Jim's Depository

femtoblogger has reached that odd state for software. It works well enough that I am happy using it. There are rough edges, but not rough enough that I will fix them.

The only thing I have changed recently is to add a meta robots tag to suggest the aggregate pages, like the front page and archive months, not be indexed. That should help keep the clicks on target. I already had robot tags to deter indexing of all the non-content pages.

There remain two rough points:

1. The WYSIWYG editing: This is still a bit awkward. Sometimes I get stuck in bold and have to pop into HTML mode to get out. Pasting in code ends up double spaced. I could make lots of elaborate workarounds, but I consider these to be browser bugs and hope they will shake themselves out over time. I could also switch to one of the giant WYSIWYG javascript editors, but then I wouldn’t be very femto, would I.
2. I keep having a nagging desire to have images. I could do it now by attaching the image and making my own IMG tag, but I’m too lazy for that. I’ve been holding off coding proper image support (with resizing for display and full resolution click through) on the grounds that if I’m too lazy to type my own image tag then surely I shouldn’t spend a couple hours making full image support.

I suppose since femtoblogger has become stable it is time to move it into a public subversion repository.

I’ve added a few features today.

• There is now a ‘recent comments’ link under Contribute. It also has its own RSS feed, so I can watch for comments should the comment spammers get through.
• Articles now have URLs constructed from their titles. I feel I could do better at this. I need to read some papers on automated abbreviators.
• I fixed a nasty little problem where a sqlite3 “insert or replace” was whacking my password. Turns out that deletes the whole row on a replace, so you better be specifying all the field values.

And now 4 days later.

• I now log much of the POST methods into my database. There is a distributed botnet trying to leave a comment on one article in this blog. I’m curious what they wish to say. I’d hate to miss out on a first contact situation.
• Found a couple URLs that were missing their “.php”.  Apache was ok with this, lighttpd is not.

I noticed that the Opera browser rocketed up to 38.4% of my hits. A quick dig of the logs shows that I am being drilled by bots that look to be trying to create link spam and masquerade as Opera browsers.

I suppose eventually they will have a human help them through the captcha and succeed. I have changed things about so untrusted users will get rel=nofollow tags on all their links. Maybe that will make them lose interest and go away.

I should probably make an RSS feed for comments while I’m at is so I notice when they get through the defenses.

Femtoblogger has just been rolled out to a corporate community of 150 users. Let the bug reports and feature requests roll.

Perhaps it isn’t fair, firefox 2 is the oldest of the browsers I am supporting, but could they make the editable html interface any less user friendly? 

The editable region has to be in an IFRAME, I’d rather not restrict people to a fixed region of screen, but ok. Now the user clicks in the IFRAME to edit, but it won’t place the insertion point unless they happen to click on an element, so if you click in the bottom of the IFRAME you get no insertion point. That makes me create a special onfocus handler to place the insertion point someplace to get them started. Then in one final gesture of hostility, the insertion point placing code doesn’t work on an empty IFRAME, so I have to insert a nonbreaking space to open up a line for the insertion point (because a normal space gets an insertion point about 2 pixels tall.) All told, most of a day wasted to support  bad decisions from the firefox coders. They should have tried to use it after they coded it.

A list of things that I might add to femtoblogger:

• [DONE] Attachments.
• Some mechanism for fiddling with MIME types of attachments.
• Local copies of images. Pull it in, resize it to display size, click through to original size.
• {NO} Some sort of Todo list.
• [DONE] The concept of a draft copy of an article.
• I’d like to use PATH_INFO to have more meaningful URLs, but then I’m committed to .htaccess files working to keep sane URLs. Or maybe I just let the ‘.php’ show in the middle of the path.
• [DONE] Some time based archive structure in the nav section.
• An export format, perhaps based on Atom.
• [DONE] Support for external httpd authentication.
• [DONE] A global configuration page.
• [DONE] CSS takes variables from database now. Color skinning.
• [DONE] Use <META NAME=“ROBOTS” CONTENT=“NONE”> to keep robots out of the non-content areas.

Femtoblogger now shows on IE7. Not too bad. It only took 2 hours to work out the layout problems.

The most severe is that max-width: 600px in the CSS file brings up a bug when used inside a table cell. The cell gets expanded as if there was no max-width so the table ends up expanding to fill the screen. All the articles were cowering against the lefthand border of the screen with the nav stuff still on the right. (Firefox does this too but only if you are clicking a link in a table cell. There went 120 minutes of my life for that one.)

My ultimate solution was to make IE use a width: 600px instead. There is now an IE only CSS file that is loaded after the real one and has a rule to patch that up. Thankfully the IE blokes must have known they were being a menace to society and they built a special comment hack into their HTML parser to let people cope.

<!--[if IE]> <link rel=stylesheet type=text/css href=femtoblogger-ie.css> <![endif]-->

… it would have been nice to have something similar in CSS, that would save a file and a download.

You can read more about this hack at CSS Hacks- The good, the bad, and the ugly- Conditional comments

I have abandoned CSS columns. They are an ongoing time sink. If you are willing to specify hard physical pixel widths for the columns they almost work like I want, but not quite. Their background colors end early, and when you get a wider than planned element inside one it spills out on to neighboring content instead of resizing.

Back to the grand one row table for me. The CSS zealots may scoff, but my columns work right all the time.

On the plus side, I may now be web 2.0. I added a couple rounded corners and a drop shadow. Unless you are using IE.

I went ahead and registered femtoblogger.com which reminds me how much easier it is for me to write code than prose. Filling a page is just painful. I’ll have to make filling in that outline be a long term project.

For now it serves as a placeholder for people that might guess at the URL and will send them back to this blog for femtoblogger news. I suppose I need to rename this blog now which means more code. Blast.

This is half baked, but I’m going to roll it out and try to live with it. Articles and comments will now use a WYSIWYG interface for styling. I hope to remove the How do I insert-a-link/bold/blockquote? type of questions that interrupt people’s thought process when posting in a new venue.

The downsides are many:

• This uses the designMode and the execCommand() interface. execCommand() was probably designed by children and is functionally incomplete and inadequately specified. It promises to be a festering source of browser quirks and user bafflement for years to come.
• The HTML sanitizer will need to normalize as well to unquirk the postings.
• I need to also support a raw HTML mode for people with odd browsers.
• I will need to make decisions about copying in images and possibly resizing.
• I will probably need onscreen hinting ofsome sort to let people know how design mode works, e.g. They can drag in links and images.
• I will probably screw up and butcher comments at least several times.

But… what would life be without a little excitement, so here we go.