August 7, 2004
Responses
Exodus crafted a very good "wish list" for the new Tabulas. It's a bit heavy on the technical side, so I'll break this entry.
(I was going to write this as a comment, but it was quite long and I figured a lot of people would benefit from reading it on my main site).
I'll address each point bit by bit.
Valid XHTML Strict Entries
I'm not aiming for XHTML Strict entries; my goal is to get all of Tabulas on the XHTML 1.0 Transitional boat ... but I don't plan on building a validator (yet).
The way I reason, each account comes with a RSS feed, and you can fulfill all your strict XHTML fantasies with the RSS feed.
As for the Markdown plugin, that is way overkill for what I want to do. I did discuss this issue a long time ago ... and come back somewhat dissappointed in the responses.
I will be extended the Tabulas "autoformatting" features to autodetect carriage and consecutive newline breaks to automatically create paragraphs. I will also allow the option to "turn-on" which formatting features you want (you can go the route of a real HTML warrior and turn off all autoformatting features and write the whole entry in pure HTML), but I have a feeling that most people will use most of the autoformatting features.
I do realize that the autoformatting that Tabulas does is horrendous; but I think fixing up the newlines/carriage problem coupled with the automatic closing of opened HTML tags (this has been a feature of Tabulas for quite some time; try opening a HTML tag and creating an entry) should be enough to keep most accounts validated.
This is the hardest part of Tabulas; to clean up all the data input into the system by novices...
But to clarify: I will be doing basic "fixes" to all entries: cleaning up any non-ASCII characters (although this should be automatic since the browser is sending in iso mode), cleaning up basic img tags (most people won't close them properly ...
Permalinks
I thought Tabulas already had permalinks? The #comment is just an anchor tag ... but the pemalink page for any user's entry is www.tabulas.com/~username/entryid.html. However, I will be extending the 'permalinks' to also allow for www.tabulas.com/~username/year/month/entryid.html.
Maybe a paid option will be letting you create your own 'permalink' url (like http://www.tabulas.com/~roy/2003/03/so-happy/). But that's really iffy.
Accents/Angle Brackets
Yes, a huge problem. For a while I tried to address this by htmlentities() all the data input into the system, but this caused weird problems for people writing in international characters (it would already get ASCII-encoded then would get doubly-ASCII encoded), so I had to turn it off. But it's something I will fix.
As a side note, in the upcoming version, you will be able to select which HTML encoding (UTF-8, iso-8859-1, whatever floats your boat) you want to use on your site.
Documentation
A wiki is a very interesting idea. But I hate the ways wikis are formatted and their penchant for DoingThisToWords. But an community-moderated 'help' center would be really awesome. If I roll this out with a community-driven support center, people could 'earn' points for their paid accounts (for those who can't afford but have endless amounts of time...). And this would be even cooler if I could make it localized for nationalities; Singaporeans could help each other out, Phillipinos could help each other out ... in their native tongue. Hmm.
Spellchecker
I've built in the spellchecker already into Tabulas. It's not the best, but like you say, people can always use client-side programs until I can roll out my own version.
No Privacy on Community
This was done on purpose. The idea is that allowing people to post 'friends-only' entries to a community site defeats the purpose of posting to a community. It in essence forces you to subscribe to every member of the community ... not good.
However, the new features in Tabulas allows a community moderator to set a privacy level on the whole community itself (only members can view its posts vs. everyone can see the posts).
But if you post a private entry to a community, you are submitting it to the community ... and your privacy options will be overriden. Communities are not a way to categorize your personal private posts; you need to purchase categories for that.
Reading/Music/Mood fields
Maybe.
Community Styles
Problems: I know. All have been fixed in the new CP. I promise ;)
Deleting Accounts
This has just me being lazy. It's not just a matter of clearing out the DB, but accessing the children servers (like aces.tabulas.com) to delete all their stuff, and I honestly haven't had time to extend the intranet API to handle this (mass deletions is something I'm very scared to do, for obvious reasons).
Backups
The backup feature already exists???????
Share the love
Maybe.
