021008.txt

<!--Improving RSS-->
I've been using
<a href="http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/">
amphetaDesk</a> to scan RSS channels. The RSS that BlogMax generates
looks funny there. The main link appears twice. I've been thinking
about some ideas to improve the RSS and get rid of the need to use
&lt;br> tags for paragraph breaks within an entry. I think I know what
to do now.

I'll add two new macros, <code>\{story link title name}</code> and
<code>\{/story}</code>. The RSS generation will include only the text
between the two new macros (using the old algorithm for backward
compatibility on pages that contain no instance of the
<code>\{story}</code> macro).

<code>\{story link title name}</code> will expand into:
<blockquote>
<code>&lt;!--story-->&lt;a href=link name=name>title&lt;/a></code>
</blockquote>
<code>\{/story}</code> will expand into:
<blockquote>
<code>&lt;!--/story--></code>
</blockquote>
The weblog-insert-story-tags command, likely bound to
&lt;Ctrl>&lt;Shift>-S, will insert:
<blockquote>
<code>\{story ...}\{/story}</code>
</blockquote>
using the clipboard as the "link", auto-generating the "name" as one
more than the largest integer already used in the file, and putting
the cursor between the two quotes of a blank "title". RSS generation
will then be done on the generated HTML file, finding the
<code>&lt!--story--></code> and <code>&lt;!--/story--></code> comments
and pulling the link and title out of the generated anchor tag.

Comments?