This would be the home page of q. There’s not much here right now… I apologize for that, and look to remedy it soon.

I have written my first story, Don’t cry for Netscape. It was inspired by ramming my head into too many design walls while trying to make a page viewable in Netscape.

Scripting News Readers

Good morning to you all! The fact that you’re reading this is a testament to the power of Manila — I signed up for my site sometime yesterday afternoon, got a generic Manila site in return, started playing with the styles, layout, and prefs, and put up a page or two, all before going to sleep. Thanks to Dave for pointing you here; now I feel that I have a pretty big burden to keep things up to date and moving. So, without further ado…

Please, everyone, feel free to post to the discussion group in my absence!

My brief take on the configuration stuff

First, the configurability of this is pretty much great — I can’t host an environment-driven home page on most (all?) of the big sites and include a CSS section or JavaScript section on all served pages. That ability here is bigtime.

From my minimal playing with the prefs and things that I can configure, though, I have three wishes:

1. I agree with Zeke; I wish that I had access to the class tags on the various markup elements; ‘twould make it much simpler to design a nice CSS for the whole site.
2. I wish that the navbar on the left had all of its elements enclosed in <p> and </p> tags (as opposed to the current method of just terminating each with a <p>) — it appears that if I have a specific font size associated with the P element, IE on Windows will only apply it to the first such P element in a group if the paragraphs aren’t enclosed in full <p> and </p> structures. (So, when I started here, I had my paras rendering with 11-point type, but only the Home line was doing so, the rest were doing as they wished.)
3. I wish that Netscape would come out with a browser that would even try to approximate usage of a CSS in a way that made any sense. (For example, if you’re using Netscape on the PC, I’m pretty sure that the navbar on the left has one font for the first item in it and another font for the rest, which assuredly is not how I designed it. And once I saw this list rendered in Netscape, I had to add an OL section to my CSS; for some reason, Netscape decided that a list doesn’t inherit the font-family property of the page itself.)

Who are my members?

My last wish (so far) is that I could conjure up a list of all of the people who’ve signed on as members to my Manilasite. (I originally typed that last word as a typo, meaning for there to be a space between the two words, but I like how it looks like that!) I can see where I can get a list of the people who’ve signed up and requested receipt of my bulletins, but I don’t see where the entire member list can be found. Am I missing something?

(I just found the /profiles link, but I still want a list on which I can see all on one page.)

Who are my peers?

I also think it would be cool if Dave and Userland put up a site that listed all of the people who have EditThisPage sites. That way, I could latch onto my peers like the remora that I am. Wait… cool idea forming… How cool would it be if one of the prefs for the site was that My.Userland.Com grabbed your changes, just like any other My.Userland.Com member?

A few questions…

What glossary am I tied in to? I would assume the big Userland one, but I have no idea.

Dave’s answer: both the Userland one and my own. Pretty awesome!

If I leave this hosting service, do I get to keep my .root file?

Dave’s answer: yep!

What is the URL to my syndication file?

Dave’s (and Brent’s) answer: /xml/scriptingNews2.xml; I now have it in the navbar to the left.

Wow…

OK, this is too cool. I can see that I will be maintaining this site pretty well, since the whole edit-in-browser thing is way more addictive than I thought it ever could be.

I can also see that I can make this site look almost any way that I want it to — I can make it so that you can’t tell it’s a Manila site, if I want! (I can see how this would be pretty attractive to big companies out there who want to totally control the site structure and look-and-feel.)