VanCleve.com User's Guide

The Menu applet is perhaps the coolest and worthiest aspect of VanCleve.com, and thus so many of the Terminal's commands are dedicated to its configuration. Indeed, an extraordinary number of visual details can be controlled by each individual user--provided they are logged in. The Menu serves as a navigational interface for the content on VanCleve.com, but it is also an interface for indexing and reopening your own favorite Web pages, or "bookmarks". While using the Menu directly is quite simple and intuitive, it being entirely a GUI, setting it up and customizing it using the Terminal will require some explanation.

The first thing to understand--the very paradigm here (well, the very data model, at least)--is that a "folder" which contains a bookmark and the bookmark itself (or "menu item", as I sometimes call it) are two different things. So the bookmark does not belong to any one folder. It can appear in more than one or in no folder whatsoever. Don't worry, the command insert unused menu items can be used to recover bookmarks which are unplaced in your menu. Another thing to bear in mind is that some links in the Menu--the default ones--are not in your control. Only items you create can be altered or moved around (with the slight exception that you can add your own bookmarks to the default folders). Incidentally, if you want to know exactly, I use the term "menu item" to refer to all links appearing in the menu, including the default ones, and I use "bookmark" to refer to user-defined links.

One more thing to remember is, when you make a change to your menu using the Terminal, the Menu applet will not immediately reflect it. You will have to reload that one way or another. A sure way of doing this is to reload the page on which the Menu is running, usually the home page. But see also the reload menu command below.

Okay, that said, let's talk process. Since bookmarks and folders are independent entities, they must be created separately. Obviously, if you want to add a bookmark to a particular folder, you should create that folder first. So you would do that using the create menu folder command, and then you would add the bookmark to it using create bookmark. But not necessarily. Sometimes you may be in a hurry to just get something bookmarked, without too much distraction. Then the speedier bookmark command would be preferable, since it simply drops the new bookmark into a default folder, without asking a lot of questions. In fact, since the Menu applet allows you to move things around graphically, you may prefer to use this command all the time and use the Menu itself to get things into their proper folders.

If you remove an item in the Menu applet, it is not destroyed. It may still be in another folder, or it may appear nowhere in your menu, but it's still in the database. To recover all such bookmarks to the Menu, you can enter "insert unused menu items". This places them into a standard location where you can examine and replace them into your menu hierchy properly. If you want to delete those bookmarks permanently, on the other hand, type "delete unused menu items".

Another way of adding bookmarks into folders is the create menu link command, although for this command the bookmark must already exist. The same thing can be accomplished with the menu applet, though.

Hopefully, between the Terminal and the Menu applets, you will find enough convenient functionality for organizing your bookmarks that you will abandon your own browser's bookmark interface. Not only does mine look really keen, it makes your bookmarks available to you from any decent (read "Java-enabled") browser, anywhere on Earth! Isn't that amazing?

create menu item

create menu item is the basic command for creating a "menu item", without assigning it to any folder in the Menu. It will ask you for several details of the item, including its URL and the name that should appear in the menu. This "menu name" should be very short, in order to keep your menu neat and clean. Some of these details are optional, such as the "blurb", which is a message that should (but may not) appear in your browser's status bar when you move your mouse over the item in your menu. If your browser supports this, the message can serve as a more thorough description of your link.

One more thing: unlike create bookmark, this command will ask you explicitly for an optional URL query string to your link. It is in fact the canonical way to create menu links, whereas the "bookmark" commands are somewhat simplified.

create bookmark

This is the normal command for creating a personal bookmark. It asks you for the name of a folder, into which the bookmark should be placed. If you just press <enter>, it will be placed in the top-level "Bookmarks" folder; or, if the name you type matches more than one folder, you will be able to select the right one. Other details of the bookmark are optional, as well.

bookmark

This is just a speedy way to add a bookmark, without worrying about unnecessary details. Such things as the status bar blurb are simply left empty. This command places the bookmark in the "Bookmarks" folder. You can change this using the Menu, and you can go back later and fill in those missing details using edit bookmark.

