Site updates

So if you ever visit my site (as opposed to just reading RSS), you've probably been noticing things changing lately. Ever since the RSS updates I've been chipping away at other things. The titles are one, which I've made show up everywhere now. Due to the way the site is built it's not available when it prints the normal header, so there's a script to put it up there. On navigation through main and category history it will also show position in the title bar. All URLs to entries changed. I have a bit of code in the new RSS feeds to prevent them all from flagging as new entries there, but if you visit it'll convert. The new format should be cleaner for linking, indexing, and stats (query strings confuse things).

Comments have a few changes. Assuming one's browser is capable of it, you can add them from the same page as viewing. This fixes both the issue of not seeing other comments and prevents loading another page. In case you're wondering, the reason the form isn't there directly is so the page itself can be indexed, but the comment form isn't indexed. That's important to keep comment spam away. Also, you can now include a URL with your comment. I'm planning on making name and URL saveable, but it's late and comcast sucks (my connection to the net keeps cutting out) so that's for another day. I plan to implement that with another interesting feature.

Categories are also there. They exist for new entries, and are still filling in for old ones. There's not a preset list, which means it's mostly for finding related entries. On a category page there's also links to my del.icio.us links (if any) for that category and a Technorati search. I'll probably have more metadata in some of them eventually too. Note up to the 5 most popular categories for an entry are listed, listed in order of declining popularity (for this defined by how many entries have it, not views). So the list may change/reorder over time as entries are added to the site. Note that categories not listed both due to not being popular enough and being flagged as hidden will still show up in a category view, so that's why you may see stuff that you don't see as being in a category. Each category also has entry and comment RSS feeds (/entries.rss and /comments.rss) if you're interested, but I haven't figured out how to best get them in the headers for them (same issue as titles).

I've started posting links on del.icio.us more than here, unless I have some extra comments on them. Currently there's just a link to it on the left ("My del.icio.us"), and that has RSS too if you want. I'm curious if that's OK, or if I should aggregate them and post some or all of them back hear (maybe daily)? Leave a comment on that one.

You can see links to blogs I read pretty regularly under "My Reads" over on the left as well. As noted at the top, let me know if you don't want to appear there. I'll probably convert it from a javascript include to plain HTML at some point just to make it cleaner.

The most popular entries and categories are now also linked under Most Popular on the left as well. Probably not useful to regular readers, but it's there. It pulls the views and rebuilds the listing at the same time it checks whether sitemap updates and external pings are needed (about hourly). I think sometimes odd old stuff is gonna pop up in there...

I think the other things are the email updates (another probably gonna be unused thing) and the geo-map (at the bottom, somewhat interesting). They don't really need any explanation though. Enjoy poking around with or ignoring any of the other stuff as you see fit. Let me know if something is broken or doesn't seem to act how you expect.

This week has been interesting. In phasing out some stuff on Monday, I found I apparently missed some stuff the last couple summers and it made a bit of a mess. Oh well, I think it's mostly resolved now. If not I may have to write some scripts to go check stuff. There's been other stuff popping up which has kept me rather busy. Of course it happened right as I started getting into the swing of planning some major projects, so stuff is really piling up. Luckily I got some stuff in place where I just throw everything in my list and don't have to try and remember it. I can even set it up where things will disappear and come back over time so I don't have to think of them until later. I've created a monster that will hopefully just get better as I keep changing it.

