Net4TV Voice: The PageBuilder Egg Hunt

Feature

The PageBuilder Egg Hunt

By Beth Candy
(November 21, 1999)

Having as much fun as children on an Easter Egg Hunt, PageBuilders searched everywhere looking for surprises the minute the upgrades were hatched. Yes, Virgnia, there is an Easter Bunny! (He's non denominational and his likeness is copyrighted but I digress.) Here is what we have in our baskets:

Change Public Listing

We used to be able to view a list of all our pages by going to this address:

http://community.webtv.net/nic

We could substitute the word "nic" for any WebTV nic name and visit that user's list of published web pages. Some Webtvers were unhappy with the public list of pages. For example, my brother left notes about practice times for teammates on his Hockey team page. He needed this page accessible on the internet, put preferred it to not be publicly listed. And I had my Photo Page of Uncle Bob that I wanted to access from my computer at work, but didn't want to share with just anyone.

That option is now a reality. If your page is alread published and you want to remove it from that public list:

Go to your PageBuilder Index.
Select your page.
Click on "Change public listing."
You will see a red check mark in front of "Include this page in your public list of pages."
Click on to remove the checkmark.
Press "Done" and you are.

When creating a new page, right before you hit the "Publish" button you will see the option checkmarked "Include this page in your public list of pages." You can click on to remove the checkmark.

Edit Title

While in Edit, we can select "Edit Title" on the left sidebar. After we type the page title in we have the option for the title to show on our page or not! This is great news.

Previously, our page titles were printed across the top of our pages, and the first 20 letters of that title would become the page address. If we changed the title on the top of our pages, we would change the address of our pages.

Changing our address meant having to notify our friends, expired bookmarks, link changes, and re-registering our pages in search engines. Now that is all behind us. To change what is written across the top of your page (but not your page address):

Go to your PageBuilder Index
Click on your page.
Select "Change page."
Click on "Edit title"
Click on to remove the red checkmark in front of "Show this title on your page."
Press "Done."
Select "Add an item."
Click on "Heading"
Type in the page title.
Select the text size.
Click on "move up" button until it is item #1
Press "Done"
Press "Publish" on left sidebar
Note:The "Publish" button on the left sidebar is actually a "save" button that saves changes made.
Mission Complete

You have sucessfully removed the title from your page, placed a new title and left your page address unchanged.

Start Page in Scrapbook

Navigating the Scrapbook is still labored, but a beneficial change has occurred. You now start at the page you last viewed. If you were last on page 12 of 25, (unless you have uploaded an image in the interim), no matter when you return to your Scrapbook, that will be your start page.

If you Upload an image to your scrapbook, the next time you return, the last page will be your start page. More than likely, you are interested in working with the latest addition and having it available first would be a convenience.

What hasn't changed is that you must go through your scrapbook page by page to navigate. If your start page is page 25, to get to page 10, you must click that minus sign 15 times!

Start Page in Art Gallery

The WebTV Art Gallery is now working the same way the Scrapbook is. It will open on the page you last viewed. If you last selected a guitar from page 5 in the Music category, that is where you will begin when you select to view Art Gallery images again. What is good about that is if you select an image from page 5 of 10, and then go back to select another image, you will not have to select the Music category again, and then push the plus sign four times to arrive on page 5. You will be able to go on to page 6 and add items.

What is bad about this is if one month ago you selected a guitar from page 5 and you are now working on an occupational safety page, you will have to escape from the Music category to get to the main index. Unlike the Scrapbook, no matter what page you are on, you can opt to select "Index" from the left sidebar and get to the Art Gallery Categories page.

Online Tools Compatibility

What once prevented us from using online tools has been removed. Prior to the update we were unable to use Validators, conventional Source Viewers, and Image tools. When trying to upload an image into Image Magick we would get the error "file not found." When we tried to validate our pages, WebTV would redirect the Validators to an error page and the Validators would generate a report on the Corporate WebTV-made Page. Inexperienced webmasters believed they were getting reports based on the page they made. We were locked out of almost every online tool.

