Blog posting changes

posted by Breadmower on Sat 19th Aug, 06 at 20:20:42

Another update - it's only something small, but it fixes something irritating, and I've been meaning to do it for a while. Now when you click "add new post" on a blog, the form appears on the main blog page, and when you save the post, you see it appear in the list straight away - no more going back to the add page with no sign that it's been added.

Actually, I'd done an update quite a while ago to provide feedback on whether a post had been successfully added or not, but then it never actually went live. Turns out that I had two files with very similar names, and I'd put the updated code in the wrong one, so it just sat there never being used. Ah well - it's done properly now, anyway :-)

Feeding frenzy

posted by Breadmower on Sat 19th Aug, 06 at 18:54:01

Just a minor update - more RSS feeds are now available. On blog pages, you'll find a new "blog comments" feed in addition to the "blog entries" feed. There's also a "user activity" feed on user pages - letting you see what someone's been up to recently (both blogs and comments).

Suggestions / feedback? Leave a comment...

Comments

posted by Breadmower on Thu 17th Aug, 06 at 22:07:03

The first version of the comments system is in place. Seems to work OK, even though I did have a moment of confusion when the comment count for one of the tests was five, rather than the zero that I was expecting. Turns out that someone had jumped in whilst I was in the middle of the update, clocked what was happening, posted a few comments, highlighted a bug, then vanished again. I think that I somehow knew that it was happening, as at the moment when they posted the comments, I was thinking "I really should stop testing things on the live site, as one time someone's going to catch me out". Good timing :-)

Two things about the comment system:

1) It's thread based, so you can either click "add a new comment" or "reply to this comment" - replies to comments are indented below the original comment, but at the moment they're just indented using the <blockquote> tag. Lazy I know (and it looks ugly when things are indented more than twice), but I'm going to bed in a minute. I'll sort it out tomorrow / over the weekend :-)

2) I've forgotten what the second thing was. Never mind.

Got any comments on comments (or anything to do with the site)? Why not leave a comment below... 

Permalinks update

posted by Breadmower on Thu 17th Aug, 06 at 18:49:52

OK, the new permalink update is in place - you shouldn't notice any difference (unless you'd been paying special attention to what the permalinks looked like). Any existing permalinks that you might have put somewhere / emailed to someone / whatever still work, so no need to panic. All is well.

At the same time, I slipped in an extra check for permalinks that will stop you from creating a dodgy permalink that displays someone else's entry as if it's in your blog. It was a pretty obvious oversight, considering how simple the permalink construction was. Sorted now, anyway :-) 

Permalinks changing

posted by Breadmower on Thu 17th Aug, 06 at 18:36:53

Bit of a pain I know, but the URLs used for permalinks are about to change. Old permalinks will still work, but new ones will be a little different to accommodate some changes for when the comment system is added in. To be honest, I doubt anyone's going to notice, but I'm trying to keep in the habit of posting (even minor) changes into here.

Watch this space... 

Pagination

posted by Breadmower on Mon 24th Jul, 06 at 11:13:25

Blogs now show ten items per page, along with links to move back and forth through the archives.

Permalink update

posted by Breadmower on Fri 21st Jul, 06 at 17:32:57

When viewing a permalink (as in you're viewing a particular item, rather than the blog), you can now move backwards and forwards without having to return to the blog first.

Blog directory update

posted by Breadmower on Fri 21st Jul, 06 at 08:58:38

As of about 1AM last night (well, this morning), you can now choose to sort the blog directory by blog name or time of last update. Makes is a little easier to see which blogs have been updated recently.

Blog directory update

posted by Breadmower on Thu 20th Jul, 06 at 19:44:02

The blog directory now shows the title of the latest entry in a blog (as well as the time of last update). The reasoning is that if a blog is updated several times in a day (or you can't remember the last time you checked it), being able to see the latest entry title will make it a little easier to know if you've read that entry.

Blog RSS feed

posted by Breadmower on Tue 18th Jul, 06 at 18:00:34

There's now a basic implementation of RSS feeds for blogs. At the moment, there's only one feed, showing the latest ten items - more to come soon.