PowerBlogs.Com Development

It is now possible to close the preview window once you open it.

Also, titles which are links no longer interfere with the quick editing of recent posts features.

I just pushed the latest code release onto the server. It features a number of upgrades:

1. The new page template code

2. a link to edit a just-published post

3. Update Recent Post (with popup) has been added to the post tab

4. Fixed the bug which messed up if links were in the title and one edited a published post.

5. some of the republishing code now shows incremental progress.

6. I refactored the republishing code to separate out republishing (archive pages) from regeneration (writing absolutely everything). This means that republishing will be faster.

7. The archive preferences page now properly determines whether anything needs building once you're done selecting it.

8. A new, improved interactive scheduler. This one guides the user and is optimized for the common uses of scheduled publishing (writing a bunch of posts on the weekend and spreading them out over the week, etc.)

Now to get working on category support.

If you want to use a technorati link tracker rather than the trackback implementation (and the technorati link tracker does have some definite advantages), this new variable in the post template will help, since you need to pass the URL of the post to the technorati script in a way that preserves the entire URL. It's more useful, admittedly, for those who have their permalinks directed to their weekly archive pages than for those who have their permalinks going to the individual archives pages (since the former will always include the # character which is special in a URL, whereas the latter won't). Still, it's here for whatever use you might find for it. Flexibility is always good. :-)

The archives features which I talked about earlier are now in effect.

I've added an Archives Preferences page to the Prefs tab, and this lets you pick which archives you want to generate. The two new types of archives are probably not for most blogs, or at least not for most traditional blogs.

You can choose to generate any or all of the types of archive pages, and whichever you choose to generate will be automatically linked in the sidebar in the html that fills in the [$Archives$] variable.

There was a stupid bug where if you logged in with the username not in all lower-case letters, it wouldn't pick up or set any of the user preferences. This bug is now squashed.

The RSS feeds were slightly non-compliant in that they used a capital A in rdf:About where it should have been rdf:about. Fixed now. The code will be on the live server by the end of the day.

However, I haven't gotten a chance to implement the function to print all such archive pages.

Also, I haven't gotten a chance to properly test the recent additions so that I could upload them; they won't be available until tomorrow. I apologize; my DSL service was out for a bit and I'm too tired to go through all of the testing now.

I've just implemented a preference which allows archives to be written in chronological order, rather than the default reverse chronological order. It is more natural for people to read top-to-bottom than bottom-to-top (in most cultures), so this makes following a series of posts in the archive pages more natural.

It's not typical, which is why I'm not going to make it the default, but I can see a good argument for why a person would want it to be that way. So, now, powerblogs users have that option.

Well, I just added a feature to the update page which I hope will be more convenient. Now when you go to update a page, it optionally inserts:

<p class="update"><b class="update">Update</b>

</p>

To make it a little easier to add updates. It's configurable through the interface preferences page, of course; you can set it to prompt you (the default), automatically add this text, or do nothing (no prompt, no text added).

I hope that it's useful.

A small joke of mine was featured on The Volokh Conspiracy.

Unfortunately, the database that we use as a backend doesn't like it if you feed it improperly formed utf-8 unicode characters (i.e. it just chokes). I hadn't realized that people would generate these, but Stephen Nuño indirectly pointed out that this is certainly not the case.

The fix is quite simple, it's just a perl regular expression to replace high characters with their html entity equivalents (the numerical html entities are quite helpful for this). Now one can enter such characters into the title, name, and post, and there won't be problems. I just wish that I had thought of this earlier. Still, the fix is quite pro-active and should prevent any recurrance of this sort of problem. (I've also added it to the comments and trackbacks, as well.)

I finally updated www.powerblogs.com. There are now a few useful screenshots, and best of all I rewrote the features page so that it actually reflects the current featureset, rather than the featureset from 6 months ago.

Also, I put into practice what I learned at Kaplan about "people care about benefits, not features". Or I tried to, at least. Even if I didn't completely succeed, it's a whole lot better than it used to be. Now people will have a reasonable idea of what the powerblogs service is all about.

There was a nasty PHP bug in the signup code which added \ characters if the blog's title contained any sort of quotes. I eventually tracked this down to a "feature" controlled through the magic_quote_gpc variable in the main PHP configuration file. I suppose that this might do someone good, but turning it off did the trick. (The correct way to make your CGI secure is through using regular expressions to verify input, not by having your language automatically mangle every string that it sees.)

Tom discovered a bug in the stylesheet editing code where you couldn't clear out a user stylsheet. This is fixed now.

He also noticed that I forgot to include the code to set the variable which disables trackbacks. Fixed.

I also added a pair of features to comments:

1. The ability to require a name when posting without a comment account.

2. The ability to have every new comment emailed to the author of the post (useful for staying on top of comment discussions when you have very low comment volume or very long comment sunsets).

Finally, I changed the font size on the menu to be 12px instead of 14px. This should help it display properly at smaller resolutions.

Now it's time to rewrite the features page to reflect the features that the software actually has. If you read it now, you'd get the impression that at best it had a meagre comment system, when I think that it currently has the best blog comment system available (I'll admit that I'm biased, but even so I think that it's true).

In my last post I talked about some cool new features which I was working on. Well, they're here.

• All comments and trackbacks can be moderated from a central location (so you don't need to follow every post in order to moderate every comment).

• It is possible for commenters to register accounts, and such accounts can be optional or required for commenting on posts.

• There is an option to require comment accounts to be approved by you before they can post.

• If you allow guest comments, guests cannot use the display name of someone with a registered account, so if you get a flood of foreign commenters (because, for example, some popular blog linked to you), the invaders can't pretend to be any of your regular readers.

Also, I re-implemented the back-end storage for posts to use the same postgreSQL database that comments and trackbacks are using, for improved speed, flexibility, and scalability. It should now handle tens of thousands of posts as lightning-fast as it handles ten.

There are some really good features about to show up on the production server. The second generation comment system is nearly done now, with the introduction of comment accounts and account moderation. Even when comment accounts are not required, guests cannot post using the display name of someone with a registered account, so it can really help protect regulars against invasions from other blogs.

Also, I've revised the PREFERENCES and APPEARANCE tabs on the side to PREFS and THEME, which are much shorter. It managed to cut about 100 pixels off of the height of the administrator's sidebar tabs, and half that much off of regular user's sidebar tabs.

I expect to have these changes uploaded tonight.