Entries for March, 2003

Please feel free to comment here if you have any issues with the sites or questions on how to do certain things.
Posted by tabulas on March 16, 2003 at 03:59 PM | 5 Comments
You can join blogrings and such, but the output is somewhat fudged for the time being.

There are issues with "validation" if you're a moderator in a blogring.

There is also a problem with the display of location, as well as problems with the timestamp on the "your friends" page.

We are also working to fix the "unable to attach images to blogring" problem.

Thanks for your help so far We swear these bugs will go away!
Currently feeling: nothing
Posted by tabulas on March 16, 2003 at 07:21 PM | 4 Comments
New Features:
  • "Hide" option for albums
    Hidden albums do not display to public

  • Additional style parameters for "tagboard options"
    Editing parameters also affect the box in which your data is contained; before the stye changes only affected the actual IFRAME that contained the tagboard data


Bugs Fixed:
  • Moderation for blogring
    Moderators for blogrings were having difficulty validating users. This has now been fixed.

  • Gallery Image actually displays a page now instead of just linking to the image

  • Adding friends has been completely redone so you can add with "one-click" instead of the old method of clicking two times (and then an additional time to get back to your admin panel)

Aesthetic Changes:
  • "Leave Bloring" error in admin panel changes

  • Default template uses transparent gifs for "navigation," "blogring," and "tagboard" so that any background color may be used

  • Gallery Output


Next up?

  • Blogring Styles

  • Rewrite of "add/edit" entry display

  • Tracking option


The Tabulas staff will be taking a short break after these three features ...
Posted by tabulas on March 18, 2003 at 01:52 AM | 2 Comments
New Features:
  • Resend Confirmation
    There is now an option to resend confirmation e-mails if you didn't get the first one


Bugs Fixed:
  • Add Simple/Advanced Entries was redone. Please let us know if you have problems. The Javascript error that didn't copy your entries to clipboard has also been fixed.

  • Problems with registering earlier have all been resolved.

  • Various editing entries problems solved.

  • Problems with "privacy" of entries (public/private/friends) fixed

  • Attachments with entries posted to blogrings are now fixed.

Posted by tabulas on March 18, 2003 at 04:25 PM | 14 Comments
Blogrings now displays under Profiles.

We've also added a new feature ... if you notice under your "Advanced Entries" page, you'll notice a few dropdowns that should be shaded out.

You can now select your timestamp manually; posts with timestamps that are in the future will not display until that time.
Posted by tabulas on March 20, 2003 at 05:54 PM | 9 Comments
If your journal is messed up, please post below. During an upgrade, we screwed up and accidentally deleted a few user styles.
Posted by tabulas on March 23, 2003 at 11:16 AM | Add a Comment
The image attachments has been a sore issue for me to deal with. On one hand, I want people to see the image on the entry (not having to click to view gallery), but I also don't want to overload friends' pages ...

So everytime you upload an image as an attachment to an entry, the image displayed will be a max of 360px width or height, while your thumbnail will be a max of 180x width or height, and the "large" image will be a max of 550px width or height.

There is a new template ... go to your "Styles" and "Select Template."

Posted by tabulas on March 23, 2003 at 04:03 PM | 2 Comments
There is now ONE blogring template to choose from - and now you should be able to post to your blogrings with ease.

There has been the addition of a small control panel in your administrator's panel (only shows up on a few entry pages) to track your recent entries.

Again, the templating is working (you have a whopping two templates to choose from)... so go check it out. Upload Templates has not worked and will continue to not work for a while

In any case, some preset color schemes will be built ... and some better instructions on how to template your tabulas.

XML feeds and site tracking is next. We are also working on "track users" page ... we've not published a "full members list" yet for privacy reasons. But we are working on providing for a closer community by being able to find people by locale.
Posted by tabulas on March 23, 2003 at 08:48 PM | 3 Comments
Almost everyone who has joined this thing has asked, "Where is the feature to find other members?"

Unlike the Alpha version (long gone, thank goodness), there is no "master members list." Besides the fact that this is slightly unprofessional, there are members that I'm sure are not willing to post their information to a public forum like that - some like privacy and anonymity.

In any case, I am building a module to help "locate" members, but it will be done through locale (meaning you better set your profiles). Of course, there will remain the option of listing yourself OFF the master members list - but it will be set by default to "list."

While developing this site, I went over many rewrites of the same module (chalk it up to learning). One of the main problems I faced was whether or not I was going to develop this site with classes (Object Oriented Programming) ...

The conclusion, after much research, was a resounding "no." Although OOP programming is incredibly powerful and clean, it allows for none of the advantages that I'm looking for.

Developing this site's backend by my lonesome, I'm not required to make thing standardized or "clean." I'm the only one looking at the innards at this time ...

Furthermore, OOP in PHP is more server-intensive, and that is one issue that I'm really factoring in my decision. The coding I'm doing is constantly refined to be faster and less server-intensive. Most of the work over the past weeks has not been new features - it's rewriting old features and getting things to work better (that's not to say I haven't been planning better features lately).

Speaking of which, I will be rewriting the way templates will be done in a little bit. You won't notice any problems or changes (hopefully). Basically right now each page is generated on the fly from a master template page; this is quite server intensive and will work for the few members we have now, but already I've been noticing high server loads.

So I'm going to try to make "static" pages that are generated from master template files (very similiar to what's being done now for CSS - you'll notice in your HTML source that you have a separate CSS file from everyone else if you've customized your site style) that will only change upon editing.

This will hopefully reduce a LOT of load on the server ...

Still working on new features. Site tracking/better gallery upload UI/"auto links."

More to come soon. Also got a few templates coming up .. very similiar to the Brarh template in style.
Posted by tabulas on March 25, 2003 at 10:38 AM | 10 Comments
If you were using the alpha and would your old entries moved over, please comment here.

We will move them manually just for YOU!
Posted by tabulas on March 26, 2003 at 10:40 PM | 2 Comments
People who requested move of entries ... your entries from the old database should of successfully made it into your journal entries. They have been timestamped to the original date, so you'll have to go back to the original date to see them.

If you want us to move your entry from the old database, please post below. We will continue to support moving of old entries.

Note: Moved entries only retained:
entry, title, timestamp, privacy status, and mood. Comments, book and song data were lost. Sorry
Posted by tabulas on March 30, 2003 at 06:14 PM | 1 Comments
Updatings for Tabulas have been lacking - sorry. We've been involved with production of another site which will be integrated with Tabulas ...

In any case, we've added a "flood" control mechanism for your Tagboards, as well as the ability to delete tags made in your tagboard. Go to your "Content" tab in your administrator's panel and it will show up on the left.

We've also been experimenting with different methods of templating - we will switch over to the new method shortly. We are testing it for completeness before moving it over.
Posted by tabulas on March 30, 2003 at 09:02 PM | 2 Comments