Raible Designs

Thursday November 21, 2002

Flock RSS Aggregator Dominic has setup an instance of flock. I gave up on it when it wouldn't install on my XP machine, but after looking at the demo - this is a very cool webapp. Hmmm, I wonder if we can integrate it into Roller somehow? Of course it's possible, but where/how do we begin is the question? Posted in Roller at Nov 21 2002, 07:05:01 PM MST 1 Comment

IE 5.x and Roller's Calendar I've gotten a few complaints in the last week from users that they weren't able to read my site because of a "calendar overlay" issue. Basically, they said that they couldn't read the content on this site because the calendar was too big and was hiding my blog entries. The two browsers it happened on were IE 5.5/Win95 Tonight, someone sent me a screenshot (150K) and now I know what they're talking about. I don't know if your roller site has the same issue, but the following might help if you do. Basically, I just had to define a font-size for the table that surrounds the calendar. If this doesn't work, I'll define the table and the <td>'s inside the table. Here's the fix so far:

.hCalendarTable {
    font-size: 1em;
}

I also found that I had to do this for Opera 7 to render the calendar properly. And, Opera 7 doesn't seem to understand font-size: x-small, so I used 10px instead.

Of course, the easiest way to avoid any issues such as these is to use a standards-compliant browser. I recommend IE6, Mozilla, Phoenix (Windows only) or Chimera (Mac only). Nevertheless, I'd like to make this site available to everyone, so if you do experience issues, please do let me know and include a screenshot for clarity. Thanks!

Later: It's getting better and I've managed to fix the font-size problem, but the font color inside my calendar is still the wrong color, as illustrated in this screenshot (138K). Oh well, at least everything is readable now. Posted in The Web at Nov 21 2002, 06:48:54 PM MST Add a Comment

Roller's Search Feature I'd love to use Lucene to develop Roller's search feature, but there have been discussions of a much simpler search (i.e. simple SQL LIKE `%searchTerm%' statements). Since I'd like to dig in and learn Lucene, I think it would be valuable to integrate into Roller, but so as to not discourage any other ideas - maybe we could code for a pluggable search module. That way, roller administrators could choose which one they liked, and developers could plug in others.

I don't know how much time I'll have to contribute to this, but just wanted to throw it out there. BTW, does anyone know if Lucene can index existing database records (weblog entries)? I would imagine so. Would we want to index bookmarks and newsfeeds as well? The nice think about the Google search on this site is that it indexes everything. Anyone know of a java-based google-like search package? Posted in Roller at Nov 21 2002, 09:55:01 AM MST 1 Comment