PowerBlogs.Com Development

Hopefully this is the last that I have to say about trackbacks. They're done and tested. The code is up, the new scripts distributed, and they're working. The auto-detection and such appears to be working with MovableType in both directions, which is good.

I don't expect there to be much more about them — knock on wood — they don't have the same range of possibilities that comments do. Time will tell, of course, but for the time being I think that the current implementation is complete.

Most of the code to implement trackbacks is in place now. Mostly there just remains the CSS styling, creating the appropriate template variables, and setting up the appropriate options. It shouldn't be long before we have a working implementation of trackback (sending is finished, so far as I can tell; it's only receiving trackbacks that's yet to be completed).

The moderation system for trackbacks is built on the second generation comment model, so it will be fairly easy to keep on top of all new trackbacks and delete any inappropriate ones. Still, I think that displaying trackbacks may default to off.

The Tools -> Search Published Posts feature now has an implementation, though not the final one. It will now let you search by words or phrases.

Eventually I'm going to re-implement this using an inverse-index search which will allow complete boolean and phrase searching, but I haven't found the right backend yet. Until then, the current implementation is a pretty good stop-gap measure.

The first stages of the second generation comment moderation system are up. Right now it's a more advanced moderation page, plus a moderation page which will display all unmoderated comments, regardless of the post that they're attached to.

This way you don't need to keep on top of each post, you can just go to the "Moderate Recent Comments" page, It is, incidentally, usable for reading all new comments regardless of post, but that's not the intended use and it's not great for that.

There's plenty more to come, including registration of accounts, requiring registered accounts, etc.

I added another feature for group bloggers: a page where the blog administrator can set the contact information for lazy (or busy) co-bloggers. It's available in the site-wide tab.

Also, fixed a minor cosmetic issue with the archive pages where the dates were being displayed sub-optimally.

I just added a page which allows one to insert html into the head tag (the page is accessible from the appearance tab). This allows one to insert arbitrary javascript, etc.

I just added a feature which wraps all of the posts in a day in a div (class "calendaryday") and sticks as the first thing in it the day in an H2 tag (e.g. Wednesday, April 21, 2004).

That is, powerblogs can now immitate either Blogger or Movable Type in grouping the posts of a given day together and putting a heading indicating which day they're in. It's a Blog Preference which defaults to off.

I've just finished and uploaded the scheduled posting code. It is now possible to schedule posts for publishing at an arbitrary future date.

I've taken advantage of the save-for-later code, so that a post which is scheduled to be published is merely saved for later with a schedule for its posting made. This way one just uses the regular ability to edit saved posts to edit scheduled posts (plus canceling a post just means deleting it from the saved posts).

I also have to give credit to Date::Manip for allowing me to accept dates in arbitrary formats like "Next thursday at 5am". For anyone who's a perl programmer, Date::Manip is a fabulous module if you need to take a date from a user (as the author himself says, though, it's far too slow for repetative parsing, such as in a tight loop).

Well, fun is the wrong word. Testing is rather a PITA, but it's one of those strange activities where you hope that it's going to be boring.

In this case, I discovered a bug which would affect hostnames that have numbers in them. I think that this came from a mixup in policy — originally I wasn't going to support hostnames with numbers but then I decided to — but anyway, it was screwing up the generation of archives (none of the beta accounts have numbers in them).

Well, all's well that ends well, especially when it's during the testing phase rather than the live phase. :-)

And, pleasingly, once again when I find a bug, it's not the sort that would cause a loss of data, just an inconvenience until it's fixed. I'm very pleased with the backend architecture so far. It's proved very resilient against data loss. In fact, [and I say this knocking on wood], I haven't seen a case of data loss yet as a result of a bug. Things are looking good.

The code to accept payments and automatically create accounts is almost ready. This is a really exciting time.

The next version of the software has been uploaded to the live server and we're now trying it out. It's been thoroughly tested on the development server and all seems to be going well.

I'm really excited about this version, because it should be both far more powerful as well as easier to use. We'll see how this goes, but I'm really looking forward to using it, as well as to seeing what users think of it.