...more recent posts
A few hiccups this morning (between 10:00 and 11:00 am.) Nothing major, but you might have gotten an error for a minute or two. I made a pretty big update, but you shouldn't really notice anything different. Everything should be working properly now.
For about the last half hour I've been tracking down a bug in the posting system. If you were trying to post during that time you might have encountered some error messages. Probably your posts went through anyway. Things are now back to "normal". Sorry for any inconvenience.
The red new comment pointers which used to appear after each post (where there were new comments, of course) have now been restored. These are rather hard to test, so let me know if they seem at all funky.
The search function has been preliminarily activated. You can add a search box to the bottom of your page by turning on "add search footer" in /editpage (click on [editpage] at the bottom of your page.) This performs a brute force case insensitive search of all the text on your page (including your archives, or in other words, through all the text that's ever been on your page.) It is very simplistic at this time. It just tries to match the entire string, so a search for 'george bush' will not find any mentions of 'george w. bush'. Also it searches without thought to html, so a search for 'nasa' will return every post that includes the text string 'nasa', even when that string is not visible - for instance if the post contains a link to "pictures.nasa.gov/images/spacecraft.gif", but doesn't otherwise use the phrase 'nasa'.
This will be expanding. Soon there will be a seperate search page you can go to for more advanced features, plus the ability to search more than one page at a time. Still, this is a start.
There was still a problem, most recently pointed out by the wheel, with editing comments from the old system on the various group pages. I think these problems are now solved, and you should be able to edit the older posts of your own.
Trying to comment on dave's page led me to realize that the system wasn't letting people leave comments on many of the pages. Sorry about that. It should be fixed now. I'll do a little more testing to be sure.
Also, and I have to admit I was wondering what he was doing making all those comments, dave discovered that the comments were not in fact displaying properly. Pretty subtle bug in one way, but obvious once it was pointed out. If there was some sort of prize he'd get it for that one.
Eventually we will be adding several more layers to the software here. One of these layers will be some flavor of XML feed. It's not entirely clear at this point how this part of the web is going to evolve. There is some fighting going on now in the various XML camps. Hopefully people can move toward some sort of agreement in a reasonable fashion. RSS is probably the front runner (although there's a great deal of trouble just inside the RSS community itself.) If you're interested in a good look at RSS (Rich Site Summary) you can read about it here.
"Websites that publish new content regularly usually provide a list of news headline style links to their latest content. In addition to displaying these headlines on their own websites, it is very common for publishers to make them available for syndication, so that other websites or applications can also include their headlines...
...RSS is the name given to a simple and well-established XML format used to syndicate headlines. Once a website creates an RSS file they have created a means to allow others to syndicate their headlines."
I think I have that lag problem on the front page (for signed in users) solved. There is the slight possibility that I introduced some subtle bug into the new post counters, so let me know if you see any weirdness there.
testing...
The front page is loading very slowly if you are signed in. This is because of the time it takes for the system to check for new posts. (Log out and then try loading the front page to prove this point.) I'm working on a fix for this, and I think it will be possible.