maybe i am carrying coal to newcastle with this posting, but probably only few know that there is a close relationship between the preferences of a site and the antville macros in skins...

when editing a skin you can refer to most of the preferences as set-up on the preferences page by using a macro of the form

<% site.preference_name %>

This macro tells antville to embed one of the logo-buttons of antville, which will link to www.antville.org. Currently antville provides the following logo-buttons:

<% logo name="smallstraight" %>

<% logo name="smallchaos" %>

<% logo name="smallanim" %>

<% logo name="smalltrans" %>
(which is the same as the smallanim-logo, just transparent)

and the main antville-logo:
<% logo name="big" %>

For placing other images out of the default image-pool of antville (or all the options for embedding images in your weblog) please have a look at the image macro.

thanks to hannes, we found a quick way to enable a macro that displays a poll inside a story. below is a first test created by the macro of the form <% poll id="poll_number" %>. please be aware that this macro still can be subject to changes.

currently, if you are logged in you should be able to vote, otherwise you only will see a link to the poll.

it is also possible to display the link to the poll, generally, using the same macro but additionally the paramter as="link".

finally, use as="results" to show the poll results only. latter are also shown if the macro id refers to an already closed poll.

as you might have noticed, this is actually a poll from another weblog. this is possible by using a slash notation in the id parameter like id="weblog_alias/poll_number", in this case id="project/2".

While you always can use normal HTML to create a link (i.e. <a href="http://www.antville.org">antville</a>), antville provides a special macro called "link". depending on the options you specify, the link-macro will change it's behaviour.

<% link to="http://www.antville.org" %> will result in www.antville.org.

<% link to="http://www.antville.org" text="antville" %> will show this link: antville.

<% site.link to="topics/polls" text="polls" %> creates a link to polls.

please mind the use of site.link - this simply means that you tell your site to create a link (you can also use <% story.link ...%>). And that again means that everything you specify in the to=...-option will be relative to your site (or your story).

Of course you can also use the link-macro for ftp-, https-, mms- or whatever-links. The only thing that an external URL must contain is ://

And finally, for the lousy ones, antville is able to detect URLs in a story or comment, so when you simply write http://antville.org antville will display http://www.antville.org