The Developer's Corner

Mon, Nov 18 2002

After a little uncertainty and moving about, I am back at Tripod (of course you may be reading this on one of the mirrors :p). I will not go into the full details of my vanishing trick since it is all detailed in Solipsistic Meanderings; so go read that if you're interested - or read Jen's more terse account of the events :p

I did work on BlogMan, RenX and the tagboard code over the weekend. I fixed a problem with BlogMan in that it will not save Movable Type default settings for entries and I thought I had it all fixed but I made an entry yesterday and noticed that the defaults were still not set. So that needs a bit more tweaking right there. I added the option to either rename the file name itself or the extension in RenX and uploaded a new build (now version 1.5) to the servers but made the download the same file and so it will be downloadable from the same old link - no change there. However, after I did the upload I realized that while you can replace a portion of an extension according to a given pattern, you can't select multiple files with different extensions and rename them so that all of them have the same extension. So I added the ability to do that too but have not uploaded the new build yet. Maybe today ...

The tagboard - well, I did get the tagboard working so that it now writes all data to a mySQL database. It even checks the database to see if the table is there and if not, creates it before inserting entries. It then takes the last x number of entries (configurable) in raw format and then parses them for smileys, swearing etc. and displays them on the tagboard each time a new tag is added. This way, you are never dependant on the settings you had in effect when you set up the tagboard - which is what most tagboards seem to do - they parse the entries at the time they are entered and store them in formatted form. You can change your settings at any time and you will get your entries displayed according to the new settings with my code. Now I want to add an Admin login option so that the admin can ban a user or delete their comment. Once all that works, I think the tagboard will be ready for distribution. Of course, this might take a while since I'm working on the tagboard while doing a few other things as well :p