talideon.com

I was dead at the time!

Entries for August 2004

August 1, 2004 at 7:22PM Stopping me from making mistakes with my linklog

I’ve done it several times so far, and I want to make sure I don’t do it again.

Sometimes, when I add a link to the linklog, I get the title and link mixed up. It’s irritatingly easy to do, and I’m sure that other people with linklogs have the same problems.

Now, it’s easy to tell them apart: one starts with “blah://” whereas the other never does. So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to modify the engine to detect cases where I’m being an idiot. If it can’t see a link starting with “http://”, “ftp://”, &c, in the link field, it’ll swap it with the contents of the title field and complain. Yeah, that should stop me from being an idiot.

And I really ought to work on my sister’s site...

August 10, 2004 at 11:56PM KWiki v2 (alpha) up online!

Today, due to various circumstances, I decided to get my wiki engine up and running properly.

It’s now got StableCopy versioning rather than the EditCopy system it used to use.

In addition, I’ve beefed up the formatting engine a bit. It’s now the same one as I use there. One difficulty I’ve had is that I’ve had to remove plaintext wikiwords. Why? Because ColdFusion 5 has a crappy RegEx engine and having them and marking wikiwords without a corresponding page became too difficult. Oh, to have MX running on the server.

Still, CF5 isn’t all bad. I ran into a nasty problem with CFMX that I never had with the previous versions: if you’re from anywhere even slightly out of the way, beware of your configured locale.

The problem I ran into was with CFDIRECTORY’s DateLastModified query field. In CF5, it’s returned in a relatively sane format: you can use it as a date, and ParseDateTime() and LSParseDateTime() have no problems understanding it.

Not so on CFMX: DateLastModified has some kind of wierd locale-dependant format. Considering there’s functions there if I wanted to format it for my current locale, this seems rather dumb.

If you’re a Yankistani, a Brit, German, blah, blah, blah, you’re fine, but head even a bit out of the way, like here in Ireland, you’ve got problems.

Y’see, on the laptop I use, I’ve got the locale configured as en_IE. It’s a rather sane, reasonable choice seeing as I’m Irish and living here. Now, I also work to GMT/BST, though BST is called IST (Irish Summer Time) here: I think they might begin and end at slightly different times, but nothing major.

Now here’s the rub: CFDIRECTORY produced a date that was nice and easily parsable, and identical to its BST equivalent, except that it has IST at the end rather than BST. I tried LSParseDateTime(), which said what I parsed wasn’t a date (!), and ParseDateTime(), which said that en_IE wasn’t amongst the list of locales it understands (meaning it could parse the date, the locale to which it belonged, but couldn’t be bothered parsing it after that: it could identify the locale, for Dog’s sake!)

I kludged around it by fiddling with the locale settings in the jvm.config file for CFMX to make it think my locale was en_UK (best fit) rather than en_IE.

This little episode does not inspire confidence in me for Macromedia...

August 11, 2004 at 12:12AM I’m thinking of a redesign.

I’ve been continually tweaking the current design for the site, and I have to say that I’ve never been entirely happy with it.

At the weekend, I took to playing with some CSS and JavaScript, mainly just for fun, and partly with a view to finding some layout techniques I could use on the site I want to build for my sister.

This (hmmm... must add image inclusion to CFFORMAT) was the result. It ended up morphing into an alternative layout for this site. Terribly green, isn’t it? The colour on this laptop isn’t exactly the best things end up looking less green than they actually are. What it looked like to me was a rather tasteful gray with a green tinge.

I may use it, I’m not sure. If I do, I’m changing the colours. For Niamh’s site, I’m thinking of developing the placeholder layout already up there. I think it has potential.

August 16, 2004 at 11:09PM Talideon.com, v2

So, here’s the end result of my travails over the weekend. It’s great what can come out of refactoring code so it can be used elsewhere. Are we talking understated brilliance, or utter suckage in the area of design? Yup, some elements like the background drop-shadow are, how can I put it, um, quickly becoming cliches, but they still look great, so I’m hoping for the former... [smile]

Sorry the comments are disabled right now. I’m rejigging the engine to make them database driven rather than using flat files. It’ll be back as soon as possible.

I also must work on stopping the sidebar on the blog frontpage from flashing like it is. It’s just not good enough as it is. It also needs a wee bit of styling.

August 17, 2004 at 12:57PM Checking blo.gs pinging

At the request of Keith, I’ve added REST-ful pinging of blo.gs to the linklog and weblog engines. I’m not completely sure if this is going to work ok, so bear with me.

Update: It worked! And it didn’t blow up! Yay! I’ve posted a copy of the tag on CFTagStore so people can use it. Next, I attack Niamh’s site.

August 26, 2004 at 1:10PM Sage: I’m loving it!

A while back, I downloaded a copy of RSS Bandit as I need/wanted an RSS aggregator. I’d heard good things about it, so I thought it would be a good idea to give it a try.

However, I hit the same problems I have with every other aggregator I’ve tried in the last while: it just felt clunky, and the mailer-style interface just doesn’t sit right for me when I’m reading feeds.

A few years ago, just as the first aggregators were coming out (about three, I think: this would have been after AmphetaDesk came out anyway), I took a stab at writing my own one: Mocha. I lost interest in it, mainly because I’m no great fan of VB (which I was writing it in), and because part of me never really saw the point. It’s now sitting on a CD, half-finished, waiting for me to come back to it. I did get a good idea of how I’d like an RSS aggregator to be like though.

For a start, I wanted two panes: one a display pane, and the other a tree. The display pane is exactly how you’d expect it: a display of the currently selected feed/post. The tree pane had two tabs: new posts, and archived. Each listed all the feed categories, under which were the feeds, under which were a list of posts. Posts would only be archived if you marked them to be archived.

I heard about an aggregator for Firefox a while back called Sage. Now, while it’s not precisely what I wanted for Mocha, it’s close. I love sage. I’m almost inspired to go back and finish my own one now.

August 26, 2004 at 1:24PM Linklog uses a pilcrow now.

Just to make it like all the other linklogs out there, I’ve changed the permalink marker on my linklogs to be a pilcrow rather than a hash. That should keep some people happy.

I’m after plugging in code to show how long it takes for paged to be generated. The results are worrying: the blog frontpage take a second and a half! That’s at least partly down the the weird query I use for generating it without needing subqueries. I can, however, speed things up a little by caching the resultsets.

I’ve a tag that I haven’t used yet called <CF_CACHECONTENT>. It allows caching of a lump of content, only regenerating it when the cache is invalidated or it times out. Soon as I dig it up, I’m going plugging it into the site. It should clear up much of the speed problems the site has.

Next: put a blogroll listing on the weblog sidebar, like with the archive and linklog.

Oh, and welcome back, Karlin!