April 08, 2007

Posting Questions

Can't post?  Can't post the right way? Wondering about features like categories, or how to use all those little check boxes?  Ask away.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:47 AM | Comments (51) | Add Comment
Post contains 25 words, total size 1 kb.

1

Drat, it ate my first comment.

I think there's something ownky with the post status pulldown. I saved a post as "draft", and when I came back, the "publish" at the top of the stauts pulldown lisy had been over written by "draft." So I tried changing to "published" to see if that would do anything. All it did was replace the first item in the lest with "published" and the post still doesn't appear.

Posted by: Will at April 10, 2007 05:40 PM (SOx9v)

2 Yes, it seems to be eating comments.  I'm working on that.

I'll get that pulldown list fixed too.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 10, 2007 05:43 PM (PiXy!)

3

Stupid newbie question: What controls the "more" tag. When I wrote this three-sentence post, I'm sure I didn't go anywhere near the "more" window, yet there it is. (Yet in the previous post it's not there.

Also reporting that the WYSIWYG post editor seems to work fine in both K-Meleon 0.9 on Windows 98 and K-Meleon 1.02 on Windows XP.

Posted by: Old Grouch at April 12, 2007 07:37 PM (FZKGS)

4 However, I see BBCode doesn't have paragraph tags.

Posted by: Old Grouch at April 12, 2007 07:38 PM (FZKGS)

5

What's Windows 98?

Dunno if there is a paragraph tag or not, but you didn't have a closing tag, so it wouldn't have worked no matter what.

You might have screwed up your post template, which caused the conditional to fail...

Posted by: McGurk at April 12, 2007 08:18 PM (Ri74D)

6 Actually, if you even click in the More box, it creates a <br> tag there, and that triggers the more... thingy.  And I just realised that the More box is stealing the cursor on page load, and it captures tabs, so it's very easy to get something in there without it being obvious.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 13, 2007 01:09 AM (PiXy!)

7 "you didn't have a closing tag"

Since the issue "lack of preview sucks" has already been thoroughly aired, I'll not be bringing it up again :-)

Posted by: Old Grouch at April 13, 2007 03:04 AM (dt7YR)

8 And hey, I'll have you know I have two machines running DOS 5.0 that still handle 90 percent of my business. So don't go woofin' at my Win98 box.

Posted by: Old Grouch at April 13, 2007 03:07 AM (dt7YR)

9 In fact, bbcode will automatically close any open tags - but it doesn't have

, as you've discovered.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 13, 2007 03:21 AM (PiXy!)

10 Old Grouch.  Very appropriate.  My dad's still using a shareware text editor to write his books that he bought for our 8088 back in 85. 

Posted by: McGurk at April 13, 2007 04:06 AM (8GzzQ)

11 Oh, and as a software developer, your legacy system scares the shit outta me...

Posted by: McGurk at April 13, 2007 04:07 AM (8GzzQ)

12 It's a Clipper point-of-sale system, with a bunch of extensions written in FoxPro. 38,000 record table (inventory) and 18,000 record table (customers). Impact printers running 2-part burst forms.

Posted by: Old Grouch at April 13, 2007 04:18 AM (+E8+c)

13 Lol... Foxpro.  You know MS is releasing Foxpro to open source?  They're going to put the entire codebase on codeplex.  No more MS support, tho.  Last time I dealt with FP was the accounting software package used by a local restaurant chain in 1999.  Fox friggin' pro...  wow.  That's some kind of bullshit.  But it works for you, I guess.  Good luck if it ever stops....

Posted by: McGurk at April 13, 2007 04:41 AM (8GzzQ)

14 Are they going to release the whole thing? Last I'd heard there was talk that they were going to withhold some of the libraries or something such.
AIUI, there is still a ton of legacy FoxPro stuff out there... not so much Clipper anymore. I've been looking at what it'd take to replicate things with newer stuff, but first impression is that the limitations of real SQL are a pain.
Yeah, I know it's fragile. Needless to say, everything is imaged and we keep two offsite backups, one in a different time zone. Anything happen bad enough to knock 'em all out, we'll probably be OB anyway.

Posted by: Old Grouch at April 13, 2007 04:56 AM (+E8+c)

15

Limitations of real sql?  Dude, you're living in a sandbox, commenting on the limitations of the playground.  Foxpro is a shitty version of Access.  Access is a shitty version of an application + Sql Server.  I may be wrong, but I believe MS developed Access in response to Foxpro, and that MS eventually bought Foxpro in order to get its client base.  Let's see: foxpro or maybe fox_pro (wikipedia links). 

Anyhow, all Fox and Access are is a VBA (visual basic for applications) development environment/execution engine pasted on the front of a database engine.  Anything you can build in Fox/Access you can build an equivalent system with VB6 with a Sql database.  And that technology's ancient. 

 

Posted by: McGurk at April 13, 2007 01:51 PM (Ri74D)

16 This is embarassing...but I can't remove the paragraph marks <<  << from my posts. Duuuh. Help.

Posted by: CJUSA at April 17, 2007 06:21 PM (9KqcB)

17 I sure thought I knew how to use the Image button. I get a red X in this entry every time. I'm inserting the HTML tag copied directly from Photobucket.com. Any suggestions?

