...more recent posts
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.)