TagsTagsYouTube videos may now be embedded in comments again. The procedure is the same: 1) Browse to a YouTube video. 2) Copy/paste the web address of the video (shown at the top of your browser window - not the YouTube embed link!) into the comment. 3) The address will be automagically converted into ...
Yes, the unthinkable has come to pass, on this Christmas day — you can now embed a YouTube video in a comment, assuming you’re registered and in good standing. How to do it: 1) Browse to a YouTube video. 2) Copy/paste the web address of the video (shown at the top of your ...
Our individual comment pages now include all the tools that are visible on the full comment threads, including ratings, favorites, and reporting. You get to one of these individual comment pages by clicking the number of a comment (at top left of each comment). It’s a way for you to link ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Comments, Ajax, Javascript, Ratings, Favorites
Some tips on using our search feature, with the execrable Pat Buchanan as an example: * All searches are case-insensitive. “Pat Buchanan” is the same as “pat buchanan.” So don’t worry about the Shift key. * If you want to search for all LGF front page articles that contain the exact phrase ...
We discovered a bug in our Ajax commenting system this morning, and the fix involved changing several important files. And you know what that means: time to reload the page.
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Javascript, jQuery, HTML, Comments
I had to take down the front page live comment updates for a couple of days to figure out why MySQL was deadlocking. We all know how painful that can be. Turns out that MyISAM tables suffer from an obscure problem related to concurrent reads and writes, that’s exacerbated when the ...
We have a new feature on the LGF front page: if you’re registered and logged in, the last comment information that shows at the bottom right of each article is now live. Every 15 seconds an Ajax routine checks the last comment for each article on the front page, and if ...
If you’re registered and logged in to your account, you can click the icon next to the username in comments to show that commenter’s profile. Now included in the profile information is the “karma,” the sum total of all the “up” ratings Username X received, minus the “down” ratings Username ...
A new addition to the site, although you wouldn’t know it unless you look at the source code: Mint, a nicely-designed site statistics package with a slick Ajax interface by Shaun Inman. Quickie review: very simple to install, and started working flawlessly right away with almost no perceptible impact on the ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Javascript, jQuery, Mint, Statistics, Ajax
In the latest tech note that will inevitably become an open thread, still more outdated code has been trimmed, modernized, and tightened up in the LGF Blog Engine templates. The comment entry form that registered users see is now table-free, using floated elements to create a table-like look for the ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Javascript, jQuery, HTML, Comments, Optimization, CSS
Behind the scenes, the LGF Blog Engine code is being radically reworked, especially in pages with comments. By optimizing the HTML/Javascript/CSS design, we’ve managed to reduce the size (defined as the amount of HTML code it takes to render the comment in your browser) of each individual comment by about ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Javascript, jQuery, HTML, Comments, Optimization
It’s time to reload the page, as we’ve made structural changes to the HTML and Javascript code to make comments pages significantly smaller and less complex, which should help keep the hamsters from going totally insane.
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Javascript, jQuery, HTML, Comments
If you’re using Internet Explorer version 6, you may have noticed the left sidebar seemingly disappearing. It wasn’t really disappearing, it was being pushed down to the bottom of the page when the “Top Rated Links” area opened up. The reason: without getting too technical, Internet Explorer is simply the buggiest ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, CSS, HTML, Web Design, Internet Explorer, IE6
If you were having trouble seeing all the comments in longer threads with Firefox 3, reload the page and this should now be fixed. Apparently the Windows version of Firefox has a serious bug with its implementation of the CSS “overflow” property, which we added to a certain page element ...
The latest change behind the scenes is huge, but hopefully you won’t even notice. Ever since LGF began, back in the Paleostinky Era, our main template has been based around a simple HTML table with three columns. No nested tables (gasp!) or anything like that, but in the world of web ...
Just to see what happens, we’ve deleted a bunch of the IP blocking rules from our .htaccess file tonight. Since most bloggers don’t watch for (and block) robots and spammers as diligently as Stinky Beaumont does, I suspect we’ve been artificially deflating our traffic numbers in comparison to other blogs. ...
If you’ve been having any of the following problems at LGF: * Login from the main page doesn’t work, but clicking through to an article page and logging in does. * The “top rated links” area just spins and spins and doesn’t open, until you click through to another LGF page. * The ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, Javascript, Security, htaccess, mod_rewrite
Stinky Beaumont is project-managing a major code refactoring process this weekend, that we’ve been putting off because it’s painful. We’re talking duplicated code. Global variables. Inconsistent variable naming. Remnants from the days before we started coding smart, instead of just getting it working. It’s not all like this, but the ...
I’m testing out ShareThis, a small Javascript addition that consolidates all the “sharing” functions into one button, replacing that row of links that formerly read “digg, newsvine, reddit,” etc. In addition to looking less cluttered, this has the highly desirable side effect of reducing the download size of the front page, ...
Tech Note, LGF Blog Engine, sharethis, Social Networking, Javascript
We have some new icons in that little information area that shows up at the bottom right of each post; they replace the text links that used to be in that section. The number of comments for each post is now shown with larger digits, followed by the icons: Go ...
The spinoff links redesign is complete, with styles to match the rest of the site. Gone are the clunky HTML tables, replaced by nice, clean, relatively semantic markup. Stinky Beaumont says they look like the kind of spinoff links his mom would have baked. But he had a weird mom. As always, ...
Tech Note, Icons, Graphics, Design, Spinoff Links, LGF Blog Engine
A new addition: LGF front page articles are now categorized, with a limited set of broad categories brazenly lifted from Yahoo’s Buzz categories as described on this page. Deliberate simplicity is often the best solution, but I can easily add more categories as needed. For example, I’ve added “Open” (for open ...
Extending our comment reporting feature to the spinoff links feature is a natural. Like comments, the links are content supplied by our users, and occasionally a link will be posted that is inappropriate for one reason or another and needs to be deleted. So, when you’re logged in to your LGF ...
LGF now offers video on demand, thanks to Reuters’ decision to make some of their news video available through RSS: lgf: Reuters Video Feeds. There are some big improvements since I first launched this page yesterday; video operation has been debugged (no more simultaneous playback of different feeds), and playlists ...
Al-Reuters has begun providing their video reports (sometimes raw and unedited, and possibly more interesting than the massaged reports that end up on TV) in the form of RSS playlists, and I’ve set up a new page to view these video feeds here: Reuters Video Feeds. This is the first version of ...