Question on Affero - social media icons, blog post layout, publishing

RapidWeaver Classic
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Hello all - newbie to RapidWeaver, although I used to be good at webstuff. But it was a few years ago and a few things have atrophied. I have done a search and can’t quite find the answer I’m after.

After a couple of weeks of playing around in various offline webdev systems, I settled on RapidWeaver for its combo of access-to-code plus nice-shiny-themes plus proper web design stuff like “only upload changed files”.

Affero theme (freebie version) seemed to have what I’m looking for in my fairly simple (currently) website for my farmer’s market business AND (separate) writing/editing/proofreading business - left-hand-nav menu plus a range of options for images, blogging, and suchlike.

I’ve managed to work out how to control most things in the theme, I think, but I’m still stuck on a few bits.

  1. I would like to add social media icons (FB, Twitter, and Instagram at the moment) to a static page. The sidebar or the footer would be ideal.

However, the sidebar content seems to be variable depending on what sort of other page is open, and the footer seems to be entirely static on “word I set” and “contact me with email details populated from the Mac somewhere”.

I’m downloading a couple of the social media stacks, but I’m at a loss as to how I can add these neatly to every page (including those with pre-set setup like the photos and blog pages, where I have little option to add more text).

(Maybe the “HTML” styled option in the sidebar is what I’m after? Unsure).

  1. The blog page (which I’m re-naming to “articles”) has the option for “summary” and “body”, and for the blog entries to have a permalink - which I assume to mean “their own page”. So far so good. I’ve edited the existing blog posts and added a couple more, for test purposes.

When I go into “Preview”, I’m expecting the blog entries to behave as they would for real. However, clicking “Read More”, or the blog title itself, has no effect at all.

Will this work as expected once it’s published to a live server?

  1. I exported the site to a local folder and tried to open in Chrome/Firefox, but I got a completely unstyled site, which was a nasty surprise, but I assume I might need a full webserver to see everything I need (?). I haven’t published to my website host yet because I have limited bandwidth to play with and want things reasonably settled before that first big upload.

Will this play as expected once fully published, or should everything behave precisely as the true website will in “Preview”? If so, am I missing something in the blog page design in Affero?

Sorry for the newbie questions. I’m currently pretty pleased with the program on the whole, given I used to hack my CSS by hand and so retain some serious control-freak tendencies. Combine these with serious lack of time and the actual graphic design ability of a deranged ant, and you see my difficulties :slight_smile: .

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OK. I may have sussed out the social media icons, using the most simple option of generating code from the sites themselves and pasting as an HTML option in each sidebar. I can cope with that for the moment (either that or coughing up more to start implementing stacks, and the $Aus makes that a rather expensive option right now)(why is the Stacks plugin a rather expensive paid extra when 2/3 of Rapidweaver is based on Stacks??? Hmmm).

The Instagram image appears to be working (after I fixed the missing “https” options in the code). FB isn’t - yet - but this seems to be a common issue, so we’ll see. Yes, I fixed its missing “http” as well.

Blogs still not working.

Export still not working.

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Update, in case anyone’s interested …

I finally bit the bullet and published the site.

Blogs work.
Styles work.
FB link doesn’t work.
Still unwilling to pay for Stacks just to implement social media …

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Glad to see you are getting it sorted. It’s hard for anyone to help without a url.

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Well, yes, but I hadn’t published the site when I first asked the question, as I wasn’t having that load of crap at my true domain name! That’s why I exported to my local drive and tried to view it there first, which didn’t work.

I was hoping that someone could tell me that yes, the blog posts would publish correctly when it went live; why I can’t view it properly locally; and suggestions on how to insert the social media icons into the sidebar.

Ah well. I have since done a few diverts and now have the (seriously incomplete but actually-not-bad-I-don’t-think) site located at http://cbr1lcp11.webhosting.openconnect.com.au/~s1040503/.

Now that I’ve seen how it publishes, I can go back and tidy up some folder names (“style-1” and “style-2” aren’t terribly professional :slight_smile: ). I’d be happy with feedback on the still-klutzy-looking bits.

Still can’t make the Facebook link work, either.

I could also do with some feedback on http://bentshed.com.au/ - why won’t those two images line up? I’m using bootstrap and it should work - it’s creating the two columns without difficulty - and I’m stuffed if I can see the logic.

I’m using Affero again because I couldn’t find how to create a perfectly plain single webpage! The side-column is completely superfluous but it was easier doing this than it was to try and do anything else … (aside from hacking out a page in HTML plaintext, which didn’t thrill me at all).

Oh yes, and one of the links doesn’t work currently. Having a small fight with my hosting supplier about that …