Live!

Thanks to all of you who have helped us shake out at least some of the bugs over the last few weeks, mee.nu has now gone live. 

So if you haven't done so already, join now.  It's free!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:26 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Changes!

Hi everyone.

You'll see changes happening to the edit screens over the next two days, with a number of new features popping up.  It will take me a little while to put all the updates in place, so if you try some of the new links and they don't do anything, that's why.

Once I've finished with the updates, I'll put a longer post up explaining where everything is and what it does.  And then, if something isn't working, feel free to tell me about it.

Okay, the update is in!  We are now running on version 1.0.  I still have to do some tweaking, and enable some of the features, but we're here!

And then... The documentation.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:57 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Update - April 23rd

New Features

Configurable Editor: mee.nu supports a variety of optional fields on posts, in addition to the standard text and more. If you want to add notes, tags, keywords, extracts, blurbs and other information to your posts, you now can select exactly which fields you want to appear on your edit page

Enhanced Edit Screen: Now you can view comments within the post edit screen, adjust the posting date and path of your posts, and as access new features like pages and sticky posts. Click on the Options link on the edit screen to access these new features.

Pages: Pages are similar to posts, except that they don't appear in the main flow of your blog. Ideal for one-off items like an "about" page.

Stickies: Posts can be flagged as announcements or sticky, which makes them appear at the top of your blog. You can also mark posts as unsticky, which makes them appear at the very end of your blog. You can manage how this is handled using the sticky, unsticky, nosticky and stickyonly options on the [posts] tag.

Prev/Next: The [post:prev] and [post:next] tags can be used in your individual entry pages to access data from the previous and next items (within the current folder, and ordered by posting date). The [post:first] and [post:last] tags similarly provide access to the first and last posts. By adding the mode=category option, you can restrict the selection to the present post's category.

Cache Control: In some cases, you may not want a page to be cached, for example, when you are working with dynamic CSS that is customised for the user's browser. You can now select whether pages are cached on a per-folder basis.

Enhanced Performance: Pages are now generated up to 40% faster, with the greatest gains on pages with lots of comments.

Video: New BBCode tags for Eyespot, iFilm, Guba and Veoh.

BBCode: New image tag [img]...[/img] is compatible with many web forums, and with (for example) Photobucket.

The pullquote tag makes for easy and attractive magazine-style pullquotes. You can place the pullquote to the left or right of the text, set your own colour schemes, control the line breaks yourself or let the system handle it for you, and select different text for the quote and the main body.

Enhanced Include: When including a sub-template, you can now specify any number of parameters. These are substituted into the new template as specified by place-markers of the form {1}, {2}, {3}...

Variables As Parameters: You can now use template variables as parameters to template tags. To indicate that a parameter should be read from a variable, prefix the variable name with $. (Note that you can't do this for parameter values, yet; the variable must contain the entire parameter.)

mee.fm: mee.fm is our forthcoming podcasting and internet raido sister-site. Every mee.nu blog comes with a free companion mee.fm site. Your mee.fm site currently resolves to your existing mee.nu blog; in the future you will have the ability to create it as a separate site. Right now, you can see which site a user is accessing via the [page.domain] tag, which will return either mee.nu or mee.fm.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed bug from 17th April update which broke search function. (200)
• Added nospace, underscore formatting options. (190)
• Fixed default RSS template. (188)
• Completed update of post selection. (164)
• Images and videos allowed in comments for registered users. (141)
• Hotlink prevention. (110)

more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:24 AM | Comments (17) | Add Comment
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Update Schedule - April 23rd and 24th

The next update will be Monday April 23rd at 2AM GMT. 

One of the features didn't quite make it in time, so there will be another update Tuesday April 24th at 6AM GMT.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:28 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Update - April 16th

Okay, the update that was held over from yesterday is now in place.  Here's a brief description of what's new; I'll be running tests to make sure that everything made it okay, then post some documentation.

New Features

Caching Module: The system now caches pages in memory as they are created.  If additional requests for a given page arrive within the timeout period (currently 120 seconds), the page will be served directly from the cache rather than generated by the template engine. 

The purpose of this is to improve the handling of situations where a high-traffic site - Slashdot, Fark, Instapundit, Drudge Report - links to a site or page on mee.nu.  Fetching a page from the cache can be 20x to 60x faster than re-creating it from the templates.

