Dev Team
General
Some of the mailing lists were improperly configured. I've cleaned all of that up, and they should all be working perfectly now.
There was a bug in the syndication preferences where the email labels were switched — this is now fixed.
A few small things have been cleaned up, mostly edge cases. The exception is saved posts — editing a post which is saved-for-later now properly saves and loads any post chain or category information for the post. (This didn't affect scheduled-publish posts, which were technically saved-for-later posts for various technical reasons.)
Those of you who had comments being emailed to you may have noticed that the name, email, and url were being omitted for those commenters with comment accounts. This has now been fixed.
Comments accounts were supposed to be case insensitive, but there was one part of the code (mostly affecting reseting passwords) which wasn't; consequently people who entered their accounts with mixed case weren't able to reset their passwords. This has now been fixed.
Also, for some reason I was never able to figure out, once in a great while someone would have problems with cookies and would get told, when trying to post with their comment account, that the display name was already in use. I still don't get what was going on, but I've just disabled the relevant section when a person is using a comment account (because the display name is forced to be what's specified for the comment account), and this seems to have fixed things.
Ok, I'm finally back from my honeymoon and settled in enough to start blogging again, which I will do faithfully, from now on. :)
Today's news is a few bug fixes: unclosed HTML comments in the sidebar special content will no longer kill the save button on the edit page, and quotes in co-blogger author accounts won't interfere with the "Set Contact Info for an Author" drop-down any more.
I'm also getting pretty close on getting report generation back up and running. The improvements that I've been making will dramatically reduce memory usage, so things should be good for the long-term, then.
Some of you may have noticed some performance issues, especially during the workday. We're currently working on them and more importantly preparing a larger, more powerful server to migrate all accounts to. Migrations will begin shortly, and as they happen things will get better both for the people who have migrated and for the people who haven't.
We'll be contacting bloggers individually to coordinate migrations since this will involve a little downtime for the blog (posting and commenting downtime — readers will still be able to read).
Thank you for your patience and things will be better than ever soon (the new server is much more powerful).
I fixed a bug in autosave where it wasn't saving backing up the entire post.
I just fixed a subtle but really stupid bug in the regeneration code which would cause it to not update some weekly archives if one had sufficiently rewritten history (i.e. changed the display dates significantly on enough posts). It's really amazing how much work it can take to figure out which are the three lines that need changing.
Anyhow, thanks to Steve's help in figuring this bug out, it's now history.
I just fixed a bug in the interface preferences page which wouldn't allow one to select manual formatting as the default.
Powerblogs has really great users. Today a new user helped me find (and hence fix) the following bugs:
Fixed the documentation for the List Post Template and the Individual Post Template.
Also, fixed an off-by-one error in the script to rewrite history (modify the dates on posts).
Update: The rewrite history bug is now actually fixed. It turned out not to be an off-by-one error, but a bug about how daylight savings time was handled.
Fixed the spelling checker to unselect words when selecting the next word.
Fixed the bug which caused the spell checker to not come up at all in IE. Unfortunately, it doesn't work in IE6 — it won't show the suggestions when selecting a new word, but this is progress. At least it shows the (possibly) mis-spelled words and allows one to manually correct them. I'll get it to fully work on IE soon. (It is still a beta feature, after all.)
Added a feature to the co-blogger report to allow for a maximum word count per post, so as not to reward a single enormous post in preference to many medium-sized posts.
I've been rewriting more of the code to optimize posting and editing. In the process, I discovered and fixed a few bugs, though most of them would only be noticeable if one used the rewrite history feature to back-date posts. The rest dealt with the chronological titles archive, which weren't being properly generated for categories.
That being said, posting and editing should be faster then they have been. I uploaded a number of speed optimizations. I've moved more functions over to the schedule/marshal paradign. I also rewrote the core loops in a few commonly called functions for writing archives so that they're now substantially faster. I think that the front archives and complete weekly archives page are now written in about one tenth the time that they had been taking. The chronological titles archive pages now take about half the time that they did previously. The RSS feed generation has been very marginally improved. All in all it should result in a noticeable increase in the speed of posting and publishing changes.
We're on the way to instantaneous publishing. :-)
Previously the "weekly" archives only used the creation date of the post to determine which "weeks" to link. Now they use the display date so that if one uses the rewrite history feature to back-date posts, the archives lists will now reflect this properly.
(note: I say "weekly" since that archive style is not truly weekly, but rather a method of slicing up months which tends to slice into 7-day segments. I really should add a true weekly archive option, which aligns on Saturday-Sunday borders.)
Those powerblogs users who use the optional formatting option "Format HTML automagically" know that the magic involved was not very powerful magic — it broke and left a post unformatted often enough to be annoying. I've been working on the second generation of auto-formatter which will be far smarter and more robust, but in the mean time on Eugene Volokh's suggestion I implemented a stop-gap which will add paragraph tags to everything separated by newlines. It's not ideal, of course, but it should really ameliorate the automagic formatter's failures. (Of course, this problem doesn't affect you if you're using the default "break at newlines" option.)
I also introduced a minor feature in the editing window which can take ascii-formatted tabular data and put all of the appropriate HTML code around it to make it an HTML table. (One can then select the newly generated table and edit it with the table editor.)
There was a bug with scheduled publishing where it would forget the category and post chaining for the post. That bug is now fixed, and scheduled posting properly sets both any specified categories as well as any specified post chain.