...more recent posts
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.)
weblogs.com is a userland site that acts as a central index of weblogs that have been recently updated. Userland products (frontier, manilla, and radiouserland) are plugged into this index, but any weblog can patch into it as well using either SOAP, XML-RPC, or just manually hitting a web page that will register your update with the system.
To make your page here automatically notify userland just go to [editpage] and change 'notify userland of updates' from 'no notification' to 'notify'. Also, fill in the name of your weblog as you want it to appear at weblogs.com in the space below marked 'page name' (this is different from 'title' which is what goes in the top line of the surfers browsers - so, dave's page has a title of 'do you hear me, do you care' but the page name is 'dratfink'.)
Now every time you post, this system sends an XML-RPC call to weblogs.com and you should get some sort of sucess or error message back.
I'm thinking of decreasing the time window inside of which logs of hits to your page are kept from 30 days down to 2 weeks. I think the logs are a bit too big at 30 days. Any strong objections?
Just FYI:
The fix I institued yesterday should also fix the problem with google not indexing anything but the front page. Not sure how long it will take them to follow the links out to the individual pages, but it should happen. Faster for those pages that are linked from elsewhere.
I think only Alex and I were doing this, but I might have told others awhile back to use /getpic.php3?id=xx for posting images instead of the old format /getpic/xx. Well, now we are back to the original /getpic/xx format that most people have been using anyway. I've converted all image posts to the new (old) format, so you don't have to do anything except continue (or go back to) the /getpic/xx format for posting photos. Confused yet?
A few problems this afternoon around 2:30. Should be fixed now. This was a temporary situation as I put the "big fix" in place that should (I haven't been able to confirm yet) fix the massive problem with some versions of IE and Opera on the MacOS. Let me know if you notice anything screwy. Thanks.
The automatic userland (weblogs.com) notification system is pretty much in place. This is a little ahead of schedule as userland is not switching to the new system until October 23, and not turning off the old crawlers until November 1.
I'm still not sure if you need to sign up at weblogs.com for this to work. My guess is no, although you definitely won't show up in their index until the 23rd if you are not signed up. We'll sort that out on the 23rd and I'll give some more instructions, but basically all you have to do is turn on 'notify userland of updates' in [editpage] and then give your page a 'page name' right below that (this is the name that will show up in the weblogs.com index - so it might not be the same as your page title.) If you turn it on now you'll see lots of debug code after you post, but I'll trim that down when everything is working correctly.
Some database server problems this early afternoon (eastern time.) Not sure what it was. The good machine elves seem to have fixed it up pretty quick. Keeping fingers crossed. Sorry for the troubles.
It's always been possible to link to a specific post on any page here. Just add '?xxxx' to the end of any url where xxxx=the id number of the post. You can find the id number by mousing over the [add a comment] link and noticing the first number after /comment/. So, for instance, this post could be permanently referenced by /systemnews/?10172. Also, you can link to any particular day (or month or year) you adding /date/yyyy/mm/dd/ (or /date/yyyy/mm/ or /date/yyyy/) to the end of a URL. So /tommoody/2001/05/ would give you all of Tom's posts for may 2001.
But none of this was ever made clear to an outsider (or to an insider for that matter.) So now I've added links (permanent links) on each post. The link is the word 'posted' in the bottom line 'posted by:...'. I think any reasonably savvy weblogger type would immediately figure out what that link is, and what it is for.
If anyone objects to this change let me know and either suggest something better, or if you just don't want this at all I'll make a way for individual pages to turn this on or off in [editpage].