Recent entries created by Mathew Mannion

New version

A new version of BlogBuilder has been released today, with a few improvements and minor fixes:

Fixes

• My Comments should now sort comments and display results exactly as expected
• The new "Preview" pane should act properly when saving as a draft afterwards

Improvements

• If you have statistics turned on on your "About me" page, you'll be able to see the number of comments posted, as well as a list of who has you on their favourites.
• RSS feeds have been slightly improved
• The front page colours are now slightly more readable than before

As always, if you spot any problems or issues, feel free to comment here or on the Blogs Feedback Forum (you may need to be signed in to read the forum)

Mathew Mannion : 07 Jun 2006 11:42 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Update |  Comments (6) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Trackbacks and Galleries

Released a small (functionality wise) update to BlogBuilder today, with some pretty big code changes, so if you see any problems it would be very helpful if you could comment and tell us what they are – there shouldn't be any problems but, as with any change, it's difficult to be 100% certain.

• When you trackback a non-Warwick Blog that supports trackbacks, it should now correctly show the URL of your entry to that blog.
• There should now be no problems with turning off trackbacks or pings for individual entries.
• The bug that caused the trackback counter to increment when a post that was trackbacking it was edited has been fixed.
• The My Comments screen now shows "Today" and "Yesterday" where relevant just like entries do (and we're working on the other problems with the My Comments page ordering wrongly and not updating fast enough).
• Galleries now have a maximum description length of 4,000 characters, and tell you much more politely if you exceed it.

For those who care: This update has taken a long time because there's also a backend upgrade where the code now uses the new features (foreach loops, autoboxing, Generics) in Java 5, which makes the code a lot nicer and safer to work with, and removes 2,286 iterators in the BlogBuilder code and replaces them with foreach loops (in almost every case)!

Mathew Mannion : 02 Mar 2006 18:43 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Galleries Trackbacks Update |  Comments (15) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

BB improvements

A new version of Blogbuilder was released this afternoon with a few improvements that hopefully everyone will like…

• As you may have noticed, the home page now displays one of 9 random styles when you go to it (designed by Hannah)
• The auto-tagging feature has been improved to be more specific about which entries it tags, and you can now delete or edit auto-tags on entries. If you have an entry that was accidentally tagged twice, you can now delete one (or both) of them – and this won't happen in future.
• External trackbacks now work again
• There's been a few more improvements to the "insert an image" popup dialog on the create an entry page
• The latest discussions algorithm has been improved to hopefully keep the front page updating more often with new topics – thanks to Colin for some help with the equations involved

Any feedback or comments are always welcome

Mathew Mannion : 02 Feb 2006 17:19 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Tags Update |  Comments (27) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Blogbuilder Update

Blogbuilder was updated this afternoon with a few nice new things that people may have noticed:

Galleries

• Galleries have been made slightly prettier
• In JavaScript enabled browsers, clicking on an image now brings it up on an overlay on the screen, to allow for a better experience. The icons on the image (for logged in users) allow for modification of the image as before
• You can now sort galleries by date

Other

• The "insert an image" popup when creating an entry has been improved so that thumbnailed images act the same way as gallery images
• If you write entries about certain topics, it may be auto tagged.
• At the bottom of entries and comments, if they were posted today or yesterday, they say "Today" or "Yesterday" as opposed to the date

Comments and problems to the usual place, as always.

Mathew Mannion : 26 Jan 2006 18:02 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Update |  Comments (22) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Blogbuilder Update

There has been a small update to Blogbuilder this morning that sees some slight changes and improvements, as below:

• The "Insert an image" popup when you click the link next to the box on the create an entry screen has been revamped to make it easier and less complicated
• The "latest discussions" list now has the number of different contributors to the discussion on the tooltip. You can also see this for comments on all entries now (just the number of different logged in users)
• We are working on tweaking the topics that reach "People are currently discussing…" in order to make it so that the list updates more frequently and more new entries appear on there
• You can now see the IP address of comments on entries on your blog
• There has been a lot of help added for gallery and image tasks

If you have any comments, please post them below.

