What is that?
It's a duck pond.
Why aren't there any ducks?
I don't know. There's never any ducks.
Then how do you know it's a duck pond?
Saturday, March 10
More Stuffs
One of the problems I'm having with RSS is that while Minx can generate XML just fine, it couldn't specify that a particular page was XML. Now it can.
Also HTML (of course), plain text, SGML, CSS and CSV. And it worked first time.
I also have in-line edit links working (though not true in-line editing); working flags for HTML, BBCode, and smilies on posts; options for locked, hidden and system threads; options for allowing comments and pings on entries; options for active, public, shared, hidden and system templates; post types; and - oh, oops - no option to change the path for individual entries.
Now I need to work on the page system and folder content settings, comment moderation, and
fixing the formatting options. (Currently format strings get lower-cased, but include case-sensitive options... Which doesn't quite work.) Fixed.
Oh, and avatars. Really want to get avatars working.
Let's try those flags now:
bbcode smilies
Okay, that's fine. The "hidden" setting didn't do a whole lot though.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
08:06 PM
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Friday, March 09
While I'm Playing
The editor for blog posts has rather more features than the one made available for comments. As a blog owner, you can selectively make these available to commenters as well, as you wish.
You can do formatting stuff like this:
Overline.
You can auto-capitalise each word.
You can change the font.You can centre your text.
Or right-justify it.
Or fully justify it, though that only works if the text is reasonably long, so I have to type a whole bunch of extra words here so that I can properly demonstrate the effect, which gets boring after a while, so I think I'll stop now.
You can insert images, flash files, and videos, which I won't demonstrate right now.
You can put boxes around things.
- You
- can
- change
- the
- way
- your
- lists
- appear.
More boxes.
You can create tables and forms too. And I think there are some things I'm missing from the version I've set up.
You can't drag and drop videos from YouTube, though.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:26 PM
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Off The Record
One of the shortcomings of the editor I'm using for Minx - a shortcoming that is mirrored in every open-source and commercial editor I've looked at - is that there is no support for blockquotes. This sucks, rather, because blockquotes are very commonly used in both blogs and forums, exactly Minx's target market.
Now, I have source code to the editor, and it has hooks for adding custom buttons and tags, but it doesn't look trivial to make it work properly.
Meanwhile, you have three options:
- The least attractive: Use the Edit HTML option in the editor and stick the blockquote tags in manually. The editor will preserve them; it just doesn't have a feature to put them in for you.
Like so.
- Use the indent button in the editor to mark your quotes. This will work fine, but doesn't pick up your CSS style settings for blockquotes.
- That will look like this. At least, it does if you do it in the middle of an ordered list.
- Use the [ quote ] bbtag.
That looks like this.
It also has the helpful feature that you can so So and so wrote: and it comes out as
So and so wrote:Blah blah blah.
Using bbtags means you have to enable bbtag processing for your post... And right now, you can't do that. (Yes, that will be fixed very soon.)
I wonder what would happen to performance if I made it the default. Well, I can soon find out.
Before:
Hello Pixy Misa, you are logged in to Minx.
Processing 0.09, elapsed 0.0975 seconds.
36 queries taking 0.018 seconds, 127 records returned.
Page size 92 kb.
Powered by Minx 0.93.05b.
After:
Hello Pixy Misa, you are logged in to Minx.
Processing 0.1, elapsed 0.101 seconds.
36 queries taking 0.0178 seconds, 127 records returned.
Page size 92 kb.
Powered by Minx 0.93.05b.
2.6 milliseconds? I think we'll survive.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:03 PM
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Testing BBTags
Let's see how this goes.
This should be italic.This should be bold.This should be underlined.This should be strikethroughed.This should be a link.And this should be a blockquote.
Oookay, I think I need to work on the blockquotes...
Oh, yeah, I did change that. I think I'll change it back... Done. Good.
This should be subscript. And some normal text.
This should be superscript. And some normal text.
This should be the Ambient Irony logo:
Now, what else do we have?
This is a citation, which will probably just look like italics.Churchill wrote:History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
Oh good, that one works. I hadn't tested it before. I wonder:
Winston Churchill wrote:I always avoid prophesying beforehand, because it is a much better policy to prophesy after the event has already taken place.
Excellent. Onward!
A line in the sand?
This should be small.But this should be big.Hmm. The spoiler and nsfw tags don't work yet, I know that.
Oh, what the heck, let's make a table!
| One | Two | Three | Four |
| Ant | Bee | Cat | Dog |
Yep, that works too.
See extended entry for the markup.
more...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
09:25 PM
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1
Everything looks spiffy, but to be pedantic, you called the
superscript a
subscript.
Posted by: Will at Saturday, March 10 2007 01:04 PM (SOx9v)
2
Oops. Darn cut and paste!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, March 10 2007 04:40 PM (PiXy!)
