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Steve and Alex and I talked a little last night about how the [new comments] link on the front page sometimes takes you to the middle of a thread, and there will be more unread comments above your position in the same thread. If you go back and reload the home page the preceding (still unread) comment will still be linked, and continuously returning to the home page and clicking on the decreasing number of [new comments] will eventually bring all of them into view. Still, it would obviously be better if the system would take you to the top-most unread comment in any thread with multiple unread comments. I've made a change to this effect, but not sure if it will work. Any feedback as these situations (do or do not) arise is appreciated.
- jim 6-15-2001 10:16 pm [link] [add a comment]

Still working on the weirdo bug that was/is causing problems with the archive (either posts that shouldn't be showing which are, or the opposite.) Tracking this down has basically led me on a tour back through the entire logic of the system. Yikes. It's not a pretty site in there. Spaghetti code I believe it's called. Anyway, made some changes to the /edit and /post scripts. If you were trying to post or edit between 2:30 and 3:30 today you might have gotten some errors or other strange results. Should be working now. Definitely fixed some things. Also got my head around a few more problem scenarios that still have to be fixed. These involve strange combinations of events, but could possibly happen. The best fixed that happened today has to do with deleting posts. Before, if you deleted a post that was showing on a page (say the page is set to display 10 posts) then the page would only show 9 posts. This was a problem in its own right, but also led to other problems if still more posts are added. The probelm would be that stuff at the bottom of the page wouldn't slip into the archive correctly. This should be fixed now. If you have a page set to display 10 items, and you have more than 10 items (i.e., some have already slipped into the archive) and then you erase one post that is one of the 10 showing, you should now still have 10 posts showing on the page (it will now resurrect one out of the archive.)

One of the problems still to be fixed involves changing the orientation of the page (from chronological to reverse, or the other way around.) If you do this, and the end that you are putting at the top contains deleted posts, things will go a little screwey. So beware of reversing the ordering of your page until further notice.

One quick fix for this sort of problem is to set the number of posts to display on page (set in [editpage]) to '1', and then set it back up again to whatever you want. This is like 'reseting' the ordering mechanism of the page. Blah, blah, blah.
- jim 6-14-2001 8:37 pm [link] [1 comment]

Finally getting the "slide show" picture pages working. Feel free to play around with this. Documentation, as usual, will be written real soon now. The short story is this:

When you [create] a new page there is now an option called 'slide show' in the page type pull down menu. Select this, and then in the template pull down menu, select either 'slide show plain' (for no 'posted by...', no comments, and no bottom footer) or 'slide show comment' (for 'posted by..." with comments, and with bottom page footer.) These are just the defaults, and can still be changed in [editpage] after the page is created (in case you want, say, 'posted by...' but not comments, or some other case.)

Anyway, once you create the page, just post pictures to it as if you were making regular posts to a page. The page will be set to display only one post per page, so your first post will become the first page, second post the second page, etc... I made this for pictures, but you could of course use it for text, or a combination of the two.

'previous' and 'next' links will be automagically inserted at the bottom of the page, and if you have more than three pictures a list of the pages will also be displayed (I know that's not clear, see here for an example - I mean the '1 2 3 4 5 6' page controls that show up just above the 'previous' and 'next'.

Comments welcome. There may well be bugs. Let me know.
- jim 6-14-2001 3:42 pm [link] [add a comment]