...more recent posts
As Tom had noticed, there was a bug that would drop your page from the home page of anonymous surfers. This would happen if you used [editpage]. Fixed now.
Clicking [subscriptions] from the front page gets you a list of all pages where you can make subscription changes to groups of pages at one time (this was around before, but it works better now.) One problem before was that there are literally hundreds of pages that you probably never need to adjust you subscriptions to, yet they appeared in this list making it hard to find the pages you were looking for. So while you can still get this complete list, /subscriptions now defaults to just showing you the major pages on the site (with a link so that you can reload it showing every page.)
There is now an option in [editpage] called 'listed (in /subscriptions)'. This is what controls whether your page shows up as one of the major pages. Maybe 'major' isn't the right word. Anyway, set this however you want, depending on whether you think people's subscriptions to that page are likely to need changing.
Some documentation has actually been written. More is on the way.
Here are a couple quick things you might want to know:
[add user] (/user) is much improved. You should feel free to add new users to the system yourself. You just give a name and email on the first page, and then you get a second page where you can completely select all powers and tracking and what's on the homepage for the new user.
/subscriptions now lets you put pages on your home page as well as clear any hanging posts or comments on individual pages.
/settings now lets you set the number of hours you are from greenwhich mean time. We all default to -5 (nyc time) but you could make it whatever you want. I haven't experimented too much with this, so I'd like some feedback from any non east coasters. (The server time does seem to be a 14 minutes off. I'm looking into this. I don't think it's related to this feature.)
You can also change your name and email in /settings
/subscribe for individual pages works much better now. You can receive notification for new posts and/or new comments, and you can choose to just get a link in the email, or the plaintext of the post (or comment) itself. And best of all, you can actually unsubscribe now!
Problems are already appearing.
I'll have to think about how to handle this. It may not even be a bug. Anyway, when you create new pages, there is now an expanded facility to create the new page just like a page that already exists. When you do this the system makes the page in the same style (chronological,alphabetical,numeric,) copies the style sheet, copies any permanent text (left_text, top_text,) and also copies all the subscription information.
What just happened now (I'm guessing) is that alex made a new page using this cloning method - but he cloned /arboretum, so we all ended up having the new page on our front page (because it copied all the subscription information from arboretum, and we all have arboretum on our home pages.)
Perhaps cloning is too powerful. Maybe it shouldn't copy subscriptions too. I'm not sure. Anyway, just be aware that when you create a new page "just like" an older page, it really will be just like it.
We're back.
No doubt there will be problems. What the hell do you want for free?
So let me know if anything seems amiss and I will correct it asap.
I still have the old system, of course, and multiple copies of the old database, so if somebody finds a show stopper bug we can easily go back.
I wouldn't doubt it at all if things were screwed up in early browsers.
More new stuff coming this week.
This site served around twice as many pages yesterday as a normal day (usually the traffic is very level.) Any ideas? I know my page has been getting hammered by the googlebot, maybe it's all from that?
I noticed that Tom and Bill both had weird situations where viewing their pages from the [new post] link on the front page resulted in the doubling of posts. Viewing the page regularly (without the /?new) was fine.
Have you guys been using the preview? My guess is that is where the problem is. Any info is helpful.
Tom was asking me about the behavior of the system when switching (in [editpage]) between the different commenting styles. This prompted me to rethink how this works. I had never really played around with it too much. Yet again, the incomparable value of having other people actually use the code you are writing.
Anyway, I've made some changes to the comment pages. The default behavior is to allow for comments to be added either flush left (not indented) after any comments that are already there, or directly under (and indented) any particular comment. The 'add a comment' link at the top of the page (or if it exists, the actual posting box at the bottom of the page) will always give you the first behavior. When it's allowed, clicking the [add a comment] link after a specific comment will put your follow up comment right under the one whose link you clicked (and indented.)
Anyway, the page owner can always switch back and forth between styles of comments (either straight, or allowing this indenting.) But if you already had indented comments on your page, then switching to straight (non-indented) comments would loose any old comments that were indented. Well, they wouldn't be lost, but they wouldn't display.
Anyway, to get to the point. I've changed things so now if you change a page that already has indented comments to the straight style it will "flatten" any indented comments (un-indent them) so that everything displays.
I am very happy about this. The reason is that it is my secret desire to get rid of the indenting comments altogether. While I agree that it is nice to have options, this one is so expensive that I think we'd be better off without it. I won't do anything rash, but over the long haul (and especially if we started to become more busy) I am thinking of eventually loosing this feature. I'll explain the cost if anyone really cares, but take it from me, it's a really high cost (in storage, and processor power) to get the indenting comments to work. If we had a hundred users it might not work out so well (or it might.) A thousand users and I'm pretty sure it would be too much strain. I'd love to find out some day how big this could scale.
Well, I've done a lot of testing and I can't get any of these comment problems to happen again. But I saw some happen yesterday (in the wild, as it were) so I know that something is up. I'll keep looking.
Did somebody say something about having to scroll down on the /settings page before you see any text? That doesn't sound right. Can someone confirm this with browser/OS information?
Does this happen on any other pages?
Thanks.
There are definitely some problems with the [x new comment] counters. This is a result of some new capabilities (yeah, I know) that were just added. I'll get this all straightened out by tomorrow. If anybody notices they make a comment that then doesn't show up, please write to me with the following info:
Did you post from a comment box on the comment page itself, or did you add the comment from a posting page that only contained a posting box (and no comments)?
Did you post directly as a comment, or did you use the new 'preview' feature?
Thanks.