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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 ...
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 ...
An open thread for a Friday morning; I’m chasing down a long-running, very annoying character translation bug, that causes Western European characters (with accènts, ümlauts, etc.) to show up as garbage when the Ajax system transfers them back and forth from the server. I’m pretty sure I’ve finally killed the ...
The new “avatar” feature is really getting a workout; nearly 1,400 LGF lizards have uploaded their own personal graphics. Today I fixed several bugs in the uploading system, some small, some large. I discovered that PHP’s image manipulation functions don’t like the files produced by Canon digital cameras, and possibly ...
UPDATE at 11/4/07 2:05:42 pm: This is what I’m reading in the bathroom, but please note: the picture was not taken in my bathroom. I do not keep a laptop computer in my bathroom.
LGF, Photograph, Technical, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, CSS
This is a quick update on the changes in navigating LGF that I’ve made in the past few days. To keep everything as straightforward as possible, the front page now will show only the current day’s worth of posts. There’s a setting in the LGF Blog Engine for the number ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, PHP, Refactoring, Comments, Ajax, jQuery, Calendar, Archives
At the top and bottom of our front page you will now see a navigation panel that lets you step back by days from the last day on the front page. If you click the link to go back a day, you’re in our “daily viewing” mode, and there will ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, PHP, Refactoring, Comments, Ajax, jQuery, Calendar, Archives
In our left sidebar, just below the panel with our statistics, you’ll now see a button labeled ‘Daily Archives.’ Click that baby and you can choose to view any day’s worth of LGF posts with the popup calendar. I installed this last night as an embedded calendar (i.e., always visible) ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, PHP, Refactoring, Comments, Ajax, jQuery, Calendar, Archives
The latest changes to announce: 1) The monthly archive pages now show only an excerpt of each post, without images, videos, or any other bandwidth-hungry items, with a link to the individual entry page that contains the full post. Atomization, baby. 2) The LGF Search module now uses a better ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, PHP, Refactoring, Comments, Ajax, jQuery
At the current rate of comment posting, we’re going to break through the Four Million Barrier in about four more days, sometime next Monday evening or Tuesday morning. The Ajax system has had a huge impact on the number of comments posted, and at the same time reduced our bandwidth ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, PHP, Refactoring, Comments, Ajax, jQuery
More than 5,000 comments today; I’ve created a monster!
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, PHP, Refactoring, Comments, Ajax, jQuery
Here’s an open thread for a hump day afternoon. And since tech threads always turn into open threads anyway, here’s another bit of info that might be interesting to Javascript geeks. I mentioned that I’ve been working with the jQuery Javascript library to do the ‘slide down’ special effects in ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, PHP, Refactoring, Comments, Ajax, jQuery
The new Ajax comment system is working so well that the number of comments per day has increased dramatically; it’s more than doubled, in fact. With the Ajax code, it’s easy to continue discussions even when the thread gets very long, since it doesn’t require a page reload any more ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, PHP, Refactoring, Comments, Ajax
An open thread for a warm Tuesday at dusk, and another in a seemingly endless series of technical updates, as I implore our gentle readers yet again to use their browser’s ‘reload’ (or as IE calls it, ‘refresh’) button and refresh the page. The Javascript and PHP code that drives ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, PHP, Refactoring, Comments, Ajax
Here’s an open thread, and a technical update: the animated sliding effect on our comment preview function is back. It turns out the jQuery developers were aware of the bug with older versions of Safari and had already found the fix. Downloading the nightly build fixed the problem. So to ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, PHP, Refactoring, Comments, Ajax
Here’s an open thread for a warm Monday evening (warm where I am, anyway). Again I must urge you, gentle reader, to use your browser’s ‘reload’ button, because our Ajax code has changed a bit and you won’t be running the latest, greatest version if you don’t ... reload. The ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, PHP, Refactoring, Comments, Ajax
We had a very good shakeout test for the new system over the past couple of days; releasing it Friday caused a pretty remarkable surge of comments (over 7,000), setting an all-time record even though most of them were just in open threads. That stress test revealed a synchronization problem ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, PHP, Refactoring, Comments, Ajax
Again, I remind everyone that if you see any unusual displays when you click the ‘new comments’ button (e.g., repeated posts, or the word ‘undefined’), your browser is probably running an outdated version of the Javascript code. Some of you may need to do more than simply reload the page ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, PHP, Refactoring, Comments, Ajax
Here’s our first Saturday open thread for LGF readers to play with our new Ajax-driven commenting system. Today I’m trying a different SQL query to get the new comments, which should fix the incorrect post numbering and duplicate posts some of you have noticed, so have at it...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, PHP, Refactoring, Comments, Ajax
The LGF commenting system now feels almost like a chat room; the post announcing the new Ajax feature has nearly 1,000 comments in less than 3 hours, and the second open thread is nearing 500 as I write. So here’s another open thread while we shake out the bugs and ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, PHP, Refactoring, Comments, Ajax
It’s time to put the pedal to the metal, lizards. Our commenting system will now switch into overdrive. Reload your LGF page now. You’ll need to refresh in order to get all the Javascript modules correctly loaded. Then get ready to experience a new type of blog commenting. This has ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, PHP, Refactoring, Comments, Ajax
We have a very cool enhancement to announce: our comment preview feature, that lets you see what a comment will look like with all your formatting before you post it, is now driven by Ajax. For years, when you clicked the ‘preview’ button, you were taken to a separate page. ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, PHP, Refactoring, Comments, Ajax
When you’re logged in to your LGF account, you’ll now see two little blue links in the top bar of each comment, labeled ‘reply’ and ‘quote’. Here’s what they do: Reply - inserts the number and author of the comment into the posting form, to quickly reply to something you ...
LGF, Technical Info, Javascript, PHP, Refactoring, Comments, Ajax