Mathew Mannion : 19 Jan 2006 10:37 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Update |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

BlogBuilder update

Follow-up to Modifying image tags from Blogbuilder news

A new version of BlogBuilder was released and deployed this morning, with the following changes and improvements:

• You can now access your blog in any case – so, for example, you've been forced to give out your blog name in lowercase in the past (blogs.warwick.ac.uk/mmannion) but now you can give it out in any arrangement (blogs.warwick.ac.uk/MMannion, blogs.warwick.ac.uk/mMannion) and it should work
• When you click on the "Create entry" hyperlink directly it should take you to a screen that allows you to select from the full range of options for creating an entry. This is mainly for users who don't have JavaScript browsers and so cannot see the dropdown
• There has been a minor tweak where you can still access the dropdown box even when you increase the text size
• You can now tab out of the "Tags" field on the edit entry page, and you should also now see multi-word (with underscore) tags in the suggestions
• The "Edit tags" screen (see previous entry) now includes tags from images.
• You can now select as many tags to see on the sidebar as you want (from Admin -> Appearance)
• Users who aren't logged in have to answer the anti-spam question to send emails to you through your blog

And an update on the problems we've been having with Favourites – we still haven't worked out what the problem is, but we're working on it. It seems to have occurred since we upgraded BlogBuilder to use Java 5 and the latest version of JBoss, which doesn't explain why this is happening, sorry.

Mathew Mannion : 08 Dec 2005 10:20 |  Tags: Administration BlogBuilder Tags Update |  Comments (9) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Modifying image tags

A lot of bloggers who use BlogBuilder regularly may have come across the feature to "Edit your tags" (by clicking Admin from your blog and then Edit your tags from the menu). This allows you to change the name of any of your tags, or to add synonyms where you can add an extra tag to one or more tag (for example, you may want to add the synonym "humour" to all entries you have tagged "funny", "limerick" or "joke").

Currently, this only works for entries, but we're working on making it so that you can do it for images as well – how this can be done is something that we'd like the community to comment on.

Would you:

• Put image tags on the same page, so that images and entries with the same tags are grouped together; or
• Put image tags seperately underneath your entry tags

This implicitly has a second question, if you have, say, 100 entries tagged "Humour" and 50 images tagged "Humour", would you always want a change to one to affect the other? Would you expect that if you changed your entry tag to "Funny" that your images would automatically change to "Funny" too? The tags system at the moment implicitly links from entries tagged something to images tagged the same thing, but it would be interesting to see opinions on this.

Mathew Mannion : 06 Dec 2005 16:57 |  Tags: Administration BlogBuilder Tags |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

BlogBuilder update: Tag synonyms

There has been a new release of BlogBuilder today, with the following changes:

New Feature

• You can now get URLs that AND tags together by putting a + between tags in the URL itself, such as http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/showall/tag/movie+review/
• There are now agreed Tag Synonyms so the Top Tags and individual Tag pages now take into account similar tags, for example, when you go to the tag for Movie you will also see tags for Movies, Film and Films, and this is taken into account in how big "Movie" is on the Top Tags page.

Improvements

• The text on galleries has been tweaked slightly
• Posting comments has been tweaked slightly to make it harder to "double-post"
• When you create an entry, it should take you back to the screen that you created it from
• There have been some design changes and fixes – this may make your custom CSS look a bit weird, or it might not.
• You can now select a blank style (for the ultimate custom CSS'ers)

Bug fixes

• The "My Comments" page now sorts like it says it is by default
• The bug where Internal Trackback emails are sent many times has been fixed
• A problem with deleting images that had been uploaded in a Zip file has been fixed
• Tag counts in the sidebar are more accurate.

Mathew Mannion : 23 Sep 2005 15:48 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Tags |  Comments (13) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

BlogBuilder update: New designs

If your blog looks wrong, try doing a forced refresh (pressing CTRL and F5 together) or restarting your browser

There has been a new release of BlogBuilder with several improvements and fixes:

New Markup / CSS

Andy Ingram has created new markup and CSS for blogs pages now. You may need to press Ctrl-F5 in your browser (a forced refresh) to make sure you have the latest stylesheets.

