...more recent posts
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.)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?