I'll post more details on the caching system in the Docs section shortly.

Archives: Simply by appending /archive/year/month to any folder-level request - your main index, for example, or a category page - you can get an archive for that folder.

So mee.nu/archive/2007 will show all the news for 2007, and mee.nu/archive/2007/4 will show the news for April 2007.

Templates: BBCode and smilies are now supported in your templates.  This can be set as an option on each template.

Video: New BBCode tags for Google Video, LiveLeak, Jumpcut, Vimeo, Revver and Heep.

Wiki and Search Links: New BBCode tags for Wiktionary, TVTropes, ThePPN, Google, Technorati and Sourceforge.

Bug Fixes and Minor Changes

• The search function now works. It was actually searching properly, but not displaying the results due to a problem in the standard templates. (7), (165)
• Spurious timeouts when uploading large files should no longer occur.  Please report back to me if this still happens to you. (145)
• No error is generated if you don't specify a file for upload.  You will simply be redirected back to the upload page. (133)
• If you clicked in the More editor, but didn't enter any text, the editor would generate an invisible line break, which would cause the more... link to appear on your page.  This no longer happens for new entries, but you may need to re-save your old entries. (140)
• The page generation data shown at the bottom of many pages has been simplified. (158)
• The pager (the widget that allows you to move from one page to the next) and the page generation data now follow the pager and pageinfo CSS classes, and no longer have any embedded styling or positioning. (146)
  
• Converting images to GIF format no longer produces a low-quality dithered image.  A new image filter, Dither, has been provided if you want to use this effect. (120)
• Several fixes have been made to improve the set of tags for posts, comments, and topics, and bring them into line with the documentation. (164)
  
• Fixed issues with relative paths for images added using the editor. (163)
• Mixed case supported in filenames. (161)
• Image and video tags only allowed in comments by registered users. (136)
• Syndication feeds now work correctly for categories and other subfolders. (166)
• Corrected issues with conditional tags: handling of undefined variables; handling of numeric zero; else case with multiple conditions in template. (131), (177), (179)

more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:37 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Bug Update

I still don't have a fix for the bug that occasionally causes the application to fail, but I do have a workaround.  I will be running multiple copies of the application so that if any one instance fails, the other copies will take up the load until the failed instance can be restarted - which should happen within a matter of seconds.

I'll be putting this in place tomorrow; unfortunately the change itself requires a brief outage, so the system will be unavailable for up to 5 minutes from Friday 13th April 2:00 GMT.

Right now - you may have seen a brief hiccup - I have put a new and more reliable automatic restart script in place.

This should give us a more stable system while I track down the problem.

Update: The change is in place - five minutes early.  We now have load balancing and automatic failover between three copies of the application.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:19 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Feature Update

Want to find out who else is here at mee.nu?  Check out our new sites listing!

If you'd rather your site didn't appear on this list, just tick the Hidden box on your Manage->Site page.  (Also, if you don't give your site a name, it won't show up.)

(Sorry about those brief hiccups, by the way; I had to manually restart the application when I applied these updates.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:30 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Code Update

Hi everyone.

I've uploaded some fixes for bugs we've found over the last couple of days.  This also incorporates some additional spam filtering: Comments that look spam-ish will be marked with a junk score; if this is greater than 5 the comment will be held for moderation and won't show on the page.  Go to your Content->Comments screen to moderate these; you can set them as Not Junk or delete them as appropriate.

One issue with this at present is that Junk comments are included in the comment count, so this may show a higher number than the number of visible comments.  I'll be addressing this in a future update; in any case, this corrects itself once you moderate the comment either way.

I've also updated the posting page; the Status field is now rather more orderly, and adds a couple of additional options that you may find useful.

One tip: The Delete status on the posting screen just marks a post for later deleting.  The With selected... Delete on the posts listing actually removes the post immediately.  Be careful with that one!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:37 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Oops

We were having a problem with some of our SQL queries - relating to the exact behaviour of the MySQL C API - but this now appears to be fixed.  Details below if you're interested.
more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:11 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Another Brief Outage

We were down for a minute or so, but this time I saw the error that probably caused the outage last night.  I'll be doing some research on that, but in the meantime my automatic restart script should keep things under control.


more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:33 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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