Dangling Conversations

Posted 06 Sep, 2006 at 20:40 by matt in /System | Permanent link

Today, in addition to being the birthday of one of the authors (hi Brent!), is the second bloggiversary of Dangling Conversations. Given that the front page still has posts from freakin' April on it, it's fair to say that the initial excitement has died down substantially.

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Posted 17 Jan, 2006 at 16:39 by matt in /System | Permanent link

You'll notice in the sidebar that we've got a new author on the site: Lisa, whose name has probably come up before in the context of being Brent's wife. Welcome!

I wanted to say that this makes Lisa our seventh author, but since our next-most-recent addition (Sky) has yet to bother posting anything, if she's quick I'm guessing she'll actually be the sixth. Although from another point of view she's the eighth, since there's a guy named Jason who asked to be put in the system over a year ago (and was; I even announced it) but who hasn't been heard from since. Or at least, not by me. It was maybe a little drunk out when he made the request, so I'm guessing he forgot all about it.

Anyway. Lisa, world; world, Lisa. Huzzah!

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Posted 26 Sep, 2005 at 17:43 by matt in /System | Permanent link

As was mentioned a while ago, our esteemed proprietor Brent will be moving house (and country) in the near future. It's possible that you'll see some mild disruption over the next couple of weeks at this site.

Or maybe I'm the proprietor and Brent's the landowner. Whatever.

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Posted 12 Sep, 2005 at 00:35 by matt in /System | Permanent link

Another new feature: only people who are able to count letters in a word will be allowed to post.

Hopefully this will not include automated blog.spammers, but we'll see how this works. Sometime later this week I'll be going through the comment files and removing what spam has accreted there.

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Posted 10 Sep, 2005 at 22:12 by matt in /System | Permanent link

This site is (clearly) back up after about thirty hours of unscheduled downtime. Apologies to anyone who noticed.

There seems to be a couple of things going on here: one is that I really should be setting up some sort of "test" environment when I want to try out a new plugin, so that this sort of thing doesn't happen very often. (It might still happen -- I have no computer in my apt. or at my office which can run IIS, and so there could still be creeping incompatibilities.) Second, something in the pipeline between perl and IIS is really, really crappy when it comes to error handling.

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Posted 05 Sep, 2005 at 20:49 by matt in /System | Permanent link

Today, in case anyone cares, is the (first!) anniversary of Dangling Conversations. To celebrate: a couple of new features. Both of them can be noticed on the sidebar.

Firstly, I've hacked up a way to view posts by author. Our names on the side will now link to see the last twenty (or less) posts by a given person. The structure of the URL is this:

http://www.goldenempires.com/dc/?user=foo

...where foo should of course be the name of the blogger in question. This co-operates with the rest of the archive system, so if you wanted to see, say, all of the posts made by Kael in 2005 concerning culinary matters, you've probably do something like this:

http://www.goldenempires.com/dc/blosxom.pl/FoodDrink/2005/?user=kael

Easy, right?

(Links to our personal webspaces have been moved to the bottom of our little bios, as you can see. Other DC folks: let me know if you want one of your e-mail addresses to be linked there as well, like I've got mine.)

The second new feature is the "Giving us what-for" box, which (as is probably evident) lists any posts that have picked up comments in the last week, in order from the most-recently-commented-on. I'm working on getting the post names in the proper colours, but perl's not fond of me today for some reason.

Anyhow, that's that for now.

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Posted 01 Sep, 2005 at 19:47 by matt in /System | Permanent link

We're coming up on the first anniversary of DC, which I suppose makes this as good a time as any to check up on Ye Olde To-Do Lyst.

See more ...

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Posted 27 Aug, 2005 at 08:11 by matt in /System | Permanent link

I've seen a couple of (presumably accidental) double-posts in the comments. I'm guessing that what's happening is people are leaving a comment and then at some later time reloading the page: depending on the browser being used, this could well result in re-POSTing the comment data from before.

This isn't really a problem -- I mean, c'mon, this isn't exactly a high-traffic site -- but in case you were wondering what's going on, that's probably it.

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Posted 17 Jan, 2005 at 14:56 by matt in /System | Permanent link

The fidgeting and hacking is done; we now have comments capability on Dangling Conversations. Can I hear a huzzah?

(The answer to which is: yes, I can metaphorically hear a huzzah now, since you can put in a comments which reads, huzzah!)

The system that's in place isn't entirely done; for one thing, I need to add more in the way of spam protection (probably some sort of CAPTCHA thing, as those seem to be all the rage in Paris these days). I'd like to be able to distinguish the comments of site members from those of visitors by means of the same sort of colour-coding we use elsewhere; the problem with that is that I just might need to go back and do that whole bit properly. Ah, the glorious life of a site maintainer...

Next on the to-do list after making comments better: a proper RSS feed. (There's one in place, as it happens -- automatically generated by the script -- and it's even feeding into LiveJournal, thanks to Nikita. But it could be made to fit better with everything else... by supplying author information in the feed, for instance.) Also, paging.

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