Marcus's Musings

I just noticed that all my links were broken due to a UBlog bug. This is now fixed, so if you tried a few links, were greeted by dead pages, and didn't spend the time to edit the URL to fix it, please try again.

I've finally got around to updating this blog - UBlog Reload - to v1.04, so you may or may not notice little enhancements here and there.

However, after checking that it was working I inadvertently nobbled (English slang for [i]broke[/i]) the home page by making my blog feeds private on www.bloglines.com, which then fouled up the blogroll on the left. I just noticed, and have set it to rights, so normal service should now be resumed.

This has been a public service announcement.

Unfortunately I'm ill at home today, but on the plus side I've now got email notification on comments working... here's why it wasn't working.

However, I've also discovered that the notifications are only for my benefit (people who post comments won't get any), so I've requested that this be added, since I've found it's a pain on other people's blogs that I have to check back to see if there has been a reply to my own comments...

Just thought I'd mention that email notification doesn't currently work on this blog - I'm currently sorting it out with my ISP, so if you've commented in the past check back - I've (probably) replied.

For the last 6 months or so I've been using the freeware RSS aggregator RSSReader, which is a Windows application, and pretty good at what it does.

However, since I use it at both work and home, I have found it rather annoying that posts that I have read at one location still show up as unread at the other, because naturally the two client installations have no knowledge of each other.

I've just (i.e. this morning) switched to a web-based RSS aggregator called Bloglines, which doesn't have the bells and whistles that I'm used to, but will now save me the time and annoyance of having to trawl through blog entries that I've already read.

A handy extra service which Bloglines offers is to allow public access to my blog subscriptions, in the form of a dynamically generated blogroll (either Javascript or prerendered HTML). This is something that most other blogs have and which I had been meaning to add to this one but hadn't got around to until now. Thanks to BLoglines, adding the new blogroll box on the left took about 30 seconds to do - a few clicks here, a copy & paste there, and badda-bing-badda-boom!

So now you can see what I'm subscribed to... are any of them new to you?!

PS - before someone mentions it, yes, I'm aware that some web-based aggregators also offer a windows RSS client which syncs with the web client to ensure that read posts stay read... I switched to Bloglines in a hurry, and intend to check out some of these other services when I have more time. Would anyone care to recommend one in particular?

I noticed that Jeffrey Zeldman has an ISSN for his blog, which seemed like a good idea, so I've applied to get one for this blog...!!

For those who are interested, you can apply for one by following the right links from here:
http://www.issn.org:8080/English/pub/getting-checking/form

I got back from Barcelona late last night, but somehow it's 4am and I'm still up! Heading to bed now, but what I have to show for the last hour or so is some hacks/changes to this blog (Uapplication's UBlog Reload 1.0.3) which you may or may not have noticed before reading this entry:


1) There's now no "word" length limit on comments - this had been preventing me from posting long URLs because the test was too simplistic... it was just checking for substrings bounded by spaces which were greater than 50 characters). However, don't abuse this or I'll put it back (and besides, I get email notification of all new comments and will delete them straightaway if you try)

EDIT: Ironically this bug also crops up in the script which adds a new blog entry, and it just fell over on this post! I've disabled it there too, not that that's going to change *your* life, but I thought it was funny...! ;)


2) I've vastly improved the performance of the calendar drawing code.


3) I've changed the appearance of the day numbers on the calendar to make it easier to see which ones are clickable, the clickable area is now much wider (so you don't have to click *right* on the number), and the tooltip now shows how many posts there are for the day in question.


See more on these topics here:
http://www.uapplication.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=127

And I'll post some snaps of Barcelona later after I've had some kip!!!

I couldn't bring myself to go to bed without implementing a real fix for the empty blog problem, so I've modified the code so that by default the N most recent posts are displayed instead (I've set N to 20, which seems about right to me).

Although it was intended only as a quick fix until the author implemented a real solution, it has occurred to me that this is actually the *best* solution that I can think of!!

• It solves the actual problem of new months (and new years) causing an empty front page by showing the last N posts, irrespective of how old they are.
• Only a maximum of N posts will ever be displayed on the normal home page, keeping the page size & length down.
• I've made the current month on the calendar clickable so that if somebody wants to quickly see only the posts for the current month they can do so easily. (This was the previous default behaviour of the homepage.)