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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.)
- jim 11-16-2001 6:07 pm [link] [add a comment]

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.
- jim 11-16-2001 5:47 pm [link] [3 comments]

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.
- jim 11-16-2001 5:23 pm [link] [add a comment]

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.
- jim 11-16-2001 5:00 pm [link] [add a comment]