3
Pixy, will trackbacks be allowed? Inline or otherwise? how about decided only by the blog owner? If allowed, will they be able to be shut off after say 30 days or so, or perhaps after 15 days?
Beautiful work my friend, absolutely beautiful. Much better than MT or Wordpress and for sure much better than blogger...
Posted by: GM Roper at Sunday, March 11 2007 06:45 PM (CglRh)
4
Trackbacks are evil, one of the stupidest things ever created by the mind of blog-tools programmers, and ripe for abuse from the very beginning.
Not needed, and not wanted. Leave 'em out!
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, March 11 2007 08:00 PM (+rSRq)
5
I agree with Steven; the last time I checked, 99.8% of trackbacks were spam, and the problem was growing rapidly.
Having said that, there will be trackbacks, or something like them. Snark® was a fairly efficient filter until I blew it up last June, and it will only get better as I get a larger user base to work with.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 11 2007 08:25 PM (uj4NK)
6
Beautiful work my friend, absolutely beautiful. Much better than MT or Wordpress and for sure much better than blogger.
Thanks!
There are some odd bumps here and there that still need filing off, but I'm at the point now where all the previous hard work is coming together. For example, yesterday I was able to get RSS and Atom feeds working in a couple of hours, even though they needed lots of custom formatting and had to be produced as XML, neither of which had been tested until then.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 11 2007 08:30 PM (uj4NK)
7
Okay, bbcode not enabled in comments. Add another one to the buglist!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 11 2007 08:30 PM (uj4NK)
8
Here's another one for your "fix it in your copious spare time" list:
I have gotten into the habit of using the tab key to move from field to field. Since you don't store the name/mail/web fields, I have to enter them each time, and I use tab to move from field to field. But from the "web" field, tab takes me to the "post" button, not to the comment entry frame.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, March 12 2007 12:30 AM (+rSRq)
9
I'll take a look at the cookie code - it
should remember you. Once you register, it will definitely remember you. I hope.
As for tabbing into the editor - yes, that's a problem. At worst, I can fix it with a bit of Javascript.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 12 2007 02:28 AM (PiXy!)
10
I just looked, and I do have a cookie from "minx.cc" which contains the information that should be in those three fields. There's also a cookie from "mee.nu" which does not have that information. Could you be writing it to one cookie and trying to read it from the other?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, March 12 2007 02:41 AM (+rSRq)
11
Hmm.
The old version was running from minx.cc; the new one is mee.nu. Clearly it's not setting the cookie properly.
Thanks for the info. I'll get that fixed.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 12 2007 07:09 AM (uj4NK)
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Monday, March 05
More Dragon Drops
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:33 AM
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1
Well, that was easy. Relative path issues fixed. Future cross-site blogging issues fixed too.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 05 2007 09:34 PM (PiXy!)
2
I love it.......................well done
Posted by: Mark Silbermann at Tuesday, March 06 2007 12:43 AM (cWtKp)
3
Thanks Mark. Working on the main site now. Work work work.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 06 2007 02:38 AM (uj4NK)
4
keep up the good work. i will see you at 2 tomorrow.
Posted by: Mark at Tuesday, March 06 2007 06:24 AM (9lzBF)
5
YAY! We love it when things work. *grin*
Posted by: Teresa at Tuesday, March 06 2007 08:34 PM (gsbs5)
6
Looks swell from here, Pixy! Is The Pond going to move, or is that up to me?
Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, March 07 2007 07:19 PM (OS+Cr)
7
When you move is up to you, but it will be strongly encouraged - once we're past beta anyway.
I do have a nice program to suck all your posts and comments out of Movable Type and put them into Minx - took about six seconds for my blog - but the templates still require a bit of manual hackery.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, March 08 2007 04:13 AM (uj4NK)
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Sunday, March 04
Welcome to Minxville, Population 1
Here we are, up and running on the almost-beta version of Minx (instead
of the old alpha version). The limited beta test will start on Tuesday
(March 6th) for existing mu.nu users, with a larger-scale test
following on the 13th, weather permitting.
Have a look around,
let me know if you run into any hiccups. The title box looks a bit
funny under Internet Explorer; I'll be hacking on the CSS tonight to
see if I can fix that.
Most of the rest should be mostly working. I think.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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1
I like how it looks so far.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, March 05 2007 06:04 AM (3R0bS)
2
In Firefox, the top title box needs some padding along the bottom because the letter's descenders are chopped off.
Other than that nitpick it looks good so far...
Oops, there's a "bracket-body-bracket" html tag at the bottom of this comment section, just above the "Post" button.
Hmmmmm... looks like maybe you were displaying tags for debugging, because a "bracket-br-bracket" tag appears after I hit Enter and disappears after I begin typing the next line.
The CoolIris Firefox add-on seems to work just dandy with Minx.
