November 30, 2003

Sorry about the fairly long absence of updates, the site being unavailable for a while and then the header, footer and sidebar disappearing. It was like this, I was sick for about a week after fasting ended (it was the month of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting) and when I got back to work and had access to the Net again, I discovered that my main domain had exceeded the bandwidth limit that I had set for it. I have plenty of bandwidth on this account but I decided to limit the bandwidth to the main domain to see how much I use and it got me at this particular moment :p I get that sorted out on Friday and do quite a few changes to Blog on the same day and come to work on Saturday hoping to write about it and I discover that they are doing maintenance on the web server and so I am shut out of my domain, my e-mail and the RookSoft forums :p So I finally got access to the site today and then I discover that due to the maintenance, my .htaccess file on the root folder had mysteriously become a zero byte file and all the customizations I had added to allow SSI had gone and hence, my header, footer and sidebar had disappeared as well. I got that fixed too and am finally able to talk about Blog 🙂

So what’s been happening with Blog? A lot actually. I’ve fixed all the bugs that have been reported so far and even added a feature that has been often requested but I kept on forgetting – pinging 🙂 At the moment, it is a bit clunky and not so customizable since I’ve added it only as a proof-of-concept feature. Pinging can be globally disabled or enabled but you can’t do anything on a per blog basis. Neither can you add/remove custom servers to ping at the moment. However, all of this should hopefully be there in the final version of Blog 8.0 🙂 At the moment, Blog will ping weblogs.com, blo.gs and blogrolling.com when you publish a non-local journal but I’m not sure if the blogrolling.com ping actually works since there are some problems there. Hopefully, I’ll get that sorted out before I do release this build.

There are however a few bugs that I can’t fix since they are in the HTMLEdit component that I’m using – such as clicking on an image and then clicking DEL causing an AV (Access Violation) error, the text you are typing going under the vertical scrollbar till you save the entry and saving an entry causing the cursor to move to the top of the entry. The author of the HTMLEdit component, Fabian, knows about all of these and has promised to fix all of them and he’s been a brick about responding to bug reports. So I’m hoping that he’ll get these sorted out before I get to the final release of Blog 8.0 🙂

In the meantime, I probably will do one or two more beta releases before I get to the database restructuring. In fact, that is why the ping feature is not so robust at the moment – because I would have had to add some extra database fields to support individual blog level pinging and it seems pointless to do so now since I’ll be restructuring the tables again for the final 8.0 move. So bear with me while we slowly move towards the 8.0 final …

Oh one more piece of news – especially of importance to Nigel :p – I’ve finally been able to figure out a pesky problem that’s been there for a while – if you have images in a different folder and publish an entry with images, you have to publish twice to get main page updated. I tried to duplicate the problem at this end several times but never could but I finally figured out what I was doing wrong – it was the way my server was setup for FTPing :p So the problem occurred only under specific setups only. But now that bug is squished too but unfortunately, Nigel informs me that so far the Blog 8.0 beats don’t publish at all at his end and so I might have to figure out what’s going on there too before Nigel can finally stop having to publish twice 🙁

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Posted by Fahim at 9:49 am  |  No Comments