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...

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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.

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Include

Quickly Process another template and add the results to the current page.

Usage [include {args}]
[include:once {args}]

Type control tag

Data Fields n/a
more...

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Formatting Options

You can add formatting to any data tag using the format= option. The main formatting commands are described below.

Date and Time

Dates and times use a format string as described below. You can use any combination of formatting options and text in the format string. If the format string contains spaces, you will need to enclose it in either single or double quotes.

Date Formatting Options

Code	Meaning	Examples
%a	Abbreviated weekday name.	Tue, Thu
%A	Full weekday name.	Tuesday, Thursday
%b	Abbreviated month name	Jan, Aug
%B	Full month name.	January, August
%c	Date and time.	Tue Apr 3 14:53:38 2007
%d	Day of month.	3
%j	Day of year.	093
%m	Month.	1, 8
%U	Week of year (weeks starting Sunday).	13
%W	Week of year (weeks starting Monday).	13
%x	Date (mm/dd/yy).	04/03/07
%y	Year.	07
%Y	Year with century.	2007

Time Formatting Options

Code	Meaning	Examples
%H	Hour (24-hour clock).	11, 23
%I	Hour (12-hour clock).	11, 11
%M	Minute.	03, 29
%p	AM or PM.	AM, PM
%S	Second.	15, 59
%X	Time.	14:53:38

Some Examples

Code	Result
%A, %B %d	Monday, April 09
%I:%M %p	08:57 PM
%A, %B %d %Y %I:%M %p	Monday, April 09 2007 08:57 PM
%Y-%m-%d	2007-04-09

Example: [post.date format="%I:%M %p"]

Text

Multiple text formatting options can be applied by separating the commands with commas. The formatting commands are applied in the order they are listed. Example: [post.text format="first=100,underscore,lower"].

Option	Description
left=n	Returns the first n characters of the text.
right=n	Returns the last n characters of the text.
first=n	Returns the first n words of the text.
last=n	Returns the last n words of the text.
trim	Removes any leading and trailing spaces.
trim=s	Removes any leading or trailing instances of string s.
lower	Converts text to lower case.
upper	Converts text to upper case.
words	Returns the number of words in the text.
letters	Returns the number of letters in the text.
nospace	Removes any spaces from the text.
underscore	Convert any spaces in the text to underscores.

Numbers

Number formatting works by placing the formatted value into a string containing both formatting options and text.

Option	Description
%d	Signed integer decimal.
%i	Signed integer decimal.
%o	Unsigned octal.
%u	Unsigned decimal.
%x	Unsigned hexadecimal (lower case).
%X	Unsigned hexadecimal (upper case).
%e	Floating point exponential (lower case).
%E	Floating point exponential (lower case).
%f	Floating point decimal format.
%F	Floating point decimal format.
%g	Variable floating point format.
%G	Variable floating point format.
%s	Default representation.
%%	% symbol.

As an example, you could have [post.words format="There are %d words in this post."]

Each of the numeric formatting options can take a number of flags:

Flag	Description	Example
0	Zero fill the result.	%0d
-	Left-adjust the result	%-d
	(Space) Leave a space before a positive result.	% d
+	Always show a leading + or -.	%+d

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Feed.RSS2 - Standard Template

The standard RSS2 template.  This is specified in the feed template for each folder; I will be adding fields so that you can specify custom per-folder atom and archive templates.  The default type is "Feed" and the default name "RSS2".

Currently, you can only have two automatic feeds per folder, RSS and Atom.  Some other systems support RSS 0.92 and RSS 1.0; I've decided to concentrate on the more modern (and simpler) feed formats.  It is possible to create additional feeds by setting up your own parallel linked folder structure, but I'm not sure that there's a lot of requirement for that.
more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:04 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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Feed.Atom - Standard Template

This is the standard Atom template.  To create your own, the type should be "Feed" and the template "Atom".
more...

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Header - Standard Template

Some notes about this one

<base>

[page.base] is the base directory for your current folder.  This is used so that relative paths for links and images will still work for archives, where additional "directory" levels are appended to the URL.  This may need some tweaking to accommodate your own multiple directory levels.

The target option here controls how links are opened: _self makes them open in the current window; _blank will make each new link open in a new window (or tab, if your browser is set up that way).

Feeds

Both Atom and RSS feeds should be working now (sorry about that!)  The two links here should provide autodiscovery for your feeds in most browsers.  This works perfectly in Opera and IE7.  In Firefox, it does work, but automatically chooses the Atom feed without giving you an option.  This is odd, because if I add a third feed to the list, Firefox presents a menu for all three.

Both feeds validate, with some warnings in some cases; I'll be working on tidying that up so that they validate perfectly in all cases.  (Using the validator at feedvalidator.org.)

Doctype

The doctype is given as XHTML1 Transitional.  There's no way for me to guarantee that Minx generates valid XHTML1, short of running it through something like Tidy, which would double the load on the server.  I will work on cleaning up the standard templates, so that at least a freshly created blog will validate cleanly.
more...

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Some Quick Notes About Caching

The caching module is designed to keep the most frequently requested pages in memory so that they can be served more quickly.  Every time you request a page, the server first checks if it already has a copy in the cache.  If it doesn't, it creates the page from the templates, and then saves a copy in the cache - possibly pushing an older page out of the way to do so.

Pages live in the cache for a limited amount of time, currently 120 seconds.  They are automatically flushed (removed from the cache) after certain events; leaving a comment on a page, for example, will flush that individual page.  And pages are never cached if you are logged in, so you will never see an old copy of a page while you are maintaining your site.

The real benefit of the cache comes in when you get a link from a high-traffic site like Slashdot, Fark, or Instapundit.  The main page of my blog currently takes around 400 milliseconds to generate (it has a lot of comments...) Once in the cache, it takes just 3.5 milliseconds - over 100x faster.  You can imagine the difference that would make to the server if I got 10,000 visitors in the space of an hour.  Typically the performance gain would be somewhat less than that, in the range of 20x to 60x, but still definitely worthwhile.

If you log out and reload a page a couple of times, you'll see that the system actually tells you that it's coming from the cache, so you can keep an eye on this yourself.

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Update Schedule

I'll be applying a number of smaller updates this week, beginning with Tuesday 17th, again at 6AM GMT.  None of these updates should cause any more than a minute or so of downtime.

Update: April 17th update done.  This puts in place several minor fixes, and the new sorting and selection options for the [posts] tag.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:21 AM | Comments (7) | 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...

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