HTML Lists
This is a problem with the autoformatting, as mentioned above
Commenting (in a comment)
Commenting has been a HUGE headache since day one. If you are one of the early users, you'll remember when Tabulas actually autoindented children comments... but I turned this off because a lot of templates were getting really screwy. Now it uses a simple "Posted as reply:" (or some inane text) ...
I've expermented privately with using color combinations, but this gets way too complex to style for the average user ...
I'm probably going to try to reimplement the nested comments along with some sort of color scheme (I'm really digging the way the comments are laid out on pure-essence.net).
But I do need to figure out something (ala LiveJournal) that 'limits' the number of comments on a given page.
I also need to fix the comment processing form. So nasty.
I have been logging insane hours at this PC bang working on the new display engine (still). You'd be surprised how long it takes... I can do most PHP stuff, but the architectural stuff is still my weakness.
I'll be able to demo the new display engine to you guys within a few days (hopefully by weekend's end). You guys can marvel at how clean and how VALID the whole display engine now is, and as requested by sal, the comments form spits out a lot of id/class values so you can style your comments.
(I was going to write this as a comment, but it was quite long and I figured a lot of people would benefit from reading it on my main site).
I'll address each point bit by bit.
Valid XHTML Strict Entries
I'm not aiming for XHTML Strict entries; my goal is to get all of Tabulas on the XHTML 1.0 Transitional boat ... but I don't plan on building a validator (yet).
The way I reason, each account comes with a RSS feed, and you can fulfill all your strict XHTML fantasies with the RSS feed.
As for the Markdown plugin, that is way overkill for what I want to do. I did discuss this issue a long time ago ... and come back somewhat dissappointed in the responses.
I will be extended the Tabulas "autoformatting" features to autodetect carriage and consecutive newline breaks to automatically create paragraphs. I will also allow the option to "turn-on" which formatting features you want (you can go the route of a real HTML warrior and turn off all autoformatting features and write the whole entry in pure HTML), but I have a feeling that most people will use most of the autoformatting features.
I do realize that the autoformatting that Tabulas does is horrendous; but I think fixing up the newlines/carriage problem coupled with the automatic closing of opened HTML tags (this has been a feature of Tabulas for quite some time; try opening a HTML tag and creating an entry) should be enough to keep most accounts validated.
This is the hardest part of Tabulas; to clean up all the data input into the system by novices...
But to clarify: I will be doing basic "fixes" to all entries: cleaning up any non-ASCII characters (although this should be automatic since the browser is sending in iso mode), cleaning up basic img tags (most people won't close them properly ...
Permalinks
I thought Tabulas already had permalinks? The #comment is just an anchor tag ... but the pemalink page for any user's entry is www.tabulas.com/~username/entryid.html. However, I will be extending the 'permalinks' to also allow for www.tabulas.com/~username/year/month/entryid.html.
Maybe a paid option will be letting you create your own 'permalink' url (like http://www.tabulas.com/~roy/2003/03/so-happy/). But that's really iffy.
Accents/Angle Brackets
Yes, a huge problem. For a while I tried to address this by htmlentities() all the data input into the system, but this caused weird problems for people writing in international characters (it would already get ASCII-encoded then would get doubly-ASCII encoded), so I had to turn it off. But it's something I will fix.
As a side note, in the upcoming version, you will be able to select which HTML encoding (UTF-8, iso-8859-1, whatever floats your boat) you want to use on your site.
Documentation
A wiki is a very interesting idea. But I hate the ways wikis are formatted and their penchant for DoingThisToWords. But an community-moderated 'help' center would be really awesome. If I roll this out with a community-driven support center, people could 'earn' points for their paid accounts (for those who can't afford but have endless amounts of time...). And this would be even cooler if I could make it localized for nationalities; Singaporeans could help each other out, Phillipinos could help each other out ... in their native tongue. Hmm.
Spellchecker
I've built in the spellchecker already into Tabulas. It's not the best, but like you say, people can always use client-side programs until I can roll out my own version.