edit bookmark

edit bookmark can be used to change the details of a bookmark you have created, especially if you used the simple bookmark command and have not completely defined it. If you only need to change the URL for the bookmark, try the relink command instead.

relink

The relink provides the simplest means of changing the URL for a bookmark you have created. Type in a distinguishing portion of the menu name of the item you want to change (you can even type it directly after the command, to save a step). If it matches multiple bookmarks, a list will be displayed with the integer IDs of each match, and you will have to type the ID of the correct item. Once it is identified, just type or paste in a new URL, and you're done.

list menu items

This command just lists the names of all the custom bookmarks you have defined. These are the brief names which appear in the Menu applet--but the list includes all your bookmarks, whether or not you have placed them in any folders.

create menu folder

Use this command to create a new folder in your menu. You will be asked to identify the parent folder into which the new one should be added. If you wish to create a top-level folder (visible when the Menu is completely collapsed), you can just hit <enter> at this point. Menu folders share most of the same attributes as the bookmarks they contain, except of course the URLs.

folder

Since folders can be moved around using the Menu applet just as "menu items" can, you may prefer to use this simplified command for creating your menu folders. Like the bookmark command, it will create a new folder in the the top-level folder "Bookmarks", from where you can then move it to some other place.

create menu link

This places a menu item (most often a bookmark) into a folder. The Menu itself can be used to move items around, but if want to place the same link in more than one folder, you may need to employ this command.

remove menu item

You can remove items from your menu, without deleting them permanently, using this command. It will send them into "limbo", from where they can be recovered by relinking them with create menu link, or using the insert unused menu items command.

insert unused menu items

Any of your custom bookmarks which are in "limbo"--that is, they aren't placed in any folders in your menu--can be introduced into the Menu with this command. It will place them in the default "unassigned" folder, under "Bookmarks". You can then use the Menu to move them to better locations.

delete unused menu items

All bookmarks or other "menu items" you have created (other than folders), which are not currently in any folders in your menu, will be deleted when this command is executed. You may wish to use insert unused menu items first, then reexamine your "unassigned" folder (under "Bookmarks") and remove any truly unwanted menu items there before deleting them with this command.

reload menu

This command is supposed to automatically reload the Menu applet, if it is running on the same page as the Terminal (as on the home page). Changes to your menu made using the Terminal are not immediately reflected in the Menu applet, so this is a useful way to refresh that applet. But it requires the applets to be able to talk to each other, which depends on your browser's support for this feature, so don't expect it to work necessarily. If it doesn't, another way to refresh the menu is to hold the <ctrl> and <alt> keys and click on any folder or link therein.

Now comes the icing on the cake, and I'm big on icing. These following commands are for customizing the appearance of the Menu applet. When you log in to VanCleve.com using the Terminal applet on the home page, the Menu applet should be automatically reloaded to reflect all your customizations; but again, this depends on browser support, so may have to effect this manually by <ctrl>-<alt>-clicking on a menu item, or by reloading the entire page.

Where the 'set . . .' commands change the appearance of your menu, the 'reset . . .' commands can be used to remove your custom settings, changing them back to the default values.

set menu background color

This command changes the background color of the Menu. It also governs the color of the arrow buttons which appear when the expanded menu becomes longer than the height of its window. These buttons's color cannot be set explicitly. It is always relative to the background color set by this command.

set menu active bullet color

When you click a link in the Menu, the icon next to it changes to show which link was last clicked. (You may not see this unless you have activated the "use other window" feature.) Change the color of that specific icon with this command.

set menu first level extra indent

The "extra indent" value is added to the first-level indent only, that is, the indentation between top-level folders and their immediate children. So that indent is the normal level indent (customized with set menu level indent) plus the value set by this command. This affords just a little more customization of the Menu's layout. (I told you I'm big on icing my cake!)