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Thu, Oct 10 2002

Blog 7.0 final is out :-) I have done all the fixes that I needed to do, added the last few features and even updated the documentation so that it is fairly up-to-date - though it might still be a bit arcane for a normal user to understand :p I will be here only for the next two days since I will be departing for the US on Saturday night (Saturday morning for the folks in the US ...) and I probably will not make anymore journal entries till my journey is complete but I will continue to check e-mail and so do let me know if you have any problems and I will try to provide support as usual. The download link is (as usual) on the sidebar so go on, download and enjoy :-)

On a different note, my journey will be for about twenty-seven hours and I am supposed to arrive in on the same day I leave here since my flight actually leaves early in the morning of Sunday though I will be leaving home late at night on Saturday. There are certain possible problems/difficulties in this trip and so I hope all of you will keep a good thought for me so that things will work out well :-) I will probably start updating the journal again once I've reached my destination and like the last time I traveled, will probably have a couple of entries from en route - though I hope this time it won't be as circuitous a trip :p
posted at 08:18:22 PM  link  comment

Since the only area in Blog 7.0 that seems to have problems is the digest feature (and since not many people seem to want to use it yet :p), I decided to prepare to release 7.0 final and then tweak the digest feature as we go along. With that aim in mind, I added a few final touches to the current Blog build yesterday. One of these was a feature that I'd discussed before - converting double carriage returns to paragraphs and single carriage returns to line breaks, so that your entry will appear legible as you type and will still appear the same way you typed it when it is published. Of course, I realized that current entries might get broken if I do it this way since there might be people (like me ..) who explicitly used a line break tag to achieve line breaks and relied on a single carriage return to be a paragraph. So in order to maintain backward compatibility, I added in an option which would still do that - if you want Blog to. As an added bonus, I added a sub-option which lets you use two line break tags instead of a paragraph tag ... and I changed all internally generated Blog tags to be XHTML compliant - or at least I hope so since I am not completely sure about how far I have to go to be XHTML compliant :p

I probably would have released Blog 7.0 final yesterday except for a few minor things that I've forgotten or need to do. The first thing is that I need to update the documentation and it's still not done - in fact, I might release as it is since I want to get this release done before I leave and I'd feel more comfortable if I was available for tech support for a couple of days following the release to combat any major bugs that might have been missed. Tyran mentioned one of the other things but I forgot to implement it. In Blog 7.0, there is no way to refresh a preview since the preview and comments/category displays toggle back and forward on each press/click on the preview button and if you rely on the preview window, this can be very annoying. So I intend to add a right-click context menu for the preview window which allows you to refresh the view. The last is something I had totally forgotten but was asked for a while back - the ability to edit/delete comments sent via the remote comments system. Now, I still don't feel letting people edit comments is totally acceptable (but there are exceptions such as when you want to run a family-friendly site and people intentionally/accidentally swear ..) and so am not going to allow an edit feature - instead, I'll let comments be deleted totally. You might say that encourages censorship too but you also have to let the site owner have control over his/her site too. Darn, when did coding Blog become a moral issue? :p
posted at 06:02:48 AM  link  comment

Wed, Oct 09 2002

One of the data tables in Jen's installation of Blog corrupted yesterday. I had hoped that the new Repair option in Blog would fix the problem but when Jen tried, it didn't seem to do anything. So I got her to send me the data files and when I ran Blog at my end, I wouldn't even get the main screen due to the corrupted data file! So I added code which would detect data file corruption at the time of opening the main screen and fix the corrupted files automatically. Of course, this would work only for files needed by the main screen but since you can access the Repair option once you have the main screen open, you shouldn't have any problems with repairing all the other files if they do ever become corrupt. I ran the new code through it's paces and it seems to work fine but we'll see how it does in the field, so to speak :p
posted at 05:34:13 AM  link  comment

Tue, Oct 08 2002

Over the weekend Edward McCain found several bugs in the latest build of Blog. Not only did he help eliminate (at least we think it eliminated it ...) that infuriating "list index out of bounds" error but he discovered several other problems which caused errors in Blog. Not cotent wiht that, he went on to discover a couple of more bugs in the Purge Entries dialog which has probably been there since that option was added - shows what a good tester I am :p Oh yeah, he also found a curious problem with the calendar control in that we can only go back to October 1752 - not sure about the year but it's somewhere around there. This of course seems to be either standard Delphi or standard MS behaviour but it was an interesting thing ...

I've fixed all the other bugs - can't do anything about the calendar control - and probably am ready to release Blog 7.0 final except for the fact that I am no too happy with the digest functionality yet. So I might just wait till I have got to the US, settled in and had time to contemplate the digest functionality a bit more before I do the next (and hopefully the final ...) release. Oh yes, another bug which has come up is Blog not recognizing that there is an Internet connection when you have a cable Net connection. I've heard about this once before but the person who reported it didn't seem to be willing to help with finding the cause but now Andrew has come forward to work with me on this. Anybody else on cable who has this problem or had this problem and sorted it out?
posted at 05:25:57 AM  link  comment



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