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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:37 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 189 words, total size 2 kb.

There's a new BBCode tag in town - two tags, in fact - and the name of the game is slideshows.

[slideshow {group=groupid} {size=expression|resize=expression} {title=text} {alt=text}]
[slide=path {group=groupid} {size=expression|resize=expression} {title=text} {alt=text}]

The [slide] tag works very much like the [img] tag.  The difference is that instead of simply embedding an image in your page, it creates a thumbnail for the image and a link that will bring up the full-size image as part of a slideshow.  (You'll need to update your blog to 1.1 to get the full effect, but the thumbnail and link will work on older sites.)

The [slideshow] tag lets you set up the default values for a slideshow.  The group can be used if you want to have two separate slideshows in a post; simple give them different ID's.  The size or resize value can be used to automatically make all your thumbnails the same size, sparing you from specifying this each time.

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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:32 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 324 words, total size 4 kb.

Just a quick outage to do some database changes for the upcoming 1.2 release.  Downtime should be less than five minutes.

Update: Done!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:58 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 30 words, total size 1 kb.

A couple of users have alerted me to the fact that the Style Images editor doesn't work quite as it should under Internet Explorer, with differing problems arising depending on whether you're using IE6 or IE7.

I'll be doing additional testing and fixing those problems very soon.  In the meantime, if you need to create Style Images, I highly recommend the Firefox browser.

A Note On Browser Support

Minx (the blogging application that runs mee.nu) is developed against Firefox and then tested under Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari.  Usually you only need to make sure that pages render correctly; however, active user interface pages require more testing and problems can slip through.

We intend to fully support all four major browsers on all platforms.  Currently, there are major issues with the WYSIWYG editor on both Opera and Safari; we will shortly be adding an alternative editor that supports all four browsers.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:03 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 154 words, total size 1 kb.

Minx doesn't email you when new comments or private messages arrive.  It could - it would be easy to do - but I don't want to be sending out thousands (and eventually millions) of emails a day.  There are all sorts of problems with being a high-volume email source, and I'd rather simply not go there.

But it's very useful to be alerted to incoming comments (and private messages!) without having to visit your site every ten minutes.  So how else can this be achieved?

Well, there's RSS.  Minx already supports automatic RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds (and you can customise it to support other formats).  Why not add an RSS feed of comments?

Comments are public, so an RSS feed of them isn't an issue.  (Not true of private messages, but we'll get to that.)  But maybe you don't want everyone to see spam or unapproved comments.  Well, you can set up a hidden feed.  Or the system can do that automatically for you.  If your public comment feed is at http://mysite.mee.nu/feed/comments, and your private comment feed is at, say, http://mysite.mee.nu/feed/comments/aj69c0, you'd have to try an average of a billion combinations before getting access to someone's private comment feed. 

There would be a link in the editing interface so you could subscribe with one click, and easy-peasy, comment notification.

I could certainly do the same with private messages.  If you're sensitive about those and worried about that 1 in a billion chance, I can have an option where the RSS feed only shows the arrival of a new message, and not the sender or contents.

I could also do secured feeds, but that's more fiddly and many popular readers don't support them.

So, what do you think?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:50 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
Post contains 291 words, total size 2 kb.

So, you may have noticed that we have these wonderful new banners and layouts and stuff.  And you may be asking how do you use this?

Here's how!

Converting to 1.1

If you have an original style blog - if your banner doesn't look something like the above - the first thing you'll need to do is update your site to 1.1. 

This is very easy to do.  In your edit menu, got to Styles.  You will see an option Choose a theme... Update to 1.1.  All the themes are similar, varying only in the banner image and some colours.  You can see the basic images used to produce the banners here.  If you want to customise your starter banner, you can grab the images from that page.



Click the button, and your blog will be transformed!

(Note: You may need to do a forced reload of your site to pick up changes immediately when you are working with styles.  In most browsers, you can do this by holding down the shift key and clicking the reload (refresh) button.)


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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:31 AM | Comments (15) | Add Comment
Post contains 952 words, total size 7 kb.

These are the images used by the standard Minx 1.1 themes.  If you want to modify a "Starter Banner" generated by the theme builder, grab the matching photo from here (or whatever photo you like), upload it to your images directory, and select it in the Style Images editor.

Just right-click on the image you want, and choose "Save link as...", and take it from there.

Photos







(These photos courtesy PD Photo.org.)


Gradients





(These images courtesy me.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:27 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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You may have noticed an odd problem with individual entry pages in the 1.1 templates with multi-column layouts on sites with long sidebars when browsing with Firefox.

This has been fixed.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:30 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 35 words, total size 1 kb.

I've just put in place an updated version of the comment listing and moderation screen.  The new version lets you see the full (HTML) text of the comment and the commenter's email (if supplied).  Let me know what you think, and definitely let me know if you have any problems using this (or any other) screen.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:57 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 59 words, total size 1 kb.

Sorry about that.  We were down for five or six minutes due to an error in an update file.

Fortunately the automatic notification system worked: I received nearly three hundred emails from the software telling me there was a problem...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:21 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 42 words, total size 1 kb.