Included in this:

Changes

• HTML rearranged to put entries before the sidebar, gives improved accessibility and search engine results
• Fixed various issues of content dropping below the sidebar
• Left-floated images should no longer drop into the entries below
• Utility Bar appears correctly in Opera 7
• The background image in the header of all blog styles should now be visible in Internet Explorer
• The whole banner area (except utility bar) is now part of the link back to your overall blog view
• Removed opacity effects from various blog styles to allow more consistancy between browsers
• Most blog styles tweaked in some way for browser consistency
• Galleries should now be more readable (no more white on white)
• The bluegreen2 style is completely redone
• New style: black 2
• New style: puce
• New style: swift1
• Favourites markup improved and styled to suit each individual blog style better

Known Issues

• Existing styles don't appear exactly the same as before, if you feel an important part of the style has been overlooked or changed, please don't hesitate to mention it.
• Javascript has been used to make some of the blogs styles appear correctly with the new layout markup and styling. If javascript is disabled the blogs may not appear exactly as intended. Resizing the text in the browser may also cause problems; this can be fixed by reloading the page. Pages should still be fully readable however.

New Blogs Search

New Blog Search has now been implemented into the front page and the sidebar. When you start typing in, search results will appear immediately below the box, and then you can click on any of the results or on "more results" (or press enter) to get to the posts you want.

Search works better if you're logged in, because if you're logged in then it will search protected posts as well.

New Features

• Tags: You can now select which tags you want to display on your sidebar, or how many of your top tags to display, and also display a list of untagged entries if you please.
• Tag Selection: You can now click on a number of suggested tags when making an entry
• Comment Spam: When a non-logged in user tries to make a comment on your blog, they must answer an arbritrary question (by default, "What colour is an orange?") – this has allowed us to set the default commenting permissions back to "Anyone", which should make the WGA people "well chuffed".

Improvements

• My Comments: By default, your "My Comments" page now sorts by the date of the most recent comment on the entry, not the date of your most recent comment. You can still sort by the old format if desired.
• Comment Information: When you're trying to make a comment, you can see a padlock next to the "COMMENTS" title which will tell you who has permission to comment - this will allow you to see easily why you're not allowed to comment (did you forget to login?) or if your own entries are accidentally locked (or unlocked)
• Book/DVD/CD/Game Reviews: You can now attach a custom picture and URL to a Book, DVD, CD or Game review just like with Movie and TV reviews, so you could quite easily make Gig Reviews under the guise of a Music review and they would appear under the "Music Review" entry type.
• Top Tags: The top tags page is now weighted differently; it will weight tags that appear on several blogs much, much higher than those that appear on a single blog. Also, the Top Tags page now only shows tags used in the past month by default, in order to show popular issues at the present time.
• Miscellaneous: When on a tag page, you can now see the actual entry and image counts being displayed and how many are available on the other links. The "Tag" counter on the front page now only shows the number of unique tags. Tag counts in the sidebar no longer take into account draft entries.

Bugfixes

• Image Editing: You can now edit your images again. Sorry about that.
• Tag Selector: You can also use the up/down arrows in your entries again. Again, sorry…

Mathew Mannion : 16 Sep 2005 10:18 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Comments CSS |  Comments (43) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Custom CSS Removal From Blogs

Soon, we will be deploying new changes to BlogBuilder, which include major changes to the markup and CSS for the pages in order to make them more accessible and neater.

As a result of this, all Custom CSS that has been added to blogs will be removed, and you will revert to your default CSS - with the new design.

To make sure that nothing is lost, I have (painstakingly) gone through all blogs with Custom CSS and compiled it into a text file, which you can see below:

link

If there are any problems, contact me – else, the changes will be made, probably sometime this afternoon or tomorrow morning.

Mathew Mannion : 15 Sep 2005 13:06 |  Tags: BlogBuilder CSS |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem