1 Moron requests help. Am trying to post with an embedded link
Example : Type in "Read an interesting article at Breitbart   today and thought you might like a look" and expect it to display as "Read an interesting article at Breitbart today and thought you might like a look"(making the word Breitbart a hyperlink). Instead it displays all the html (or BBCODE). What am I doing wrong?

2 If you just type the HTML into the editor, it will display the HTML code.

There are three ways to insert a link:

Use BBCode - that should work fine.
Use the little link icon in the toolbar: Select the text you want to make into a link, click on the "Hyperlink" icon (looks like a little chain), and type or paste the URL into the pop-up box.

Or (and I generally don't recommend this), use the HTML editor.  Click on the <> icon and you'll get a pop-up window where you can directly edit the HTML.  It works fine, but most people won't want to do that.

3

That's a defense measure against spammers and hostiles who try to screw up a page by embedding HTML in comments. What he's done is to make it so that the left-angle-bracket character gets escaped (turned into "&lt;") so that it doesn't trigger the browser's formatting engine.

That way the only HTML that users like you are permitted to use are the ones supported by the editor or by BBCODE, which is a carefully circumscribed list that doesn't open up vulnerabilities.

4 Pixy, bug alert: Brickmuppet made a post whose title consists of three katakana characters. There doesn't seem to be any way to link directly to it; the link that should go to the post goes to the top page. Presumably that would also be the case if other non-Roman alphabets were used.

5 Another bug alert, while I'm at it: I just looked at my "site statistics" page, and the numbers for the "template" row are completely bogus. Whatever it's supposed to mean, this probably isn't the right answer: 92233720368523288563304384

6 I got an email from Brickmuppet; I'm looking into that.

And yeah, there's something that throws the stats out; that happened to me too.  Integer underflow, maybe.  I'll see if I can find it.

7 Hi Steven.  I've fixed the bug with non-Latin characters in post titles; this will now generate a numeric URL (which you can manually override).

Still poking at the stats glitch.  It's certainly not anything obvious.

8 Hi Pixy, is the stats page supposed to be working for everybody? My "Statistics" link still puts me back to http://oldgrouch.mee.nu/edit/

9 Yeah, it's supposed to be working.

I'll take another look.  Thought I had that one fixed.

10

Pixy, somehow there was a partial post of a comment I was composing in this thread. (Unfortunately, the prose is loaded with spoilers about Shingu, and I'm sorry about that.)

I don't have any idea how it happened, especially since they both have the same timestamp. (At least to the minute.)

11 Thanks Steven.  Unfortunately there's not much to go on there; the two comments were received one second apart, but nothing really shows me why the first one was cut off or why the second one wasn't.

There's a retry-on-error system built into Minx now, but it shouldn't be happening on an HTTP POST.

Oh. Hmm.  All the text data for mee.nu (including posts and comments) is stored in MyISAM tables - which have no transaction support.  If there was an error during an insert, the Minx Query module would automatically re-connect to the database and retry the insert, but it's not smart enough to check if the original insert was partially successful.

Roll on MySQL 6.0 and the Falcon storage engine!

12

Small bug report: When I enter a new post, at the bottom I'm told that there are 1281 comments, which I presume is the total number of comments on my blog so far. Once I finish and post it, then if I look again it says 0, which is right.

That 1281 seems wrong, somehow. It's not really serious, but it could confuse people.

13 Ah, thanks.  I hadn't noticed that one.

14 Pixy, sent you an email.

15 Is there a way to make the search field search titles as well as the body of the email?

16 Not just yet, but I'm in the middle of reworking the search function right now.  Should be up in a few days (unless I run into a problem) - definitely before Christmas!

17 Pixy, how do I make my site title (MLynn's Whippet House) smaller?  It runs off the right.  Thanks, MLynn aka Mikki

18 Hi MLynn!

You want the Style Images option.  Choose your starter image, change the font size to something a little smaller, and click on save.

You might need to do a forced reload (hold down shift and click the refresh/reload button) to get the new banner to display right away.

19

My sidebar has disappeared; I no longer have my comments, my blogroll, or my archives.  Could you let me know what can be done? I would send you an e-mail, but I have no idea what server AOL uses.

Thanks!

Tim Birdnow

www.tbirdnow.mee.nu

20 My comments editor is cutting off the check boxes, making it impossible to delete spam comments. Any help would be appreciated.

Tim Birdnow

www.tbirdnow.mee.nu