old pro turns n00b -or- I can't remember this

[tannercampbell]

I'm an OLD Greymatter user, back when Noah Grey was actually still around and part of this vast online consciousness ... I traded up to Wordpress a while ago and started designing on it like crazy toceffect.com

Problem is I'm working on a personal project now, and I want to come back to Greymatter's simplicity ... but I'm hitting a snag.

tanner.toceffect.com notice the problem? The text runs across my images ... try as I might I haven't been able to find exactly WHERE I limit the width of the {{logbody}} or {{entrybodymain}} I could cheat and simply carriage return in every entry at the same point to make it LOOK like I've solved the problem ... but that's not my style. What am I missing? Where do I fix this?

Thanks.

Tanner Campbell

[tannercampbell]

***UPDATE***

I'm using a 'hack' or work around really ... I've contained the {{logbody}} within a table and restricted it's width that way ... but I'd really like an answer to the original question still. Thanks.

Tanner Campbell

[petefinnigan]

Hi Tanner,

Thanks for your question. The image you have posted of your site doesnt show text overwriting images as you describe? - did you re-upload your fixed vesion?.

I am not a CSS/"old style table design" expert at all - you can tell this by looking at my site www.petefinnigan.com : . i am happier dabbling with the perl code itself.

GM, as I am sure you are aware works on templates and {{logbody}} simply is parsed by the Perl and its contents are dumped into the index template or the archive main template to create the HTML pages. Therefore the styling would be done in those two templates (for {{logbody}} ) to limit the text width. i.e. the {{logbody}} is simply a place holder for the text stored in the GM .cgi files so although you say you hacked it with a table - you didnt say where and as your example URL is an image rather than a html file, i cannot see exactly where you added the table. You probably fixed it in the intended way; by adding layout (HTML or CSS) to the GM templates.

Sorry I could not be more help

Kind regards

Pete

[tannercampbell]

Hey Pete,

Originally I had set up
#frame
{
position: absolute;
top: 300px;
left: 55px;
z-index: 100px
}

then called to it with a div id tag.
div id="frame"
{{logbody}}
/div

positioning it absolutely at that location. but the text ran all the way (or nearly) to the right of the entire site. I thought that back in the day there was a special area in the gm menu that was like "advanced templates" or "other templates" where the width of {{logbody}} was defined ... after your post I think I'm vaguely remembering that it was done by html/css in the main index template. So I changed it to this

div id="frame"
table width=550
tr
td
{{logbody}}
/td
/tr
/table
/div

and its seems to work fine. but thanks for the relatively quick response to help. When did Noah Grey become Pete Finnegan anyway? I've been out of the loop for a LONG time

[petefinnigan]

Hi Tanner,

Thanks for your response. I think we are both on the same page now in terms of the possible solution. I have run GM sice 1.3 and I dont remember an advanced parameter to set the logbody width; that of course doesnt mean that there wasnt one. All of the old versions back to 1.2.1 are on my site (http://web.petefinnigan.com/greymatter.htm) but i am not inclined to install them and check..

I have been using GM for about 5.5 years so not as long as you. I have not become Noah Grey. This forum took over from the old greymatterforums site when that one was closed down by flippedcracker. A few of us wanted to keep GM going, Coldstone was the main developer for a few years really moving the code base forward from what it was but he has now dropped away to do other things.

I updated 1.8.2 recently (last week) to add more meaningful post URL;s - (see another thread in this board) and at the moment a couple of people are beta testing that. In parallel I am also building in feeds code. I updated BananaBobs code gm-rss a few years ago to do RDF, RSS2 and Atom but GM really needs built-in feeds. I am building 1.8.3 beta 2 at the moment to add feeds as templates / connected files. I also plan to add categories after that. This will be GM 1.8.3. beta 3 and then we will release. Anyone is welcome to the beta versions along the way of course.

cheers

Pete

[tannercampbell]

Pete that's awesome. Where can I get gm-feed? I downloaded directly from your site, should I look there? Have a look tanner.toceffect.com it's coming along nicely, I think you will be able to see why I wanted GM's simplicity ... it's powerful but not as invasive as Wordpress, Pivot or TypePad

[petefinnigan]

Hi Tanner,

Thanks for your reply.

I have to say your page looks fantastic, you have some "real"
skills as a web-designer and its great that you are using those skills to try and help other people. Well done.

The current feeds code is a seperate program gm-rss.cgi that you can get from my site - web.petefinnigan.com/gm-rss.htm but as you will read there or in posts on the forum it can be difficult to get it to run sometimes. It does work though and can be used to have native feeds for your GM blog.

Hence the need to build the feeds into GM. I am currently working on this. Originally I wrote an incomplete package called Gm_Feeds.pm which was going to simply build the RDF, RSS or Atom feeds when called but I then left it for a long time (I started Gm_Feeds probably 1.5 years ago - or more, I have not checked) this was turning into quite a complex peice of code.

So last week I started again with a different design. I am building the feeds as templates/connected files. There is probably as much work but the benefits are better as different feeds can be added in the future more easily simply by editing the template and the added functionallity used can be used for different purposes. If you want the beta 1 which has proper URL's for posts - have a look at web.petefinnigan.com/gm183/entries/ which is a clean 1.8.3 install, with one post using a "named" URL instead of a padded number like 00000001.htm. If you would like the beta 1 let me have your email address and I will send it to you. My email is in this post sig.

Thanks again for your reply,

Kind regards

Pete