Dear Santa, thank you for the dolls and pencils and the fish. It's Easter now, so I hope I didn't wake you but... honest, it is an emergency. There's a crack in my wall. Aunt Sharon says it's just an ordinary crack, but I know its not cause at night there's voices so... please please can you send someone to fix it? Or a policeman, or...
Back in a moment.
Thank you Santa.

Feeding Time

We have RSS feeds now. I'm not sure how good they are, because I, uh, adapted the code from elsewhere, but they validate, and they actually work.

Which means that formatting tags also work.

Which means... that I have to document those little buggers as well.

I've also printed a copy of the RSS 2.0 spec so that I can make a nice clean feed template - because it is just another template.

Update: Okay, clean RSS 2.0 is available now. Again, it both validates and works (tested in Firefox, Thunderbird, Opera and Google Reader) so have fun.

Update: And now we have Atom 1.0 as well!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:23 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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 | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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 create lists.

You can insert images, flash files, and videos, which I won't demonstrate right now.

1. You
2. can
3. change
4. the
5. way
6. your
7. lists
8. appear.

• And
• more
• lists.

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 | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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:

1. 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.

2. 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.
1. That will look like this. At least, it does if you do it in the middle of an ordered list.


3. 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:

After:

2.6 milliseconds?  I think we'll survive.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:03 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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 | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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More Dragon Drops

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:33 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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 05:31 PM | Comments (20) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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 01:24 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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We Have A Go

Kinda...

File uploads are working.

Drag-and-drop image insertering is working.

File management is working... ish. You can't delete files just yet, but that's not a big task to fix.* And if you try to rename a directory to have the same path as an existing directory, the results are undefined. At best. I think I'll just disallow that.

I still have a bunch of little things to fix. For example, I thought that the drag-and-drop image feature wasn't working, but that was because the allow.html flag wasn't getting set on my test posts, so all the HTML in those posts was escaped, which made the images not work, which was what I was testing, so I thought that that was where the problem was, until I finally decided to check the data getting written into the database and found that that was correct even though the final HTML in the page was wrong, which meant that it was an errant filter causing the problem and not the WYSIWYG editor.**

Which is good, because the filters are a whole lot easier to fix than the editor. Cute editor, but it's more code than the whole rest of Minx at the moment.

Attachments aren't working just yet. It would be very easy for me to get them to work, but I really want to get them properly integrated with the file uploads, and there's a little conceptual difficulty there relating to the ownership of the files and the permissions to manage content on the sites involved. I probably have a couple more days of work to get that sorted out.

Which means:

PS2: Check.
PS2 S-Video cable: Check
PS2 memory card: Check
PS2 gamepad: Check
FF XII: Check
PS2 power cord: Hmm. Looks like a standard figure-8 240V socket. Must have a few of those in the cupboard... Upstairs... Somewhere... Bah.

* Actually, you can't delete anything just yet. I have a set of delete functions defined, but they don't do nothing. I've been leaving them for a rainy day, which seems to have arrived.

** The allow.html flag should be cascading from the site (via the default or current folder auth record) and the user preferences... but it isn't, so it's off by default, which makes posts not work.

Uh, damn - I have to demo this tomorrow. I think I might just stick a 1 in there for now.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:27 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Sneak Preview

I hope to open the gate to the first group of beta testers later this week; large scale beta-testing will follow in March.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:47 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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