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1. Article Manager - Save $30 (Ends September 7th)!
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Labour Day is just around the corner so I felt I would throw a special (some call it "Labor Day", but in Canada we're proud of that "U").
Just until September 7th, you can pick up your very own copy of Article Manager for the special price of just $269. That's a big savings of $30 off the regular price. Purchase a multi-pack and save more than $80 on each license! :)
As always, the price includes all the goodies: free support, free installation, and a 90-day money back guarantee. Article Manager's perfect
if you're building a site with tons of articles, news stories, and more. There are also many other types of websites that can make great use of it for general content management. Talk to us about your latest project, maybe Article Manager will be a great fit.
If you would like to place an order or have any questions, give us a call (toll free 1-800-752-0455), send an email, post in the forum, or even
message us through live chat. We're always happy to help you out! :)
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2. New Interactivetools Blog
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Have you ever done something you thought was really stupid, regretted it, and then felt better about it later? I recently found myself alone with a
sledge hammer, standing over a pile of rubble that was once my bathtub - my ONLY bathtub, in fact. I was beginning to think "will I ever shower again?"
Well, to clear things up, I didn't have a breakdown and attack my tub. I've been renovating over the summer vacation. I've finished completely redoing
my bathroom (yes, I'm clean again) and I've just installed entirely new laminate wood flooring in my living room and dining room!
Damon has been doing renovations too, on our website. He recently set up www.interactivetools.com to include an entirely new company blog. Now
I don't even know what he has in mind for content, but I'm thinking it'll be more in line with what you just read (stories from our daily life),
interesting tech news with links, and company announcements. So feel free to stop by any time and read what we're up to. :)
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3. Ross Report - On Location In Thailand
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Ross has taken the month of August to visit Thailand and explore what the country has to offer. Here are a couple of excerpts from updates Ross has given us (typos and all):
"Thai food is without a doubt the best food i have ever tasted."
"OK. traffic time. There are about 10 million people living in Bangkok and from what i can tell, roughly 1/2 of them are on the road at any given time. Needless to say, it takes quite a long time to get anywhere."
"So next on the agenda is weather. It feels hot enough here for me to start thinking that this is where hot was invented."
It sounds like Ross is having a blast in Thailand and you can read all about his adventures in the interactivetools Blog.
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4. Coach's Corner's Greatest Hits - with Mike Briggs on Location In Vancouver
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Considering Ross is on vacation in Thailand right now and I'm a bit jealous I thought I'd add that I'm currently "On Location" as well. The only difference is that my location is my same old desk in our office in Vancouver. It's not quite as exciting as Thailand but saying that I'm "On Location" does help get me in the vacation mood, even if the weather doesn't (we're looking at overcast skies and 15 degrees Celsius, I think rain season may soon be upon us).
That said, this month I wanted to talk a bit about some of the "Greatest Hits" in past Coach's Corner tutorials that I've written. These are a couple of the tutorials that people seem to continually find helpful and if you're a new subscriber to the newsletter you may not have seen any of these before:
Setting up an RSS feed with Listings Manager
This tutorial outlines how you can create an RSS feed using Listings Manager that will allow visitors to subscribe to your content so they can continually see your latest listings and can come back to your site when a listing catches their attention.
Google-Style "Pagination" in Article Manager
In this tutorial I outlined how to modify Article Manager's search results page to include a "<< 1 2 3 4
5 >>" style navigation that will allow users to easily navigate your search results.
Article Manager Features and Search Engine Optimization
This tutorial lists some of Article Manager's features and how these can be used to make your site as search engine friendly as possible. I've received a lot of great feedback on this tutorial and just wanted to highlight this again.
Well, that's it for this Newsletter. Stay tuned for next time where I'll continue to provide tutorials on location... in Vancouver.
Over and Out,
Mike "Coach" Briggs
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5. Ask Donna : Scrolling News Ticker For Article Manager - by Donna Brown
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Hi Donna,
I was wondering if you know of a way to get my Article Manager content to scroll in a news ticker type box, like what I see on so many news sites? I would like the ticker to have my article titles and summaries just like the index page, I would also like my article title to remain a link to the full article.
