Site News

Greetings, all. I finally tonight fixed a nasty problem I was having with the Drupal software's handling of session, cache, and cookie-related stuff. For some reason, some PHP settings in the .htaccess file were not being set properly.

There were three problems being caused by this:

• If you used the Back and Foward buttons while working on a post, the browser might reset the form when you came back to it.
• If you left the Preview page for a post, the page would expire, forcing you to refresh.
• The Cooperative Digest software was logging people out too quickly and too often.

All of these problems should now be solved. If anyone is has any problems along these lines in the future, please let me know.

All the best,
Dan

P.S. For the record, this was not a Drupal problem as far as I can tell--just server configuration stuff. I'm pretty damn happy with Drupal so far.

I changed the default theme today, as well as the color scheme on the developer.* Magazine site. The sites are now a little better matched in terms of colors and fonts. I don't know that I'll ever get them exactly matched, but this should be a lot better. Please let me know what you think.

Dan

Thanks to an Atom module that I found for Drupal, I added an Atom feed to the Cooperative Digest yesterday. Atom is an emerging standard in the same vein as RSS. This is the url for the Atom feed:

http://www.developerdotstar.com/community/atom/feed

Follow this link to learn more about Atom:

http://www.atomenabled.org/

Comments or suggestions welcome.

Thanks,
Dan

I added a couple new features to the Cooperative Digest tonight:

BBCode: this allows you to use 'BBCode' tags in your posts. If you've ever used the PHPBB web forum, then you may already be familiar with these tags. Basically they're just an alternative to HTML that are supposed to be easier to type in. For example, I used a BBCode tag to to make [b]this text bold[/b].

Trackback: this is a cool blog-related feature that allows sites to inform each other when cross-site references are made. For example, if you read someone's blog post on this site or another site and paste its url in your post, then the Cooperative Digest will automatically check to see if that url has a Trackback link. If it does, then the software will 'ping' the Trackback link so that the blogger is informed that you've referenced his blog in your blog. Similarly, if someone else's blog has Trackback capabilities, if they refer to your blog our Trackback will be pinged.

Please let me know if anyone has any problems (or successes) with these new features.

Added an "email this page" feature today.

And check out the new "Browse archives" calendar in the left column of each page. If you miss a few days between visits to the Cooperative Digest, you can keep up with what's posted to the site each day by clicking on the calendar.

I also patched the comment module to do word-based truncation when making an automatic subject when the subject is blank. Thanks to Drupal developer arnab for posting this improvement.

Dan

Thanks to Drupal module developer Grant Bowman, we now have a Blogrolls feature! When you are logged in to the Cooperative Digest, go to the main page for your blog and you will see a Blog Roll block in the upper right. Click on the Edit link to add entries to your blogroll (which is a list of links to other people's blogs you like). The editing interface is somewhat basic at the moment (for instance, to change an entry you have to delete and re-add it), but that will change over time I'm sure.

I hope that this will be the first in a series of personalization improvements for the Cooperative Digest blogs.

Dan

I added a new Drupal module today that adds a new "printer friendly page" link to the end of each Digest post. To see the link, drill into the full post and scroll to the bottom of the text, before the comments start. Please let me know if you have any problems.

Dan