Joe Workman's Blog

New Searchpath Stack

A nice custom site search is difficult to implement. Most website simply piggyback on search engines such as Google or DuckDuckGo. However, Searchpath.io came on to the scene earlier this year and I think its pretty cool. It’s a freemium search service that lets you implement fast and simple search directly onto your website.

I am releasing a FREE Searchpath Stack so that you can easily integrate and customize Searchpath into your RapidWeaver websites.

Download the Searchpath Stack

New Floaty Stack

The out of the box float stacks are great. However, they have there limitations. I find that I want to sometime add data above the text area that will be flush at the top with the floating content. Floaty makes that possible! It also adds responsive support so that the content still looks great on all devices. The content will be displayed in a single column on iPhone (or similar width) mobile devices.

Floaty is available for only 95¢. For more details and demos, head over to the Floaty product page.

New QuickPics Instagram Stack

I started using Instagram almost exactly one year ago. The only reason that I started to use it was to build this stack. I have since grown to love Instagram and it’s my favorite way to post my photos to the world to see. However, this stack hovered around 95% done for-ev-ver! Things like writing my book (Which you have right?) and stuff got in the way. However, I am happy to finally get this awesome stack out into the world.

The QuickPics Instagram stack is not only a dead simple way to get Instagram photos on your site. It’s also a really awesome responsive gallery and slideshow. You have full customization controls how to style all aspects of the photos. You can display your captions in four awesome formats.

With QuickPics Instagram you can, as Ron Popeil says, “set it and forget it!” Once you have the stack setup on your RapidWeaver website, all the images that you take with Instagram will auto-magically appear on your website. Its pretty awesome.

Launch Special

I wanted to give you $5 off for the launch of this great stack. Use the coupon code QuickPics at checkout. If you have already purchased the stack before this announcement, ping us and we will make sure you are set straight.

Make sure to check out the demos and video overview on the QuickPics Instagram product page.

Simple RapidWeaver Search

Adding search to your RapidWeaver website has never been easier and more protected than with the new DuckDuckSearch stack. It leverages the great search engine at DuckDuckGo.com to display your site specific search results. The styling of the results page can be customized to match the color schemes used with your RapidWeaver sites.

Sometimes the most useful things are the ones you build for yourself. I built DuckDuckSearch as a search mechanism for my new documentation portal. I think its a very easy to implement and elegant solution. That’s why I use it.

Pick up your copy of DuckDuckSearch today for only $4.95.

• DuckDuckSearch Product Page
• DuckDuckSearch Documentation

‘Place Holder’ Nav in RapidWeaver

I get asked pretty often how you can add a simple place holder item in your site navigation that is not actually a link. If you have used RapidWeaver for a while or if you read my book, you know that you build your site navigation tree by adding new pages to your project and organizing them into a hierarchy. Obviously each page that is added into the navigation hierarchy is a link to itself. However, there are times that maybe you don’t want a 1-to-1 mapping. Here are two methods that will serve you well in you bag of tricks.

Linking to Another Page

In my book I talk about using an Offsite page in order to inject items into your navigation that may exist somewhere else within your project or maybe even external to you website. I use this trick several places on my site. If you head over to my RapidWeaver products page, you will see a link in my 2nd level navigation in the side bar to my Stacks Blog. That is an Offsite page in my RapidWeaver project file that links to the Stack Updates page that actually lives under my Blog navigation. Have a look at this picture, it should all be clear now.

If you also notice the ‘RapidWeaver Book’ link on that same page, it’s an Offsite page that links outside my website to http://rapidweaverbook.com. As you can see the Offsite page is a handy little devil. For a more elaborate walkthrough of this, pick up a copy of my book and check out chapter 6.

No Links, Just a Place Holder

Now what if you want to add a layer to your navigation that actually is not a link. This could be nice to have if you want a way to better organize your navigation. Have a look at the image below. What if I wanted the Galleries navigation item to actually not link to anything? It’s only purpose if to better organize my navigation.

Unfortunately the Offsite page is not going to work for us in this situation. There aren’t any plugins (that I know of, maybe I should look into that…) that will simply add a placeholder entry into your navigation. However, this can be done very easily with some JavaScript.

/* Instructions - Please Read 

1. Insert this snippet in the Javascript tab in RapidWeaver's Page Inspector.
2. Modify the 'page_title' variable to contain the name of the page that you want to disable in your navigation.

WARNING: If you ever have a link that is inside a bullet list and the text of that link matches the exact text that you type in page_title, that link will be rendered inactive as well.
*/
var $jq = jQuery.noConflict();
$jq(document).ready(function() {
    var page_title = 'Place Holder'
    $jq('ul li a').filter(function(){return $jq(this).text() == page_title;}).attr('href','javascript:void(0)');
});Check out this Pen!

The above JavaScript snippet will effectively disable the link within the navigation for the defined page. The means that when a user clicks on it, nothing will happen. TO use this, it will need to be added into the JavaScript tab of the Page Inspector. You do need to make sure that you modify the ‘page_title’ variable in order for this to work. You will also need to add this to every page of your project. If that seems like a bare, check out a plugin call @Stash. It has a small learning curve but it will make your life a little easier.

I also made an RWSnippet for this solution, so that you can quickly access it from RapidWeaver’s snippet browser. Download it now.

Update: I updated the RapidWeaver snippet. It should now work with all themes. Please download it again. I also updated the code snippet embedded above with the latest version of the snippet.

New SqueezeBox Stack

I am happy announce my first new stack in quite a while. SqueezeBox v2.0 is a stylish and responsive accordion stack. SqueezeBox gives you a wonderful way to present content to your users in an organized way. You can split your content into sections that can be expanded and collapsed. It even supports linking to individual sections.

To pick up your copy of SqueezeBox, head over to the SqueezeBox product page.