Last night there was no Alias because some guy thought he was so important he should be on all the TV channels. I guess he's probably right though. I ended up taking advantage of the extra time to do coding. That coding led to my big announcement of the day, which was user stylesheets for our Incident tracking system. Basically I got sick of dealing with user requests for preference changes, "this would be cool if you highlighted that" and things like that. As I was doing major code cleanup lately I had been ripping out things, pushing them to css, and making the code xhtml. This meant not only a cool new look, but stuff like printstyles as opposed to a printable version, which saves both me and the users from a lot of trouble. Mr. Boyum and I have been sorta chatting over the past few months about the possibility of user defined stylesheets and how cool they'd be. So when redoing comments last night and making some major UI changes, I started tagging a ton of stuff that I didn't necessarily use with classes, made a style to return the "classic" look, changed the header script to include a user css link if the file exists, and an interface for people to change their stylesheet. The thing has turned into something like css Zen Garden. Boyum has his sharp professional look, brooke has an all-uppercase style, schdav has gone dull and boring with a The O.C. picture in the back (seriously, it's devoid of color - everything's white except the text, which is mostly black with a couple shades of grey. No highlights, table borders, link underlines or anything), Nick has a lot of black with some bold colors, and Mike J looks like a bunch of neon paint cans exploded in a nightclub (seriously, it's scary with bright colors and stuff flashing all over). Alyssa currently has a surprisingly pink designed-by-Nick style, which will be interesting to see if she keeps once she sees it (she agreed to have it made for her). I kept the basic for the most part as I need to keep a usable default (although css comments are great). I did however opt for a very light background image of an ocean bay at night with some alpha transparent pngs on all the shaded areas so it's always there. Yea, it doesn't work in IE, but who uses that anyways. :) I think I created a work day with a rather lower than normal work output though. I was joking today that by the end of the week we'll have a department full of CSS experts (I linked them to W3 Schools for the CSS help, and they definitely seem to be learning how to do a lot). Our webmaster joked I should introduce user-defined XSLTs next. I like that idea, although I probably should wait until the novelty of the CSS wears off. Have I discovered the new prefered method of training people in proper web design? :)

Merry Christmas!

Yea, I know. You're all gonna kill me for this one (especially if you're using an LCD monitor), so I'll keep it short. I'm probably off partying somewhere, so you should be too.

Did I mention that browser DOM models suck? Mozilla treats everything as an element all the time, which makes sense. Safari does as a list of nodes, but only if you don't have any paragraph tags in there and you reference it as a list. IE is better than Safari sometimes and worse in others. I need to go read the spec to be sure what they're supposed to be doing, but the Moz way definitely makes the most sense to me (and follows the pure XML models I've used).

Last night it rained a lot. It was really interesting this morning when I got up and there was enough fog in the air that everything which wasn't actually warm had a solid layer of condensation on it. Then it got nice out. This afternoon I decided to be a code monkey and recoded parts of IncidentBase. Mainly incidentdetail, startupdateincident, and myincidents, although some shared areas end up across the site. Andy convinced me to put some CSS with rounded borders around the User Info area, and that turned into me rewriting almost all the layout tables into divs. The menu bar up top is now a rounded thing that butts up against the top edge rather than being a square thing down a bit. And people can't post comments that make the page wide anymore either (it'll cause their comment to scroll within the normal space). incidentdetail is actually down to around 350 lines now, although a bunch of that was replaced with calls to 3 different IncidentBase library collections now. That was enough work though, I can't imagine how much of a hastle the rest will be to get to the point we can consider a real redesign (hopefully all in css). Quick glance says over 20k lines - most of which is hack upon hack from people asking for new stuff all the time. At it's all my code and will hopefully make sense the second time around.

"The forecast is currently unavailable for this location." That's what the page said when I clicked to view the forcast a minute ago. I wonder if they're tied in to the Bethel network in any way. That's been confused for part of the evening and let me know by making my phone beep and vibrate a lot. As far as I can tell all my servers themselves are fine and reachable from some places on the network but not others. So I can't fix it. So if you're using Bethel email and wondering why mail delivery is taking a while now you know. Tuesday was an interesting day. I spent the list turning todo lists into Incidents. I learned that if you're fixing some minor glitch it's a bad idea to let some people even know it's happening. The day started off seeing something I didn't like much at all, which is technically against policy too and alternatives are available. As of the end of the day it's pretty much impossible for it to happen again though. If you log into a Bethel computer and halfway through the login it turns into a logout, wait a few minutes, try again, and don't try to do what you did to make the system mad at you again. Technology is great. :) Monday night I did some poking with CSS and javascript. It's on my site somewhere which I'm sure you can find (it took Austin long enough today though). I just need to work on scaling and triggering (I'm gonna need to do a loop to find the correct parent) so I can put it other places. It's another thing where Safari users are out of luck. Works fine in Mozilla though. I doubt it works in IE either, but I have no machine with IE on it to test with.