But the cookies have crumbled (the online tools not accepting webtv generated cookie files was the problem)! We can now Validate, Manipulate, and View Source codes at all the usual places! The WebTV Utility is one of my favorite collections of online tools.

Clean Up Documents

Previously we had to go into our Page Builder Index, Select the page and then click on "Discard page" for each page that we wanted to discard.

Now when we go into our Page Builders we have the "Clean up" option on the left sidebar. Similar to the Scrapbook "Clean up," after we click on "Clean up" we will see a box to check, and then press "Discard." This new feature makes it easy to discard more than one page at a time and in less steps.

Examples

When you get to the PageBuilder Index, you will now see the option "Examples" on the left sidebar. When you click on "Examples" you will see rudimentary pages on Travel Tips, Pet Care, the Wilson Family Reunion and the Hollis Baseball League.

This will serve us all well. No, really, I'm not kidding. It will be a great point of reference for anyone calling WebTV. I've seen some of the technical names newbies mistakenly call things. Now they can say "How do I make the title white, like the word "Urinating" on Cat Behavior, page 2, but have the text in black? The customer rep will be familiar with this page and may even have a FAQ available.

Invariably someone will stop in the APH newsgroup and ask to see an example of a PageBuilder page. So this really was a requested feature. Athough telling them to visit the "Pages of Sammy M. Surfer" (that's the name of the Example page) probably won't stop a 200 length thread of proud webmasters from giving the requested sample, she said, tongue in cheek. I think the samples will be a great point of reference for PageBuilder Helpers.

Clean Up Scrapbook

Cleaning up the Scrapbook just got easier. When you go to your Page Builder Index, and click on "Scrapbook," you will arrive at the page you last viewed. If you decide to clean up, you can click on the words "Clean up," check an item, and then press "Discard." You will see the popup alert asking if you want to permanently discard this image, and then return to whatever page you were on. You will still be in cleanup mode and be able to go from page to page in your scrapbook to clean up.

Previously you started on page 1, checked "Clean Up," got to page 5 and after you discarded one image on page 5, you were thrown page to page 1 to start again. We now have a way of cleaning up in a more efficient manner. Also, the amount of space that the images are taking up is now noted below each image. This could help you in deciding which image to discard.

Wedding Page Style Works!

The Wedding Page Style (page 4 of the backgrounds) now works. Previously, the wedding cake design did not show up when you published this page (although it showed up in preview). The program produced the wrong file name that resulted in a shadow box on your published page instead of the 3 tiered wedding cake. This error rendered this page unusable.

Thank you, WebTV. I'm allergic to wedding cake, but many brides liked the idea of that background. This page could be used to make Bridal shower ivitations, display wedding photos or engagement stories.

Must Select Image!

Be sure that you want to add an image when you click on "Add an item" and select "Picture."
I clicked on "Add an item," then went on to select "Your scrapbook." I was brought to the very last page I visited in my scrapbook- page 12 of 25. I decided to not add a picture and selected "Done" on the left sidebar. That brought me back to the choice of being able to add a Picture from "Your scrapbook" or the "WebTV Gallery." Pressing "Help" on the left sidebar brought me to the general PB Help Center. I clicked on "Remove" even though I did not select an image and received this alert: "Would you like to remove this entire item?" I selected "Remove" somewhat fearful that the wrong item or even my page might be removed, but reporters sometimes have to live on the edge and take chances. When I clicked on "Remove" I was brought back to an intact working page.

I suppose using the back button could work, but what we really need in there is for that "Done" button to take us back to our working page. This will only be a inconvenience if you decide to not select an image when you said you wanted to.

I hope you enjoyed learning about all the surprises we found at the Easter Egg hunt. The original article I submitted was rejected. Something about it being off-topic, and self-indulgent, alienating readers and low ratings. I thought my winning an award would make a fascinating read. I'm hoping my editor is sleeping while reading this or believes that checking the first half of my article is good enough, cause I'm gonna slip in the announcement that my Page Builder Sitemap is Draac's Pick of the Week and I have the monkey to prove it (Thanks Draac)!

with love from,
Beth Candy

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