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Our left-column Ajax RSS widget, with a drop-down list of news sites and blogs that lets you check out their current RSS feeds, has been completely rewritten. The code now uses PHP’s native SimpleXML object library to parse all three flavors of RSS (0.92, 1.0, and 2.0) or ATOM feeds. ...
As I mentioned yesterday, I recently discovered that the LGF server was running PHP 5, not PHP 4 as I thought, and I’ve been like a geek in a gadget store ever since. For years, the RSS news and blog feeds in our left sidebar were driven by a PHP ...
Here’s a tech note, also known as an open thread, as I delve into the wealth of new goodies in PHP 5. At some point after installing our new server last year, our gracious, kind, and all-powerful web hosting company upgraded our version of PHP from version 4 to version ...
Our latest addition to The Blog codebase is a button to let you “retweet” an LGF article. “Retweeting” is a common way for people to spread interesting content around on Twitter. Since each article is already automatically posted to Twitter, your tweet is prefaced with the standard Twitter syntax to ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Twitter, Javascript, jQuery, John Resig, Retweet
Stop the presses! New feature alert! OK, maybe you don’t need to actually stop any presses, but we have a new feature in the LGF Comment Engine: embedded MP3 files. It works just like the embedded video feature: you put the URL of an MP3 file on its own line ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Comments, Audio, Javascript, Media, jQuery
I’ve been doing a lot of work on the LGF Blog code behind the scenes, so as always, if a feature doesn’t seem to be working correctly, the first thing to try is reloading the page. Bugs get fixed quickly, so reloading will often make all your problems disappear. Well, ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Spinoff Links, Ajax, jQuery, Javascript
If you experience any weirdness when trying to submit a link to our spinoff links, it’s because Stinky Beaumont and I are working on the plumbing again, to optimize the loading of page elements. In the meantime, here’s an open thread...
We’re trying out an advertising service called Infolinks, which analyzes the page content and creates links in the text that pop up a little dialog box when your mouse hovers over them, containing an advertisement or link to a related site. The dialog box goes away automatically when you move ...
Registered users have been able to embed video clips in their LGF comments for several months; today I added a new format to the list of embeddable video types: Vimeo.com. To embed a Vimeo clip in a comment, go to the page at the Vimeo website that has the video, ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Comments, Video, Javascript, Media, jQuery
We’re pulling the cover off a new feature for the LGF Blog — a “timeout” block, instead of a permanent block. It’s a temporary block on a registered lizard’s account that expires in 24 hours. Intense consultation, lengthy meetings, and heinously expensive focus-grouping resulted in the consensus that we need ...
Open Thread, Private, Lizard Lounge, Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine
For years, the LGF front page has contained the last 3 to 5 days worth of posts, which can result in rather large pages depending on the content in the posts. I’m experimenting today with a single day’s worth of posts on the front page, to cut the size considerably ...
Since I received two emails last night asking why LGF doesn’t have a Twitter page—here’s another reminder that as of last week, we do have automatic updates on Twitter every time a new post appears. To receive these updates, follow the Lizardoid.
As an excuse for an open thread, here’s another reminder that LGF now has automatic updates on Twitter, every time a new post appears out of the phlogiston.
A new feature of the LGF Blog: a little checkbox underneath the comments area, labeled “Auto.” When checked, this option will automagically load and display any new comments in a thread, at 10 second intervals. (If you’re registered and logged in to your account, that is.) When you’re typing a ...
In case you missed our announcement last Sunday, we have a new feature in the LGF Blog that automatically sends a Twitter update when a new article is posted. Here’s the page where you can follow the tweeting lizardoid.
Using the Twitter API, the LGF Blog now automatically sends out a Twitter update whenever a new article is posted. A “tweet,” if you will. To get these tweets, follow the lizardoid. UPDATE at 3/15/09 12:09:21 pm: Ed Driscoll has a video intro to the wonders of tweeting: Twitter On ...
Occasionally LGF readers ask about the purposes of the icons at the bottom right of each front page article. “What do those things do? If I click them, will they hurt me?” they ask, plaintively. Nope, they’re not gonna hurt you. Here’s a quick reference card: (Some of the ...
It’s back to jQuery 1.2.6 again; the new version needs just a bit more tweaking and tuning and bug eradication to be all it can be. We discovered a couple of spots in our code where version 1.3.1 was executing some DOM lookups much more slowly than the older version, ...
We’re giving the bug-fix release of jQuery (v1.3.1) a try, to see how it behaves in the LGF jungle. With the first 1.3 release, as noted earlier, we received complaints from more than a few readers of various sorts of problems. We’ve tested this version in Internet Explorer 6 and ...
We’ve had too many reports of problems with AOL browsers, Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox versions earlier than 3, etc., so we’ve reached the reluctant conclusion that we must revert back to jQuery 1.2.6. We haven’t been able to duplicate most of the reported problems, but our development systems are ...
Gifts for geeks! A major update for the indispensable Javascript library jQuery has been released into the wild: jQuery 1.3 and the jQuery Foundation. They’re claiming some big speed improvements and other nice enhancements; full details are in the release notes. And they’ve also unveiled a great Ajax-based API browser, ...
We’re trying out a new tool that lets you easily share LGF articles at a whole passel of social networking sites; Digg, Yahoo Buzz, Reddit, Propeller, Newsvine, Facebook, MySpace, etc. etc. The tool is AddThis. I removed ShareThis for testing purposes; we were having occasional connection problems with ShareThis that ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Social Bookmarking, Social Networking, Sharing
One feature readers have requested for our comment ratings is the ability to simply cancel a rating (aka, a “ding”) and remove a vote. The method that we’ve been using only allowed you to reverse your ding — in other words, you could only change your rating from plus to ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Spinoff Links, Ratings, Comments
By popular demand (actually by request of two or three people) the ratings for spinoff links can now be reversed, just like the ratings for comments and articles. And the ratings buttons now have those super keen CSS rollover effects as well.
Yes, that image replacement and CSS rollover effect has now been applied to the row of icons at upper right of each comment. You must now reload the page to install the proper Javascript and CSS files.
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Icons, Image Replacement, CSS, HTML, Accessibility