The Rabid Paladin

Okay, I've had SubText up and running for a week and some now, so naturally it is time to tinker. In poking around, I'm not as happy with SubText's integration model as I was with DasBlog's. DasBlog exposed a number of "macros" that you could use to insert certain internal values into your own stuff. I kind of liked their model because once you registered your own code, you could reference your macros from DasBlog stuff as well (bear in mind that I didn't actually implement DasBlog, so my impression could be off).

That said, as long as you don't need to access things like entry links or other internal blog workings, it's pretty easy to modify a "Skin" in SubText to add new stuff. SubText reads a main ASP.Net Web User Control called PageTemplate.ascx that holds essentially the format for the other Web User Controls that a SubText site uses. Which subcontrols are used are pretty much determined by this PageTemplate control and the controls it references. This structure made it pretty easy for me to add a new embed control I wanted to play with.

The Technorati Embed

There are a number of sites that offer badges, embeds, and other tools intended for their users to simultaneously spruce-up their own sites and provide free advertising for the service involved. The Technorati search feature on the right is an example and was my first foray into modifying my blog template. With Technorati, the tag I need to use to expose a Technorati search link is this:
<script src="http://embed.technorati.com/embed/xw5vkfrkzb.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

To pop it on there, I just added that code right in the PageTemplate.ascx file where I thought it'd do some good (using a text editor). Straightforward, but inelegant.

The Great Games Experiment Embed

 For my next trick, I wanted to see how SubText would handle it if I mimicked their own structure to create a new control. To do this, I created a couple of things that are way more complicated than they needed to be. I mean, technically, all I needed to do to pop the user embed onto my site is copy the badge tag from their site in the same place I put the Technorati stuff. The tag isn't all that complicated:
<iframe src="http://www.greatgamesexperiment.com/greatgamesbadge/user/Jacob" height="140" width="204" scrolling="no" frameBorder="0" />

Doing so would produce this handy "badge":

But I'm a geek and I wanted to test some stuff out, so instead of simply pasting a bunch of html, I created a .Net project and two custom web user controls. One of the controls creates a user badge. The other control creates a game badge. The result of this project is that you can drag one of these controls onto an ASP.Net page and set the "UserName" property (or "Game" property for a game badge) and it'll take care of the rest. The active html would look like this:
<cc1:GreatGamesUserEmbed ID="GreatGamesUserEmbed1" runat="server" UserName="Jacob" />

Somehow, I managed to get that to work. As long as you've registered my assembly for the right tag prefix, you're golden.

But that wasn't quite enough for me, oh, no. Simply adding that control to PageTemplate would be kind of hokey and out of place, so I went one further. Following the pattern of the other controls, I created a GreatGames.ascx file under the Controls directory and referenced that instead. It's a simple file, but then, most of those Control files are. It creates a section that fits in much better on the right side bar and groups the Great Games badges together more naturally.

And wonder of wonders, it worked first time. Love when that happens.

Wrap-up

SubText doesn't have any documentation that I could find detailing these steps, so making these modifications required mucking about in the code to follow their flow during page delivery. If I get the gumption later, I'll re-write this as a more generic how-to in creating very basic SubText add-ins because the community needs something like this. Also, I saw a couple of interesting objects that look like you can extend them for more complicated things (like controls that access the SubText data, I'll bet). I'm sure that Phil Haack and others could point those out. In fact, they're nice enough folk on their dev email list I'd bet they'd be happy to answer questions if I took the time to ask.

Also, if you want those Great Games controls, download the source code. It's nothing fancy, but does the job. Or, if you just want the binary, download that instead. The source code project includes my GreatGames.ascx file as well so you can see an example of implementing them. Let me know if you do anything interesting with them.