No Privacy on Community
This was done on purpose. The idea is that allowing people to post 'friends-only' entries to a community site defeats the purpose of posting to a community. It in essence forces you to subscribe to every member of the community ... not good.
However, the new features in Tabulas allows a community moderator to set a privacy level on the whole community itself (only members can view its posts vs. everyone can see the posts).
But if you post a private entry to a community, you are submitting it to the community ... and your privacy options will be overriden. Communities are not a way to categorize your personal private posts; you need to purchase categories for that.
Reading/Music/Mood fields
Maybe.
Community Styles
Problems: I know. All have been fixed in the new CP. I promise ;)
Deleting Accounts
This has just me being lazy. It's not just a matter of clearing out the DB, but accessing the children servers (like aces.tabulas.com) to delete all their stuff, and I honestly haven't had time to extend the intranet API to handle this (mass deletions is something I'm very scared to do, for obvious reasons).
Backups
The backup feature already exists???????
Share the love
Maybe.
HTML Lists
This is a problem with the autoformatting, as mentioned above
Commenting (in a comment)
Commenting has been a HUGE headache since day one. If you are one of the early users, you'll remember when Tabulas actually autoindented children comments... but I turned this off because a lot of templates were getting really screwy. Now it uses a simple "Posted as reply:" (or some inane text) ...
I've expermented privately with using color combinations, but this gets way too complex to style for the average user ...
I'm probably going to try to reimplement the nested comments along with some sort of color scheme (I'm really digging the way the comments are laid out on pure-essence.net).
But I do need to figure out something (ala LiveJournal) that 'limits' the number of comments on a given page.
I also need to fix the comment processing form. So nasty.
I have been logging insane hours at this PC bang working on the new display engine (still). You'd be surprised how long it takes... I can do most PHP stuff, but the architectural stuff is still my weakness.
I'll be able to demo the new display engine to you guys within a few days (hopefully by weekend's end). You guys can marvel at how clean and how VALID the whole display engine now is, and as requested by sal, the comments form spits out a lot of id/class values so you can style your comments.
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Allen
roy
RoyKim (guest)
Cunt.
MacDaddyTatsu (guest)
NUMBER OF COMMENTS ALLOWED BEFORE LINKAGE: Would that be user set or global. I dont really care for my page personally, but it would be of interest to know.
RoyKim (guest)
benwebber
a) I know the back-up feature already exists, and I\'ve used it before. Just the span between back-ups is a bit much. That\'s all.
b) Permalinks. It is just an anchor, but it\'s rather annoying.
c) Privacy on community posts. Valid points. I was leaning towards the accidental side of things.
I don\'t think that people should be able to automatically post to communities at all. Very rarely are blogs on Tabulas subject-specific. And going to the webdesigners community and finding posts on what \"spiffy12\" ate for supper is defeating the purpose of the community. Sure, the mods can handle that, but that would require work 24/7.
Dodo uses a hacked-to-bits version of WordPress. I\'ve used the alternating colour scheme on my blog. All it requires is inputting
<?=($i%2)?\"even\":\"odd\";$i++;?>
Into the div or table cell itself. It will take the first comment and add in the class \"odd\". The second one \"even,\" etc.
<div class=\"<?=($i%2)?\"even\":\"odd\";$i++;?>\">
For example, I use divs on my site. If you take a look at the comments on a given entry, they will appear like this:
<div class=\"odd\" id=\"comment-123\">
You can style it any way you like, then.
roy
That\'s the purpose of community moderators ... I can build tools to make it easier to moderate, but it\'s ultimate the burden of the community to deal with that type of problem.
haiphong
b) The method that tabulas uses right now doesn\'t seem as easy/user friendly as other blog programs.
c) i agree that to avoid any problems, community posts should always be opt-in.
d) wow, that is a dirty hack, but interesting. So you have some php that determines the class to be even or odd, so that in your css you have an odd and even class that have their respective color differences? hmm....
benwebber
It\'s not my hack, though. It comes from <a href=\"http://wordpress.org/support/index.php?action=vthread&forum=10&topic=1148&page=0#post-13\">this WordPress thread</a>.