...more recent posts
Thanks to Steve and then the Wheel for alerting me to a rather serious problem with the [new comment] (but not the [new post]) counters. These were not working correctly under all situations. I think this is straightened out now. Let me know if you sense any other weirdness.
Seems like there is a slight problem with the new post counters in that if someone makes a post in preview mode (where only they should be able to see it) it will still register as a 'new post' for everyone (even though others won't be able to see it yet.) I thought I had planned for this, but I'll have to take a look.
There should be post and create links on the shared pages (treehouse,sustenace,artifax,sustenance) for those of you who have posting powers on those pages. I used the new page include function from yesterday to build this. I'm happy to have found the solution to this, and doubly happy that I could use the tools here to do it.
I've finished the roughed in idea for a page template system so that when [create]ing a new page you can have some preset values stored for the options in [editpage]. The idea is that if you make a lot of pages that are all similar (and all similarly different from the page defaults) you can make a template (with say, maybe, comments off, post footer off, green background, serif text, a specific copyright notice, and no search box) and then you have the option in [create] to choose that template when [create]ing a page. This saves you the effort of creating the page, and then having to go into [editpage] and change all these values by hand. Probably it's only worth it if you build mulitple pages with the same style. On the [create] page there is a link to another page where you can build a template. I haven't tested this extensively, but it seems to at least largely work.
Finally getting some work done after a few days of spinning my wheels. There are now two new features in [editpage]. The first is a checkbox labeld "turn on page includes?". Probably it is not understandable at this point, but if you check this box, then on the page (either inside a post, or inside the left-text box on [editpage]) you can enter a string like this:
[*pageinclude=/jim/weblog*]
And that whole string will be replaced with the entire contents of the page at /jim/weblog
Obviously, you could put any valid path in place of /jim/weblog.
This has a number of uses, many of which don't apply to our set up here. But who knows, maybe someone can think of a use for this. I'm using it already on some private pages (I'm building an address book for myself.) I'll write more about this later.
The second new feature on [editpage] is a request from Dave. He always has the same bits of html in every post (a headline, a blockquote, a link) and he doesn't want to type that stuff in every time. So now there is another textarea box on [editpage], this one labeled "posting template". Anything you put in this box will show up in the textarea box on [post] for all posts to that page. Again, maybe not useful for everyone, but could be handy if there is a standard way you make each post on a page.
More stuff coming, including a request from Alex to be able to choose a default on/off for the convert line breaks as well as a default template for creating new pages (font, colors, etc...)
A few hiccups this morning (between 10:00 and 11:00 am.) Nothing major, but you might have gotten an error for a minute or two. I made a pretty big update, but you shouldn't really notice anything different. Everything should be working properly now.
For about the last half hour I've been tracking down a bug in the posting system. If you were trying to post during that time you might have encountered some error messages. Probably your posts went through anyway. Things are now back to "normal". Sorry for any inconvenience.
The red new comment pointers which used to appear after each post (where there were new comments, of course) have now been restored. These are rather hard to test, so let me know if they seem at all funky.
The search function has been preliminarily activated. You can add a search box to the bottom of your page by turning on "add search footer" in /editpage (click on [editpage] at the bottom of your page.) This performs a brute force case insensitive search of all the text on your page (including your archives, or in other words, through all the text that's ever been on your page.) It is very simplistic at this time. It just tries to match the entire string, so a search for 'george bush' will not find any mentions of 'george w. bush'. Also it searches without thought to html, so a search for 'nasa' will return every post that includes the text string 'nasa', even when that string is not visible - for instance if the post contains a link to "pictures.nasa.gov/images/spacecraft.gif", but doesn't otherwise use the phrase 'nasa'.
This will be expanding. Soon there will be a seperate search page you can go to for more advanced features, plus the ability to search more than one page at a time. Still, this is a start.
There was still a problem, most recently pointed out by the wheel, with editing comments from the old system on the various group pages. I think these problems are now solved, and you should be able to edit the older posts of your own.
Trying to comment on dave's page led me to realize that the system wasn't letting people leave comments on many of the pages. Sorry about that. It should be fixed now. I'll do a little more testing to be sure.
Also, and I have to admit I was wondering what he was doing making all those comments, dave discovered that the comments were not in fact displaying properly. Pretty subtle bug in one way, but obvious once it was pointed out. If there was some sort of prize he'd get it for that one.
Eventually we will be adding several more layers to the software here. One of these layers will be some flavor of XML feed. It's not entirely clear at this point how this part of the web is going to evolve. There is some fighting going on now in the various XML camps. Hopefully people can move toward some sort of agreement in a reasonable fashion. RSS is probably the front runner (although there's a great deal of trouble just inside the RSS community itself.) If you're interested in a good look at RSS (Rich Site Summary) you can read about it here.
"Websites that publish new content regularly usually provide a list of news headline style links to their latest content. In addition to displaying these headlines on their own websites, it is very common for publishers to make them available for syndication, so that other websites or applications can also include their headlines...
...RSS is the name given to a simple and well-established XML format used to syndicate headlines. Once a website creates an RSS file they have created a means to allow others to syndicate their headlines."
I think I have that lag problem on the front page (for signed in users) solved. There is the slight possibility that I introduced some subtle bug into the new post counters, so let me know if you see any weirdness there.
testing...
The front page is loading very slowly if you are signed in. This is because of the time it takes for the system to check for new posts. (Log out and then try loading the front page to prove this point.) I'm working on a fix for this, and I think it will be possible.
I've added a help page if people have questions (and without any documentation, I have to think there will be some questions.) Go crazy.
The [x new comments] link should now be working from the main page.
The nested posts were not registering as having been read by you even if you read them already. I'm 95% sure this is now fixed.
I've added this page where I hope to keep track of problems with the system as well as lining up new features in terms of importance. All accounts can post to this page. It's up to you whether or not you want to add this page to your main page. To do so just go to the page and click on [subscriptions], and on that screen check the box that says "homepage". Also on the [subscription] page you should adjust the "tracking" (probably set it to "both") if you want the system to keep track of new posts and comments for you.
OK, comments are now nesting. I'm using a different style that I mean to look largely the same as before. Perhaps this won't be the case though. I'm especially curious about windows/IE users. Are the indents larger than you remember? Or is it even worse than that?
Adjustments are easy, it's just a matter of figuring out what, if anything, is wrong.
The comments are only threaded at this point. By Monday they will also nest, and basically act like they did in the old system. Also, the [new comments] links from the home page aren't really links (although [new post] should work.) This will be fixed by Monday as well.
O.K., I think that all editing has been restored for our individual pages. There is still some problem on the group pages (for old posts, not new) but I'll get to that eventually. Not that big of a deal. Probably there are worse bugs that will show up.
Shit. The editing is all screwed up, although it won't be that hard to fix. None of the posts belong to the correct people, so you get a "permission denied" error if you try to edit something old. Anything new you post will be correctly identified and editable. I'm on it.
I'm mapping some old URL's to the new ones so as to not break links. So, for instance, requests for /dave/dratfink.shtml (the old page) are redirected to /dratfink (the new page.) If you have an old URL that you want to map to a certain page in the new system, let me know.
I sort of jumped into this without too much planning, but it seems to be going OK. All the old pages are still accessible through old_ followed by the filename. So the old arboretum is at http://www.digitalmediatree.com/old_arboretum and the old dratfink is at http://www.digitalmediatree.com/old_dave/dratfink.shtml. Lots more to do. I'll keep posting updates here.