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01/22/2005: "An exception and an explanation"
I am not supposed to blog here. But this exception will be in order, as some explanation is needed. You will have noticed that in Jonathan David Morris's post just preceding this one there are two additional lines after the heading that the earlier posts did not show: music and mood.
This weblog is using Noah Grey's software Greymatter in its latest version and the entry page template offers these two entry fields which I had not really understood and not yet bothered to elucidate or I would probably already have discarded them. JDM surprised me by being the first to use them. And this seemed to me to be a slight problem.
Luckily, Rob Arnold, alias "linear", the foremost expert for this software and one of its further developers, is on board with us and available for any problem solving, as he promised: "You may continue to delegate the weird uncertainties (the Greymatter ones anyhow) to me." I availed myself of that great opportunity and our correspondence regarding this detail, I mean his answer mainly, is definitely worth quoting. Here we go:
"On Friday, January 21, 2005 5:26 PM [GMT -0500],
Christian Butterbach <...snip...@butterbach.net> wrote:
:: linear,
::
:: What are these stupid fields music and mood supposed to mean? What
:: are they for? I want to get rid of them. Or I will be confronted for
:: the next years to come by JDM's pop music inventory. He is an expert
:: in the field. And I loathe most of that. See his latest post.
::
:: Chris
::
:: PS: I just see that I only have to take
:: { {smartentrymusic} } { {smartentrymood} } out of the entry page
:: template. But still, what is all this supposed to mean?
:: "Displays contents of the respective templates if text is included
:: in the respective inputs when adding a new entry." What is the idea
:: behind that?
ah CB,
The typical (stereotypical) GM user seems to be a teenage girl,
self-absorbed to the extent of broadcasting to the world her instantaneous music and mood coordinates. This feature (along with the smilies) is a big big hit with the type who makes 5 blog entries a day, forcing her boundless teen angst into txt spk LOL in 9-point type and stuffing it all into an
iframe on a page surrounded with a 3-megabyte rendering of their pop star crush /du jour/. I'll spare you the example URLs.
In reality, they're just two additional post fields, and you can use them to record any data you see fit, including phase of the moon, navel lint census data, LDL cholesterol, or barometric pressure on Titan. The "smart" versions of the templates allow you to have some generality in labeling the field to your liking, as well as omitting the label in the case where the field is empty for an entry. One (serious) misuse of this feature is to provide per-entry meta tags for keywords and description. I stuff them full of variables that my php scripts read. You may use them (or not) as best suits you.
make sense?"
My answer:
"At 19:45 21.01.05 -0600, you wrote:
> make sense?
Yes, Rob, but it also tells me that the templates as they are, which I took over without hardly any change on my part, are not the "smart" versions... :) You or the install/handbook files didn't tell me that the basic version is for teenage girls. Such a fact needs a warning label from the Surgeon General!
The good thing is that it made you send me a little marvel of explanation that you would have been entitled to post directly to the blog, such is its quality. May I at least quote it, maybe in my own blog?
Muchas gracias though.
Chris"
Dear readers, be prepared that I will do away with this music and mood stuff, unless JDM hauls me over the coals... :)