...more recent posts
As discussed last night, I ran all the public pages through the auto post summary generator (it just takes the first seven words of each post that doesn't already have a post summary, strips out any HTML tags, and inserts them, followed by '...', as the new post summary.) You can use this on your page if you want by invoking the URL:
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/system/post_summary_fix.php?ppath=/some_path
where '/some_path' is an actual path to a page that you own (like /treehouse, or /arboretum, or /schwarz.)
This will not overwrite any existing post summaries. You will see a printed list of all the new summaries it has inserted when you run that script.
There was a problem very recently (thanks/sorry Dave, Linda) where if you needed to log in you were met with error messages and no way to proceed. This wasn't really a bug, but just a case of a script file becoming corrupted. Should be working now.
Dave had a suggestion to make the bottom menu bar less complicated. This turned out to be easier than I thought it would. You should no longer see options that are not valid for you on a given page (you don't see [post] if you can't post; don't see [editpage] if you can't edit that page, etc...) This is just the sort of issueI have a hard time identifying: What? It's not all perfectly clear?
Fixed a big problem with pending posts. Fixed a small problem with the email to weblog bridge. There still might be an issue there if a lot of people tried to use it at once. Not sure though. Hard to test. Probably we won't use it here very much, so I might have to wait to find out how it does under load.
In making the new email posting capability (see last post) I created some of those never clearing 'new posts' for everybody. So I cleared everybodies unread posts for this page. Possibly you missed some actual real posts. You might want to lookback if you are coming here from [1 new post].
Seems like this new email to web connection is a little rough around the edges. I'll keep working on it. Thrilled to have gotten this far though.
Now if only I had a blackberry.
You can now post to any page you have permission to post to by sending an email to autopost@digitalmediatree.comThe subject line must be the path of the page, so for instance, I made thesubject of this email: /systemnewsNote the preceding slash, but no trailing slash.The body of the message must start with three stars, then your password(case sensitive) then three more starts. For instance:
***fdFEA42w3w9***
Then skip a line if you want (not necessary) and write your post. Yourpassword, of course, won't show up on your page.IMPORTANT: Don't send HTML encoded email. You can use HTML (like <br> or <i> or whatever) like you usually do when posting from the web, but don'tuse this email posting feature yet if you aren't sure that your emailprogram sends plaintext email.
If you can read this, it worked!
this_is_a_test
OK, you can now delete pictures (one at a time) from the bottom of the upload page. You can only delete your own photos.
Well, instead of doing the real work on the picture upload system I built a random picture grabber instead. Where /getpic/502 gets you picture number 502, /randpic/502/503 gets you (randomly) either picture 502 or 503. There is no limit to how many picture numbers you can use. So /randpic/502/544/545/811/191/1032/777 gets you one of those 7 pictures. Each time the page is reloaded it picks another random image from that list. It doesn't check for repeats, so possibly it will fetch the same picture two (or more) times in a row.
Also, it doesn't matter what else is in the URL as long as /randpic/xxx/xxx/xxx is at the end (so digitalmedaitree.com/randpic/1/2/3 is the same as digitalmediatree.com/jim/weblog/randpic/1/2/3)
More on photos: I've slightly changed the /upload page so now it reports the total disk space occupied by all your uploaded files. The total for everyone is 42 megabytes right now.
I'm working on allowing deletes from the /upload page, but this is proving a little tricky. If you know you have lots of (or a few big) photos you would like to delete feel free to post the id numbers below and I'll erase them by hand.
The database is around 30 megs, so that makes up most of the 70+ megs of space we are occupying right now (out of 100 we are alotted.)
Alex pointed out that the new framed archive view was not working in his browsers (nav 4.x on Mac and I think an older IE on windows.) I believe I have fixed this issue (confirmed for 4.x on mac, but not for whatever the older IE on windows is.) Can anyone confirm this, or spot other problems? Thanks.
Thanks to Alex for finding a somewhat subtle bug. If you tried to move a page by changing the path in [editpage] (which is how you would move a page) and you changed the name to a longer but otherwise similar name (from /test/test2 to, say, /test/test234567) the system would get confused. And that's putting it mildly. Should be fixed now.