Posted by: Ted at Monday, March 05 2007 09:42 AM (3R0bS)
3
The title box looked fine to me, then I bumped my font sizes up a notch and it went to pieces. (Like what you describe, but worse.) I'll fix that - using fixed font sizes should do the trick.
That <BR> thingy is supposed to be there.
It's showing you the HTML markup as you type, and you can actually click on it and remove unwanted tags.
Posted by: Also Pixy at Monday, March 05 2007 09:49 AM (3R0bS)
4
And if you click in the middle of marked-up text, you can see exactly what the markup is. Also, if you click on the <> thingy in the toolbar you can see the raw HTML.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 05 2007 11:49 AM (PiXy!)
5
Uh...
Methinks the IP tracker is borked. We can't
all be 3R0bs!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 05 2007 11:50 AM (PiXy!)
6
Ah. That'll be the reverse proxy. Blast.
I'm pretty sure I can still get the original IP another way...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 05 2007 11:53 AM (PiXy!)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 05 2007 11:59 AM (PiXy!)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 05 2007 11:59 AM (PiXy!)
9
Now, why did I end up using the reverse proxy instead of iptables dnat? I don't remember. But it works, so what the heck.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, March 05 2007 12:37 PM (PiXy!)
10
Test, juan, too, tree.
<BR> tags?
Posted by: Old Grouch at Monday, March 05 2007 11:35 PM (oHrKR)
11
Indeed, <BR> tags. Are you using the fancy editor (which should show up for IE and Firefox) or the boring editor (Opera/Safari/other)?
I'm testing Safari/Opera-compliant HTML editors, so we should have fancy editors for everyone shortly.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 06 2007 12:29 AM (uj4NK)
12
Testy... Testy... Testy...
It's looking good to me. I'm on Firefox. :-)
Posted by: Teresa at Tuesday, March 06 2007 01:19 AM (gsbs5)
Posted by: Old Grouch at Tuesday, March 06 2007 08:37 PM (8HHla)
14
...and no "preview" at all, which provides an excuse for borking the link in the previous post!
Posted by: Old Grouch at Tuesday, March 06 2007 08:40 PM (8HHla)
15
Ah, okay. The fancy editor provides its own preview; the boring editor gives you nothing at all.
I'll be enabling comment editing in the next couple of days, so at least you'll be able to go back and fix borked links.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 06 2007 10:28 PM (uj4NK)
16
I've always had very mixed feelings about comment editing. Sometimes when I foul up I want it, but it also bothers me that it permits people to "change the past".
I know that you need to enable it here so it can be tested, but for political blogs (e.g. the Jawas) presumably it will be possible for them to turn it off if they want to. The blog owner should have the ability to edit anything, but it ought to be possible to prevent their commentors from doing so.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, March 07 2007 05:07 AM (+rSRq)
17
I'm setting it up with time limit, which can be chose by the site
owner. So if you spot a mistake you can fix it, but you can't come
back the next day and change things.
Also, I'm not allowing blog owners to edit comments. They can remove
comments, of course, and they can add a reply within the comment, but
they don't have access to edit comments arbitrarily.
If you're not allowed to change your own words, you certainly don't want
other people changing your words!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, March 07 2007 05:44 AM (PiXy!)
18
You broke the site feed. And it took me... only 5 days to notice? I'm good :-)
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Sunday, March 11 2007 03:58 AM (9imyF)
19
Yeah, I'm working on that. There are a couple of bugs in Minx that are preventing the RSS from validating at the moment. I should have a feed working again tomorrow or the next day.
Meanwhile, welcome to the new site!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 11 2007 04:58 AM (uj4NK)
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Saturday, March 03
Impending Chaos Alert
I'll be upgrading this blog to the new version of Minx tonight. That means migrating to a new server, so it may be lost in the fog of DNS for a few hours.
It also means that I'll shortly be enabling comment registration. This will apply to all Minx blogs; you will have to register to comment. Fortunately, all the mu.nu and mee.nu blogs running on Minx share a common user database, so your registration is good right across both domains.* Registration also gives you comment editing, private messaging, avatar thingys, and eligibility for the beta test, where we're giving away a thousand lifetime free accounts.
But right now I'm going to take a nap, because my head hurts.
* And also for other domains hosted on the same servers, though the cookies might not work.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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1
Okay, it's 2114 UTC on 3/3. Where are we? ;-)
Posted by: Old Grouch at Sunday, March 04 2007 05:14 PM (599Ne)
2
Hope your head is better! What a time to get a headache... that's the kind of thing that happens to me - so I feel for you.
Can't wait to see what happens with Minx... I'm ready to jump all over the beta thing. It's sooo exciting. :-)
Posted by: Teresa at Sunday, March 04 2007 08:04 PM (gsbs5)
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56 queries taking 0.4146 seconds, 242 records returned.
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