I finally pulled the trigger and deployed my latest code for this here blog-thing. There are all sorts of new features, most of which none of you will care about, but it was a big deal to me to finally get bunches of nagging issues cleaned up, repaired, or built out. The new features include:
- Better URLs! - The URLs should make more sense when navigating the site. Other URL features have to do with this next feature...
- Real Pagination! - No more Javascript pagination, this is now real (and obviously slower) pagination with the behavior you expect. And yes, switching pages will be slower, but you will be downloading less data as you will only get the current page, not all pages at once. With this, the URLs should maintain their prettiness.
- Category List! - You can now see a listing of all the available categories (or tags) in the header of every article or by going to the tags page.
- Feed? - Not really a feature, but the feed link has changed. Sorry folks.
- Private Articles! - Actually, there have always been private articles, but now any article that isn't viewable by guests will be marked with a lock icon.
I can't remember if there's more, so I might update this list if I come up with anything else. Please provide me with any comments, suggestions, or, *ahem* bug reports. Enjoy!
Things have been moved around a little in order to make room for the new search feature up there at the right. This is the absolutely most basic form of search I could provide. I plan on enhancing this as I learn better ways to do this and come up with improved features. In the meantime, this should serve.
I have now deployed my first attempt at a comment preview feature. It should work for logged in users and anonymous users. In order to do this I had to disable the comment threading functionality, but since I was the only one who seemed to use it, I doubt anyone else will miss it.
So, please try it out and provide feedback and bug reports as always. Enjoy!
As a followup to Sander's suggestions, I have further enhanced the commenting functionality. I have added a quick list of the allowed HTML elements (we all know HTML, right?). I have also added a convenient little "expand" option in the bottom right that will expand the textarea to something muuuuch larger than normal. If that works for folks, I'll probably extend that to other large textareas on the site... you know, the ones that only I see... Which I suppose no one cares about.
Oh, and I also added a real favicon. You'll probably have to clear your cache to see it. Come on, you know you want to! Thanks again for the feedback and I look forward to continuing to improve the site!
Sort of. I just finished a first pass at allowing visitors to post comments anonymously. Note that all anonymous (non-logged in) comments will go into moderation awaiting approval before being visible in an article. The only other major catch is that these anonymous comments are, for now, only available at a top level and will not work as threaded comments. That's probably not too difficult to fix, I'm just tired right now.
Please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions to improve this feature!
It's going to take some time to process the next batch of photos, but in the meantime I have added an RSS feed. Hopefully this will be of some use to some of you.
Now that I'm back I've made a few improvements and hopefully, bug fixes. The two biggies are the removal of all "admin" links. You should now only see these links if you have access to see them. Second, there are now links at the bottom of each article that will link to either the comments already posted in that article, or to the post comments form. That should hopefully reduce some of the confusion people have expressed when trying to find out how/where to comment. I have also un-nested the comments. They should now display in a sort of threaded mode. I don't know if this really "works" yet, so hopefully some of you can provide some feedback on this (assuming there are comments posted to actually get a feel for it).
Finally, I think and hope I have fixed the bug that was preventing people from commenting. Thanks Trish!
As I skimmed consciousness this morning a vision came to me... "Sam... it's really this easy to do inline replies..." After a couple hours of brow-furrowing work I have managed to get inline response forms working.
Basically, when you hit the reply link on an existing comment, a reply form will magically materialize from the ether. This would seem a lot better than taking you to an entirely new page with no context as to what you are replying to.