Raible Designs

Getting back on the road to XHMTL compliance

This site has failed to validate for many moons now. I think ever since I added the twisty comments. So did some work today to make the twisty comments XHTML-compliant. I almost got there. The only problem I experienced was with the <iframe> that's used to submit the comment. Basically, if I want to be XHTML 1.0 Strict, I need to create the iframe on the fly (with JavaScript), as well as set the form's target to this frame. It all works fine and dandy in Mozilla, but I can't get IE to let me set an "onload" property for the iframe. It just doesn't work. So I've reverted to XHTML 1.0 Transitional and I've stuck the iframe in the page, allowing me to set the onload property manually. Other changes I made to facilitate better compliance (this is mainly so I can fix it in Roller later).

• Replaced "insertionid" attributes in weblog.vm with "id" attributes and adjusted JavaScript in comments.js accordingly.
• Various small fixes to themes/x2/styles/comments.css.
• Edited my "_day" template to end the </p> before the #showCommentsDiv.
• Moved <a> tags inside of the <h1> tags.

So my remaining problems are the onload on the iframe and the fact that the left arrow doesn't show up in IE next to the comments div. Oh well, I can live with one measly validation error.

New Roller Feature: Comment Subscribers

I added a new feature to Roller last night. Now, if you have e-mailing of comments enabled, all the folks that have commented on a post will be cc'd when a new comment comes in. Here are the features/issues it currently has:

• (Feature) Now a URL appears on the bottom of the e-mail with a link to comment on the post.
• (Issue) Weblog owner is cc'd when they post a new comment. Since it's always "to" them, there's no need to cc them. I just noticed this after replying to another post - however, I only received one e-mail, so who knows.
• (Issue) When a commentor does not specify an e-mail address, the from address is set to "[email protected]." I don't know if this is the best way, but it works for this initial cut.

You must specify an e-mail address to be cc'd on comments (of course). Feel free to give it a whirl.

Testing Roller's WikiPlugin

Does this sucker work as designed? I hope so. Let's test out linking to my Struts Resume Support page. It looks like it still needs some work. My suggestions for improvement:

• Use valid HTML - this is probably a JSPWiki thing. All the attributes in my links are currently uppercase - invalidating my XHTML. It's not valid with twisty comments anyway, so I don't care too much.
• Produce the same HTML in my RSS Feed as is presented in the HTML version. Actually, it looks like it's just the <description> element that's still wiki-fied.

This is a very cool plugin and makes it much easier to type a post. It'll take a little getting used to, but it is very slick. As a demo, here's the text I entered.

!Does this [sucker|http://rollerweblogger.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=RollerWikiPlugin]
work as designed?  I hope so.  Let's test out linking to my 
[Struts Resume Support|StrutsResumeSupport] page. It looks like it still needs some 
work.  My suggestions for improvement:

* Use valid HTML - this is probably a [JSPWiki] thing.  All the attributes in my 
links are currently uppercase - invalidating my XHTML.  ''It's not valid with 
twisty comments anyway, so I don't care too much.''
* Produce the same HTML in my [RSS Feed|http://raibledesigns.com/rss/rd] as is 
presented in the HTML version.  '' Actually, it looks like it's just the 
<description> element that's still wiki-fied''.

This is a __very cool__ plugin and makes it much easier to type a post.  It'll 
take a little getting used to, but it is very slick.

w.bloggar problems with Roller

I've been trying to post to this site with w.bloggar with morning. It's been working, however, w.bloggar doesn't think it is. When I click "Post", it gives me a w.bloggar: 500 dialog that states: HTTP POST failed. The error number is returned HTTP status code. I upgraded this site to use the latest snapshot of Roller from CVS, but no luck, I still get the same error. I don't normally use w.bloggar, so it's not a big deal. However, moblogger is also failing.

As for the Roller upgrade, the only noticeable changes are 1) the "Editor" menu has changed from showing tabs/sublinks to just sublinks on my Weblog page, and 2) it seems to ping weblogs.com after I update. There are some issues behind the scenes, but they don't seem to be affecting anything too badly. I guess I'd better turn off e-mail notification of errors - I've received 80 since I upgraded!

Roller.com is For Sale

I've been doing some research, trying to purchase roller.com or roller.org. Why? For the simple reason that I'd rather type "roller" than "rollerweblogger" whenever I go to rollerweblogger.org. I'm sure that folks that type in "raibledesigns.com" might feel the same frustration. There's always javawebapps.com, but that's pretty long too. What about mattraible.com? Needless to say, I found some humor when the folks at roller.com replied to my e-mail about the price of roller.com:

We want US $20,000.

Ha! I'm guessing this domain will remain for sale for many years to come.

Running latest version of Roller

I upgraded to the latest version of Roller from CVS this morning. Everything appears to have gone smoothly. Too bad this bug didn't get fixed in the upgrade. The bug is that $baseURL doesn't get resolved in IE, but it does in Mozilla. This is quite strange since it's server-side code, and the browser shouldn't matter. Unfortunately, it seems to on my version of IE6.

Linkbacks are on!

I was wondering where my linkbacks went - and I figured it out this morning! They have to be enabled with the latest version of Roller - I believe they were on by default in the 0.9.7.1 release.

Formatting Comments Correctly

You can see from Matt's comments on my last post that my handy-dandy comments feature is not formatting comments correctly. Basically, if you put a line break in the textarea below (by pressing return), there should be a line break (<br />) in the rendered comment. The reason this is broken seems to be because the following Velocity code doesn't seem to be functioning correctly:

#set($content = $comment.content)
#if($escapeHtml)
    #set($content = $utilities.escapeHTML($content))
#end
#if($autoformat) 
    #set($content = $stringUtils.replace($content,"\n","<br />"))
#end

You'll notice that it's not working on my in-page comments either. But it is working for the pop-up comments. However, the pop-up one is doing the StringUtils.replace in Java code, rather than Velocity. Hopefully someone will have a tip for me to fix this.

Windows Media Player Blogging Plug-In

If you have Windows XP and Windows Media Player 9, you might want to check this out.

Blogging Plug-in for Windows Media Player 9 Series
Add more personality to your blog with this plug-in that adds the artist, song, and album name to the Windows Media Player 9 Series title bar. Blogging clients like LiveJournal, w.bloggar, Semagic, and others can then easily add that information to your next entry while you compose.

It sounds cool at least. If you've tried it, please post your review as a comment!

Blogger API and Titles

Is there any compelling reason that moblogger should support the MetaWeblog API in addition to the Blogger API? I like Blogger because it's already in moblogger and it looks pretty simple. Roller supports it, so why not?

The only problem I have with it is that it doesn't support titles. For Roller, here's a workaround I was thinking of. If the post has a <title> tag in it, use the contents of that tag as the title, or for mobile users, we'd also offer this alternative:

#t put your title here #

Where "#t" is the trigger that there's a title (short for phone bloggers) and "#" is an indicator signifying the title has ended. It's a very simple way IMO to add title support to Roller for Blogger clients.