cool to include HTML, especially scripts in a snip. They have a user contributed macro that does this.The following links, all at http://www.snipsnap.org refer.

• mfranken's HTMLmacro
• HTML macro
• Macro Tutorial

mfranken's HTMLMacro

Test Page

This needs reinstalling after a database rebuild.

This is rendered HTML

Labels

I though it would be good to have tags and tag clouds, so I need to investigate labels. I have found two resources at http://www.snipsnap.org,

• Label
• Category

Test Page 2

Obviously this page is labeled Snipsnap, and I have now created a Tags master snip, i.e. not subordinate to my user. I am begining to implement search statements, especially on the tag pages to show their subordinates, and the user Dave page, to avoid having to manually maintain the structured index.

I should research the other tag types and see if the taxonomy tag type will help me represent the IT structures I have created, or if I should just network it. I wonder if I could write a tag search macro? Would this require Java?

Backups

I need to review my backup scripts and threshold management. It#d be good to mail the phone if I run out of space.

Ubuntu NJAVA_HOME

What a palaver in discovering the $JAVE_HOME? I chased it down by doing a whereis java, then chasing the links down until there were no more. The reply ends ../bin/java, the rest is the Java Home directory.