In [editpage] you can now switch from the 'standard template' to 'use your own HTML'. If you choose to do this you must make the change to 'use your own...' and then come back to [editpage] a second time and you will see some different options including two new posting boxes (textarea boxes) one labeled 'Opening HTML' and the other 'Closing HTML'. When your page is requested the system will print out 'Opening HTML' followed by your currently active posts from the database, followed by 'Closing HTML'.
As of now the posts from the database are printed as rows in a table (where each row has one column) so it expects a <table> to already be set, plus that it will be closed (</table>) in the 'Closing HTML' (along with </body> and </html>.) I think I'll take out the table in the future and just seperate the posts with <p> tags.
Also there is no way yet to create a 'use your own HTML' page from /create. I'll add that tomorrow. Right now you'd have to create a regular page and then change it in [editpage] (and then go back to editpage and add in the HTML!)
Occasionally, for some as yet unknown reason, the system will screw up and think you have an unread post or comment on a page where you do not in fact have any unread posts or comments. I'm working on trying to make this never happen, but in the meantime I've changed the subscription script so that if you change your subscription to turn tracking off it will clear out all unreads for you associated with that page. Then you can turn tracking back on and it will start keeping track for you again. Note that this works from the individual subscription pages (so from /schwarz/subscriptions in this case, not from just /subscriptions.)
Not sure how closely anyone is following along. I wrote some stuff about the discussion system here on my page recently. The gist of it is that threading (being able to reply to replies) is very costly in terms of storage. I'm commited to providing threading, and at this point the cost doesn't seem to be impacting performance (although in the future this might be a different story.) But I'd like to encourage a more linear comment style where this is possible.
Anyway, one idea I had was to put the posting box at the bottom of the comment page itself. This box would be equivalent to clicking 'add a comment' at the top of the comment page, or in other words, a post made from this box would add the comment to the bottom of the page, all the way on the left (or in still other words, it would add the comment to the bottom of the page as a top level comment.) You could still click [add a comment] on any particular comment to make a threaded comment that will go directly beneath the comment you are responding to (and be indented slightly.) But I think the convenience of having the posting box already visible on the page will make people more likely just to add a top level (non threaded) comment rather than clicking through to a seperate posting page.
Any thoughts? If not I'm going to try this out soon. We can always go back.
Also, I wonder if this would make unknown anonymous surfers more likely to comment? The box would be right there after all. Would that be good or bad?
All searches (regular and advanced) will now return a maximum of 50 results. If there are more it displays the 50 and advises that there may be more and you should try to search for something more specific. This is to guard against people searching for nothing (or 'e') and taking too many system resources to return every post from a specific page (or the whole site!)
Is 50 a big enough number?
Also all searches were updated to not return 'preview' or 'pending' posts even if they are matches (already they were smart enough not to return matches from private pages - unless you are subscribed to a particular private page in question.)
A few momentary outages today as I kept breaking things. When posting you can now set the post to 'pending' in addition to 'preview'. If you choose pending you must enter a publication date in the 'pending date:' box. This date has to be in the exact format
yyyy/mm/dd 24:00
Thats the full 4 digit year followed by the two digit month (01 = january) followed by the two digit day (01 for the first of the month.) Then one space, then the 24 hour east coast time (16:30 = 4:30 pm eastern time.)
The post will be invisible until that time, at which point the following page load will publish the pending post. The 'posted by' footer will contain the date and time you entered into 'pending date:'.
If a page is set to notify userland (weblogs.com) you will now get a check box on the [edit] screen allowing you to selectively notify userland on [edit]s. This would be necessary, at least, if you make a preview post (which won't nofity userland, even if you have your page set to do so) and then change it to a regular post in [edit] to actually publish it. In that case you can check both the 'treat as new post' box (which will notify the front page that there is something new) and the 'notify userland' box.
Adding new users to the system has never been simple. The automated scripts I wrote last year never worked perfectly, and I always had to go into the database by hand and fix things. But I didn't realize how broken it was until Steve pointed out that Julie (the last person added) had all sorts of posting powers she shouldn't (although only on pages at least two levels down in the file hierarchy.) Anyway, I dug in today to finally work all that out and I believe I was sucessful.
