the underground press

Work on the new website for underground press publishing is going well. We had Code Kitty up on the front page for awhile as a placeholder for this blog's RSS feed, but it is up and running now. Visitors can now view the blog feed from the main page. Thanks Code Kitty.

We added an XmlDataSource control from the tools menu, configured the data file entry to the RSS feed for the blog, then added a DataList control to display the content. We added two Labels in the item template of the DataList control and configured their data binding to the items we wanted by setting the custom binding of their text fields to xpath(“item/title”) and xpath(“item/description”) respectfully.

The only formatting we did was to make the title text bold using the control's property menu and added some spacing between the labels. We are trying to keep styling to a minimum while we build, then add it later in a global Style Sheet, which is good W3C practice. It also keeps a styles consistent and makes updating multiple pages much simpler.

The bare bones of undergroundpresspublishing.com is complete, so we will be working on styling and tracking down any bad links or other debugging now that it is active on the remote server. There is always something that works fine on the test server then breaks on the remote server. Styling often takes longer than coding a site and even when it's done there are constant changes and updates.

Next time I'll focus on style issues as we build our global Style Sheet.