Details
DetailsThe Glossary
We manage links for you using the Glossary feature. When you're writing copy for the website, any text in double-quotes is a potential link. If we find it in the glossary, we do the subsitution. You can also include plain text in a glossary entry, so you could refer to "myAddress" and have Clay Basket automatically substitute your street address. This can be handy if you move around alot. Don't miss the power of this idea. It's a programmable text environment. You really need this to manage a website, but it's a first for text processing on personal computers. No word processor or outliner that I've ever used has had this feature.
The connection to FrontierThe glossary is implemented in a table in Frontier's object database. To use the glossary feature you must have Frontier running.
Two commands in the Gems menu support the Glossary. Add to Glossary adds a term to the database. Open Glossary brings Frontier to the front and opens clay.data.glossary the table that contains all of your glossary references. Each glossary element has a type and a value. Usually the value is a URL, but it doesn't have to be. The types currently supported are email addresses, web addresses, and plain text. Suggestions for other types are welcome, the architecture is nicely extensible. For script writers, the fact that the glossary is implemented as a Frontier table, that means that scripts can load in alternate vocabularies as you may need to.
I like this feature because it means that I can easily point to other pages and websites. It also gives me link management, the more you link thru the glossary table the easier it will be to manage the links on your site. I think this is the rational approach for link management, as opposed to some of the othere options that other people are talking about.
After implementing the Frontier-based glossary, on 10/10/95, I noticed a way to make it much more powerful, and I implemented it. If Clay looks up something inside double-quotes in the glossary, it searches the current outline for the text and generates a link to its page if it was found. This adds a great advantage to linking all your web pages to your Clay outline, now they can be referenced in any of your text thru the glossary feature.
Much more comprehensive link management.
Cooool.
If you want to see what's in my glossary today, jump to the clay.data.glossary page. A robot maintains that page.
Very cooool!
If you're using the glossary or other customization features in Frontier, you'll need to have it running while Clay Basket is running. The new Internet-enhanced version of Frontier, called Aretha, is in free public beta.
After downloading Frontier, open the Clay Basket release folder, then Extras folder, then the Frontier Install Files folder and double-click on clay.frontier and system.verbs.apps.card. Say OK to all the dialogs. These files install the support needed for Clay Basket in Frontier's object database. After installing, press cmd-S in Frontier to save the changes to disk. i
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This page was last built with Frontier on a Macintosh on Mon, Jul 22, 1996 at 10:34:32 PM. Thanks for checking it out! Dave |