PowerBlogs.Com Development

Cleaning up is proceeding. The everything now consistently uses the term "sidebar" to refer to the things which go on the side of a blog, including the themes.

Themes.powerblogs.com now can install to a blog even if you haven't logged in previously. (Corollary: a bug involving not keeping the CGI parameters has also been squashed.)

The post editing code is now abstracted into the module so that writing posts and editing them uses the same code and has the same features. I also added an IMG button that automatically includes the /files/ prefix to help people not forget it.

Adding help to pages is coming along, and probably about 40% done.

Previewing posts now uses the post template, so bloggers will be able to see exactly what their post will look like, minus the stylesheet actually being applies to their posts. I'm still not convinced that this is a good idea, but I'll go with it for now since I'm also not convinced that the alternative is a good idea either.

Themes.powerblogs.com is now up with 18 themes. The interface is still very rough — at the moment you have to come from the administration toolbar in order to be able to install a theme — but you can browse the screenshots and install any one of those 17. That's a lot better than it was last night. Unfortunately, there are neither a navigation bar nor instructions.

The navigation isn't too much of a problem because there isn't very far to navigate, at least not right now. The instructions are a bit more of a problem. Once there is a way to install a theme even if you haven't come from the administration toolbar, the instructions won't be too much of a problem — there just isn't that much to do. Well, for now. :-)

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.