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More updates this morning. You can now select from several new comment styles in [editpage]. If you want your page to continue the same just do nothing. The 2 new options are 'threaded w/posting box' and 'straight comments'. Both of these options add a posting box to the bottom of the /comment page. This box acts like the posting box you would get before by clicking the 'add a comment' link at the top of the page. This idea here is that having the posting box right on the page saves one click, and might mean that more people will add their comments to the bottom of the page rather than having threaded replies to a specific previous comment. With 'threaded w/ posting box' each comment retains its own [add a comment] link, and threading is still allowed. The second new option - 'straight comments' - only has the new posting box at the bottom of the /comment page (each individual comment does not have its own [add a comment] link.) No threading is possible. However, no matter which way you set your page (besides 'no comments') old threaded comments will still display as threaded, so any change is only effective forward into the future.

The idea, as I discussed once before, is that threaded comments really eat up system resources. This is definitely not a problem at this point, so use whatever style you want. But if this system ever needed to scale up (in a different incarnation) it might be necessary to limit comments to the straight style. Also someone might actually prefer the straight style, so for them it is now an option.
- jim 12-07-2001 4:29 pm [link] [1 comment]

Note to contributers: while I do back up the entire database (somewhat more regularly now that I have the DSL in the office, say, probably once a week) I haven't been backing up photos. I store photo information (like the mapping between picture id number and actual filename) in the database, but the photos themselves are just stored as regular files on the server. My assumption is that you all probably have copies of these files (since you uploaded them from your machines.) But is this a reasonable assumption? Should I be backing those up too? Just wondering.

Eventually (where that might mean sort of soon) I will add in a way for each individual to download a backup copy of just their page. If I can accomplish this I will add in an option to also backup your photos. Still, it might not be a bad idea to just keep a folder on your machine where you put a copy of any images that you [upload] to the server.
- jim 12-06-2001 10:55 pm [link] [1 comment]

I'm not sure how to handle a problem that has come up under testing. So I'll try to explain it here as if it were important for anyone else to understand it, and maybe that will help me decide.

The problem is that now it is possible to swich back and forth between chronological, alphabetical, and numeric page types. Chronological pages use time (although through an intermediate layer, so it is possible to [edit] a post and change it's position on the page without changing the 'posted by x at ....' datetime.) Alphabetical and numeric pages each use a serperate field in the database for keeping track of those keys which are used to order the posts either alpahbetically or numerically.

So if you make an alphabetical page, fill it with some posts (supplying an 'alphabetize by:' key with each post,) and then switch it to a chronological page, there is no problem. The system uses the datetime of each post to determine the new chronological order. And it doesn't erase the 'alphabetize by:' key, it just ignores it. So then if you swich back to an alphabetical page type the page will return to the old alphabetical order. Cool.

The problem happens in the other direction. If you make a chronological page, fill it with some posts, and then switch it to an alphabetical page, the system will have no 'alphabetize by:' information to work with. If the newly alphabetical page has its window set to zero (infinity - every post displayed on the page) then all the posts will print out. But if the window is set to a number less than the total number of posts, you will see just that number, but with no link at the bottom to see the next page worth of posts.

The solution is to go into [editpage] and set the window to zero, then you can access every post from the page in order to [edit] and provide an 'alphabetize by:' key. But I don't like this because it is not readily apparent what is happening. If you make the switch to an alphabetical page, and have a window, then it appears like some of your posts disappered. That is not good. Seems like there should be a warning or something letting you know what happened.

But where does the warning go? I guess when you submit the [editpage] that makes the change from chrono to alphabetical the system should check for this scenario and then warn you before returning you to the page. Maybe it should force the window to zero as well, so that when you are returned to the page after seeing the error message you will at least have access to each [edit] link so that you can fix the problem.

Or maybe all the posts should come up on the error screen together with the 'alphabetize by:' field so you can just fix everything on one screen instead of having to click each [edit] link. That sounds like the best option, but what if there are 500 posts on your page? That will make a pretty big error page. Hmmm. Maybe it's still OK.

Anyway, this is the only problem I am finding during some pretty intense testing. I want to write something soon about testing. It's just dawning on me that "real" programmers have very strict methods for testing code. To the point where it seems that a major part of any software project is to design an additional piece of software that can test the first one. This is something I still don't understand, especially in any formal sense, but just through knocking my head against the wall I'm beginning to understand intuitively what is necessary. And it's way more rigorous than the "just try a bunch of different things by hand and try to break something" approach I've been using. I'll have to consult one of my real programmer friends about this issue.
- jim 12-06-2001 6:13 pm [link] [add a comment]