Many people will now see an additional option of [add user] in their menu bar. This takes you to /user where you can easily add a new user. You must supply a unique name and a valid email address. The system will make the accout, subscribe to all pages, and make a home page with the same pages a guest surfer sees (and sets the system to track new stuff on all the pages on the home page.) The new user will be able to comment but not post to all pages. Individual page owners (for /treehouse and /sustenance and /cinefiles) can grant new people posting powers on those group pages as they see fit.
The new user does not get their own page automatically.
You make the account and the system sends the information to the new account holders email address.
The fate of our little world is in your hands.
I've added a fifth option to the already hard to understand /log page. Now you can view your hits by useragent (where useragent is the type of browser making the request for your page.) Probably you wouldn't keep it on this setting, but you can switch to it to uncover who is behind hits which the 'complete log' list as being from nowhere. Probably that doesn't make sense, but check it out if your curious.
For example, on my page, if I set it to complete log, I see that the overwhelming number of hits are unidentified (that is, they are not coming from a specific link on another page.) But the log is recording not just the refering page, but also the useragent (browser and OS) of the computer making the request. So if I flip the /log to 'useragent' I see that most of those unidentifid hits are coming from the googlebot. Also I can see what other browsers people are using (mostly IE.)
What if you could add any page listed on weblogs.com to your front page here? Would people use this?
You wouldn't be able to click through to just the new content, and it wouldn't track comments, and it wouldn't be up to the minute (it would be up to the hour instead,) but you would at least get a general notice of when pages had been updated.
Not sure if I should build this in here, or make a serperate site to reproduce the old weblogs.com functionality (where you could have an account and it would only show you the recently updated weblogs that you chose to follow instead of just listing every single recently updated weblog as it does now.)
Also various people pointed out that /monitor either doesn't work right and/or doesn't make any sense. I've changed it a bit, although it still might be the case that it doesn't make much sense.
When you go to /monitor the system looks and sees if there is anything you haven't read on any pages you are tracking. If so, you immediately get sent to the front page of the site where the unread stuff should be apparent (although it's possible to track a page that is not listed on your home page, so this could be confusing - hmmm, I'll have to think about that.)
If there is nothing new for you the page will go black and it will list any other people who are presently using the monitor (this wasn't working quite right either, but should be now.) It checks the site once a minute (probably too often, but there's so few of us and it's so little bandwidth, I figured what the hell) and either reloads the black page (with updated list of people monitoring) or takes you to the front page of the site as soon as there is anything new. The idea is that you can leave it up on your desktop and tell at a glance if anything new has been added without actually going to the site yourself. As long as the screen is black, nothing new has happened. When something does happen it takes you to the front page and stops reloading, so even if you leave it up on the black /monitor page it won't just reload to infinity (it will only reload until anyone else posts something.)
Yes this is not terribly useful, but it should at least work now.
Thanks to Alex's ridicule I've changed the basic search (from the box at the bottom of a page) to be case insensitive. Also found a problem where this search was not handling spaces correctly. Fixed that also. There still remains the problem where if you search for the letter 'e' or something very common it will actually return (or try to return) every post onto one long page. This will have to be fixed as well, but I'm not sure exactly how I should go about it.
Thanks to Steve I finally figured out a long standing bug with the log in system here. The site would be unviewable if you had a cookie but it's value didn't match any of the cookies in the database. This would happen if you logged out using the harder 'erase cookie from every machine' and then tried to view the site on a different machine which had been previously logged in. This was a stupid oversite on my part, but took me a long time to understand. I know this frustrated Rachael many months ago. Hopefully no one else was too affected.
Thanks to Tom for the idea to give anonymous posters a field for a name on the posting page. If supplied, the name will come out in the 'posted by' line followed by '(not signed in)'. The hope is that this will make it more clear to people that they should probably leave a name so we know who is commenting.
I've optimized the logs. They should be much faster now. Do people want them to go back further in time? (Assuming they maintain their new speed.)