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at April 20, 2007 11:12 AM (kowQC)

18 Does it show up in the post?  (I can't see your edit screen.)

There is a problem with the editor, and sometimes it doesn't show images, but they work when you post it.  If it's not working in the post either, that's something else.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 20, 2007 11:53 AM (PiXy!)

19 The image does not show up in the post.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at April 20, 2007 12:39 PM (md6XX)

20 Aha!

This is the problem:
">" border="0" alt="http://i173.photobucket.com/albums/w70/michaelrittenhouse/DSCN9919.jpg" />
Get rid of those img thingies and you're good.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 20, 2007 12:42 PM (PiXy!)

21 And the
[/IMG]
as well.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 20, 2007 12:43 PM (PiXy!)

22 O.G.  Clipper?!?!?!  I did about a year's worth of development in Clipper, farther back than I care to remember.  IIRC, it was a lot of fun.

Posted by: RocketJones at April 20, 2007 04:55 PM (blNMI)

23 The Clipper part was purchased (needed to have a PC-based program that could handle item part numbers as well as UPCs, and back in '91 there weren't that many around). Unfortunately, I don't have the source. Fortunately, it still works.

There were an amazing number of applications being written in XBase back then. When I was doing radio (c.a. 1985) I used a Clipper-compiled music scheduling program that ran on whatever Dell was current (amber screen!). It was pretty sophisticated: You tagged each song with characteristics (some were scaled, like "intensity", others were just flags like "male vocal." Then you gave it some rules and the program would block out the hours for you.
Of course that was long before CDDB, so we had to enter all the data ourselves.

Posted by: Old Grouch at April 20, 2007 09:54 PM (VUYEY)

24 The links on my posts are randomly not working.  Originally they all worked, but now some of them have stopped. One is a hyperlink, one is a youtube link, and the rest are smilies (which all have the exact same link except for the image name, but only some of them are having problems).  They didn't stop working at the same time either, originally it was one or two smilies then it just kept spreading.  Is there anything I can do to fix it?

Posted by: ShannenChan at April 23, 2007 05:59 PM (1mEPy)

25 Hey Pixy,
I wrote a few posts and saved them as drafts and now I can't bring them up to publish them/edit them.  It was working fine yesterday.

Also can we get an auto-save for posts or an idiot-warning like a pop up saying "Are you sure you want to leave with out saving?" for entries?
-Mookie

Posted by: Mookie at April 23, 2007 06:02 PM (qfk0K)

26
I wrote a few posts and saved them as drafts and now I can't bring them up to publish them/edit them.  It was working fine yesterday.
Whoops!  They should be back now.
Also can we get an auto-save for posts or an idiot-warning like a pop up saying "Are you sure you want to leave with out saving?" for entries?
I'll look into that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 23, 2007 06:17 PM (PiXy!)

27
The links on my posts are randomly not working.  Originally they all worked, but now some of them have stopped.
Which blog is yours, ShannenChan?  Oh, hang on, found it.  Let me take a look.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 23, 2007 06:23 PM (PiXy!)

28
They didn't stop working at the same time either, originally it was one or two smilies then it just kept spreading.  Is there anything I can do to fix it?
Found it!  You have a :/ smilie, and that is bad news to links in your posts, because it messes up the http://.  I suggest you replace it with :shrug: or something like that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 23, 2007 06:40 PM (PiXy!)

29 The basic problem is that the smilie parser isn't smart enough not to mess with your BBCode and HTML and your other smilies.  I'll see what I can do about that, but in the meantime, best to avoid common strings like :/.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 23, 2007 06:42 PM (PiXy!)

30 Okay, I've made it a bit smarter.  Now smilies like :/ don't work, but they don't break anything else either.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 23, 2007 06:51 PM (PiXy!)

31 Thank you!!

Posted by: ShannenChan at April 23, 2007 07:10 PM (1mEPy)

32 FWIW, I've put up a post about the problems some browsers have with resizing your images (when you use the img tag's width and height attributes), and what to do about it. It's here, and profusely illustrated!

Posted by: Old Grouch at May 05, 2007 05:58 PM (+oXoV)

33 Thanks OG.  That's a good post.

All the browsers I know of do a poor job at resizing images; they all use simple nearest-neighbour algorithms for the processing.  The resize function in Minx uses soft anti-aliasing, which produces much better results but takes much more CPU time.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 06, 2007 04:42 PM (PiXy!)

34
"...which produces much better results but takes much more CPU time."
But only has to be done ONCE, so think of all the energy we're saving!
Gee, I'm feeling green already LOL!

Posted by: Old Grouch at May 07, 2007 12:01 AM (qbFAY)

35 Yep.

But that's probably why browsers don't do it - on an older PC, the extra time taken to render a page with a large number of resized images could be quite noticeable.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 07, 2007 02:31 AM (PiXy!)

36 BBCode bug in interpreting "{/small}" tag. (Note: Using "{}" to replace square brackets to avoid having to escape everything.)

This screwed the formatting in this comment, and I've now posted a clean example here.