Is this possible? Have you seen anyone do it in the past?
-All Tickered Out
Hi Tickered,
You know, the hardest part about setting this up was picking a news ticker. There are hundreds of them!
Here's one that I found that I quite liked, all the customization was easily done with CSS. You can set it up to be a multi-line or single-line ticker just by adjusting the height in the CSS ID! Ah, CSS, is there anything you CAN'T do?
So, here's how to set it up with Article Manager. First, follow the directions on the page for how to install the scroller. Essentially, you have two bits of code that you're copying and pasting onto your page. You can also customize the CSS while you're at it, so it has the look & feel that you want.
Now, to get Article Manager into it, we'll be setting up a custom template. It's going to be extremely cut down, as we only want a few lines to be output. I also cut out a lot of the extra line-breaks that make it a little easier to read (the JavaScript wasn't all that happy with the extra spaces). You can further customize this if you want - for example, I pulled out the category date to keep it light and simple -- you can certainly put that back in.
Here's the template that I used. You can see that I called mine "scroller.html", but you can rename it to whatever you'd like. Put the template into your Article Manager templates/index/ folder.
If you decide to customize this, make sure that each row templatecell ends with a single quote as in my example template: this makes sure that the JavaScript knows that the end of the line is right there (Article Manager ends up feeding it a few extra blank lines with each include).
Now, you need to setup the scroller so that it knows what content to pull in. The default scroller code looks like this:
<script type="text/javascript">
var pausecontent=new Array()
pausecontent[0]='<a href="http://www.javascriptkit.com">JavaScript Kit</a><br />Comprehensive JavaScript tutorials and over 400+ free scripts!'
pausecontent[1]='<a href="http://www.codingforums.com">Coding Forums</a><br />Web coding and development forums.'
pausecontent[2]='<a href="http://www.cssdrive.com" target="_new">CSS Drive</a><br />Categorized CSS gallery and examples.'
</script>
Obviously, we want headlines rather than ads for various JavaScript sites, so we'll replace it with these three SSI's:
<script type="text/javascript">
var pausecontent=new Array()
pausecontent[0]='<!--#include virtual="/path/to/search.cgi?search=1&template=index/scroller.html&perpage=1&start=1" -->
pausecontent[1]='<!--#include virtual="/path/to/search.cgi?search=1&template=index/scroller.html&perpage=1&start=2" -->
pausecontent[2]='<!--#include virtual="/path/to/search.cgi?search=1&template=index/scroller.html&perpage=1&start=3" -->
</script>
Make sure you replace the /path/to with your Article Manager's search path -- this will usually be something like /artman/exec/search.cgi
You can have as many as you need -- just keep increasing the numbers next to "pause content" and "start=". You can also further customize this by adding more search options -- want to restrict it to a certain category? No problem, add &cat=5 to the search query. Now it'll show the first article in category number 5.
Want to show the top headline from each instead? Try this:
<script type="text/javascript">
var pausecontent=new Array()
pausecontent[0]='<!--#include virtual="/path/to/search.cgi?search=1&template=index/scroller.html&perpage=1&start=1&cat=1" -->
pausecontent[1]='<!--#include virtual="/path/to/search.cgi?search=1&template=index/scroller.html&perpage=1&start=1&cat=2" -->
pausecontent[2]='<!--#include virtual="/path/to/search.cgi?search=1&template=index/scroller.html&perpage=1&start=1&cat=3" -->
pausecontent[3]='<!--#include virtual="/path/to/search.cgi?search=1&template=index/scroller.html&perpage=1&start=1&cat=4" -->
</script>
Now you have the top headline from the four specified categories.
And that's about it. If you have any questions about any of this please feel free to send me an email. We also have a priority consulting service available where we can set this up for you. :)
Cheers!
Donna
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About the author
The interactivetools.com newsletter is written by Luke Holzken.
About interactivetools.com
interactivetools.com creates world-class web software. Web developers use our software to provide their non-technical
clients with an easy-to-use system for managing their websites. Visit
interactivetools.com or try an
online demo, free! Call us at 1-800-752-0455
if you have any questions not addressed on our site.
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