PowerBlogs.Com Development

Bugs come in strange types. In this case, I encountered a few bugs with the blogroll editor which for some reason manifested themselves on the dev.powerblogs.com website, but not my local development copy of Blogatron9000. Very odd. They're fixed now, though.

Also, I've gone through the toolbar entries and made the names a bit simpler. On Tom's suggestion, there is now a sidebar section for the blogroll and user-defined sidebar content.

Work is starting, slowly, on themes.powerblogs.com. I've realized that since the choice of right, left, or both for sidebars is necessary in the CSS, each theme should come with sidebar templates. Thankfully, most of the themes already developed use the same sidebar layout, so adding this to them won't be a problem. After writing it once, I'll just need to copy it from theme to theme.

It occurred to me, after thinking about the lengths that bloggers will go to obscure their email addresses (from spam spiders), that what really solves that problem is an email form. If no email address is available, a spider can't get at it. As a bonus, no one can read something that they don't like and sign a blogger up to various spam mailing lists.

The next major insight was that it would then be easy to set up a contact link on posts so that one could just click on it and go to the contact form with the To: and Subject: fields already filled out. I know that the Volokh Conspiracy has some trouble with people not bothering to read the name of the poster, so it is likely that all group blogs suffer from this (or at least ones where some personalities are dominant and thus assumed to write everything). Comments solve a similar problem, but if a person doesn't want comments on their blog (or doesn't want javascript comments and is waiting for a native comment system), this would help people direct their messages appropriately. As well, even with a comment system, email is just a more appropriate way to send certain types of messages.

This is stuff has now been implemented. I've opted not to include the comment link in the default post template, but I have switched to making it the default link for contacting the author in the sidebar template. As an incidental benefit, the IP address of the poster gets logged, so there will be more information available in the case of abusive messages.

This is the first post written by the powerblogs.com software on powerblogs.com.