When I check the page source, I see that BBCode is outputting <small> when it sees {/small}. This means font size reduction doesn't clear. (Works correctly if you use {sm}{/sm} tags.)

On my browser (at this moment) the unclosed <small> tag makes it render everything after the broken comment on the help page in small font-- even when the comments are hidden, and including the sidebar. I posted the comment almost a week ago, and since there hasn't been any subsequent screaming I'm assuming that I'm the only one seeing this. I'll have a screenshot added to the test post shortly.

Posted by: Old Grouch at May 19, 2007 03:49 PM (TTce3)

37 Thanks, I'll get that fixed.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 20, 2007 02:29 AM (PiXy!)

38 Fixed.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 21, 2007 04:39 AM (PiXy!)

39 Thankyou!

Posted by: Old Grouch at May 21, 2007 03:46 PM (bvmTR)

40 I'm very new to this.  Wondering about the stuff below the "options" link at the bottom when constructing a New Post (or editing an existing post).

I selected "Page" from the dropdown (instead of post) and it seems to have not generated a post, or generated it is such a way that I don't know how to get to it.

Also, what do the dates in that area control?  Are they able to be changed (like the path field), or are they auto-populated and useless to try to change?  I tried changing the "Start Date" and "End Date" fields assuming they controlled the life of the post, but when I reloaded the post they were reset to previous values.

Posted by: Mob at June 15, 2007 03:35 PM (f+cPk)

41 Ah, yes.  That's what Pages do.

Pages are what you use when you want to create an entry that doesn't appear in the main flow of your blog, like an "about" page.

The start and end dates don't work just yet, sorry about that.  I should take them out until they do work.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at June 15, 2007 03:38 PM (PiXy!)

42 Is there a way to access the pages you've created?  They aren't listed in the posts list, and I can't seem find them anywhere else.  I assume once I can get to them I can link them as I would any other page on the internet.

The system seems to be intended for folks that have a bit of experience with creating blogs, so I apologize for the novice questions.

Posted by: Mob at June 15, 2007 03:46 PM (f+cPk)

43
Is there a way to access the pages you've created?  They aren't listed in the posts list, and I can't seem find them anywhere else.  I assume once I can get to them I can link them as I would any other page on the internet.
Um.  Oops.  I'll fix that.
The system seems to be intended for folks that have a bit of experience with creating blogs, so I apologize for the novice questions.
Novice questions are great, because there are a lot more novices around than experts, and the questions tell me where I need to do more work on the user interface and documentation.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at June 15, 2007 03:59 PM (PiXy!)

44 One more, then I'll leave it be for awhile (should get back to work anyway).

Duplicate post names:  If you create multiple posts with the same name, the time/date link in the "Posted by:" message (and external links to the post) will only ever take you to the newest of the posts that share the same name.  I noticed that the "path" field can be used to circumvent this, however, this is less than obvious, especially to novices. 

Perhaps an addition of a numeral to the end of the path for duplicates (the check for duplicates may be processor intensive, especially on large blogs) or an addition of the timecode to the second placed after the name of the post as default path.  (newpost_061507122223)  This would allow for unique post names, but not lose the easy sight recognition by post name.

Posted by: Mob at June 15, 2007 04:30 PM (f+cPk)

45 Yes, this is a problem; I'll be changing it to add a counter as you say.  That will be an option, but turned on by default.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at June 15, 2007 04:34 PM (PiXy!)

46 Hi Pixy!
Still having problems with the post date change option.

What I did:
Had a post that I started on 7/7, but wasn't able to finish, so saved as "Draft." Wrote and published several later posts.
Came back to the draft today, and finished it. Saved text changes as draft, then reopened, changed menu to "publish", clicked options, changed date to today's date and current GMT by editing the existing entry. Clicked elsewhere to get cursor out of the time/date box. Clicked "Save".
Result: post was published, but with the original date, and in the original order, that is below all the subsequent posts. My error?

Posted by: Old Grouch at July 14, 2007 07:15 PM (VUYEY)

47 Did you enter the date in YYYY-MM-DD format?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at July 15, 2007 03:19 AM (PiXy!)

48 Yes. I actually edited the existing entry (to make sure I preserved format and spacing), should I have replaced it?

Posted by: Old Grouch at July 16, 2007 08:07 PM (4St3+)

49 question, I'd like to use Windows Live Writer with this system. which Blogging system is this thing using?

help!

-Chuck


Posted by: ChuckAdkins at January 04, 2008 11:05 PM (PyW0p)

50 I've looked through all the docs and helps and questions and if the answer is there I'm just not clever enough to find it. Is it possible to schedule a post to publish at a later date or time? I tried editing the date and time in the options window but it just posted the entry with the date and time I entered. I tried it with setting the post status to pending but the appointed time came and nothing happened.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at April 19, 2008 12:59 AM (R7LgM)

51 Trying to post a link in a post, and it's prefaced by my blog address, which renders the link useless. I searched for a bit, but didn't find anything.

Also, can't find information on blogrolls, either.

Posted by: Jay in Ames at November 04, 2009 06:19 PM (UEEex)

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