Uncle Roger's Notebooks of Daily Life

Plugging along

If you keep up with the Blosxom discussion group, you already know this, but for the rest of you, here's the scoop: I've updated fmtcat (again) and published an updated version of Gregory Bair's linksused plugin.

fmtcat now exposes three additional variables, lastcat, catlevel, and catdesc. lastcat is simply the bottom level category. If, for example, your post was in /food/dinner/meat, then lastcat would be "meat".

catlevel tells you how many levels down the category tree you can find the current category. In the example above, food would be level 1, dinner would be level 2, and meat would be level 3.

catdesc provides you with a textual description of the category, based on a list of descriptions you provide. It is also used as the title attribute of the category links in the formatted category string.

There are some other, minor enhancements as well. If you use fmtcat, it's well worth downloading this version. If you haven't heard of fmtcat before, you might want to read the original announcement of fmtcat (and another plugin I wrote, tableit). You can also read the initial announcement that I posted to the Yahoo Blosxom group, as well as the first, second, and this latest update announcements at Yahoo.

Along with this update, I'm releasing an updated version of linksused. Linksused is the plugin that generates the little list of links that you see below this entry. The original plugin simply generated the list separated by line breaks (<br>) and I changed it (when I first started using it) to spit out an unordered list (<ul>), along with a title. In this latest version, I've cleaned it up a bit, made the title (the "Related Links") a configurable variable, and made it use the title attribute of a link (if present) as the text of the link. That's why the list below has different text than the same links embedded in this post.

The title attribute (which I just found out about -- I've been busy!) provides a way of supplying additional information about a link. The common use seems to be for browsers to use them as "tooltips" -- little boxes that pop up when the cursor pauses over a link. That's all fine and dandy, but I had been thinking about a way to have the text in the linksused list be different that that which is used inline in a post, and the title attribute is absolutely perfect for it. Linksused is a great tool and I am definitely indebted to Gregory Bair for developing it.

In any case, all my plugins can be downloaded here. I would love to hear from you if you are using any of them, especially if you have any suggestions or find any bugs.