Comments!
After a few hours of futzing around, I've added comments to PolkaDot.
Now my readers, both of them, can comment on my insightful posts.
Let's see how long it takes for this to complete blow up in my face. Ah, hell, they're just text files. There's only so much that can go wrong.
PolkaDot 1.5 Released
Finally! A new release of PolkaDot. Here are the latest changes:
XHTML Compliance
PolkaDot output is now XHTML compliant. Of course, your posts may wreck it. (Mine do.) Future versions will try to protect against that better.
Changed vs. Updated Date Toggle
PolkaDot sorts posts by date. You can now choose whether to use "changed" date or "updated" date as the "posted on" date. The former is the date the file's content was last changed. The latter is the date any of the file's metadata was changed. I was trying allow a sort of file creation date, so you could fix older posts without moving them to the top of the posts. But, on my server, FTPing a file up appears to change the metadata, so it makes no difference.
Language Localization
All static strings in PolkaDot are now defined in config.php for easy customization and language localization. If you translate PolkaDot into another language, feel free to send me your config.php file and I'll make it available on the PolkaDot site.
I also have some documentation additions, specifically, how to add PolkaDot Search as a Search Engine on your Firefox Search Bar!
PolkaDot 1.4.2 Released
Yep, another tiny little minor release. Some of the new code added a variable that wasn't being initialized. So now it's initialized.
Coding is hard!
PolkaDot 1.4.1 Released
PolkaDot 1.4.1 is officially released!
The major feature in 1.4.1 is the new full-text searching capability, compliments of the vast PolkaDot Developer Community. It works great.
The search feature also lets you select posts by month by searching for an appropriate regular expression.
Check both features out on the demo site.
Additionally, there are a number of code tweaks, primarily regarding initializing variables and checking that data structures exist before accessing them. Many PHP installations don't really care. But some are configured a little more stringently and throw warnings if things aren't done correctly. Many thanks to Petri in Finland, and John with the Spamex Disposable Email Address, for their help in finding and fixing these bugs.
So, why 1.4.1 instead of 1.4? Well, I was changing the version number in the RSS feed generator tag. And I mistakenly deleted an angle bracket. Ouch. Kills the feed. And, of course, I didn't test the feed before releasing it on Freshmeat as 1.4. So I did a quickie 1.4.1 release, with the angle bracket restored. (However, I forgot to then change the generator version number from 1.4 to 1.4.1, Oh well. I am not doing a 1.4.2 release just to fix that.)
PolkaDot 1.3 Released
PolkaDot 1.3 refines the paging mechanism and adds the ability to put posts into multiple categories, via symlinks. This multiple category feature is intended for advanced users:
(Special thanks to the vast PolkaDot Developer Community for pretty much everything in version 1.3.)
Fun With PolkaDot
Here's a fun trick that just came to me. By installing PolkaDot into one of its own subdirectories, you can have a standalone blog whose posts also get incorporated into the main blog. Here's an example. This blog has a category for Tea. By placing the PolkaDot installation files into the "Tea" directory, I can also have a separate Tea Blog.
The posts that show up on the standalone "Tea Blog" are exactly the same ones as show up in the "Tea" category for the main blog. Note that if you make sub-directories under Tea, those will show up on the Tea Blog in a category with the same name as the sub-directory, but not in the main blog. PolkaDot only goes down one level when building categories.
So I could make "Green Tea" and "Black Tea" categories, but posts in those categories would only show up in the Tea Blog. Only posts to the "Main" category on the Tea Blog would also show up on the main blog.
I'm not sure, off-hand, of a good application for this feature. But it is a way to have multiple blogs, each with their own look and feel, while still being able to aggregate them together into one single blog.
PolkaDot Philosophy
Since I mentioned the PolkaDot Philosophy in the previous post, I should expound on what that is:
- Installation means dumping the files on a PHP server. Nothing else. Dump 'em and the blog should work.
- Configuration is all in config.php. This lets folks upgrade to later versions without having to redo their config file.
- Configuration is optional. (People will, of course, at least change things like the blog name. But it needs to work right out of the box. So none of the configuration defaults should prevent an installation from working.)
That's it. That's the PolkaDot Philosophy!
Now You're a Real Boy
PolkaDot now has a real live user-base. That's right. This is no longer the only PolkaDot powered blog on the net.
PolkaDot is proud to present the UW-HEP IT Blog!
The what? It's short for "University of Wisconsin High Energy Physics Core Information Technology Blog." How cool is that? The first real PolkaDot user is into High Energy Physics. (I took just enough physics in college to know that Steve the High Energy Physics Guy must be pretty smart.)
Not only is Steve actually using PolkaDot in the real world, he's enhancing the software.
If you've tried paging back to earlier posts, you may have noticed that PolkaDot lets you page back to before the first post. In fact, it'll let you page back as far as you like. (I suppose at some point the variable holding the post number will overflow.) Steve fixed it. Very nicely, too.
He also added some configuration options that were long overdue, like the format of the posted date, whether to provide an RSS feed, and what to call that list-o-links on the right.
These enhancements all fit well into the PolkaDot design philosophy and will be included in the next official release.
Thanks Steve!
PolkaDot 1.2 Released
PolkaDot 1.2 has two new features. First, the RSS feeds have been expanded to include the category-specific feeds. In other words, if you use the RSS feed on the Tea page, then you'll get just the tea-related posts.
Second, PolkaDot now lets you page back to earlier posts. Just scroll down to the bottom of the page. It's not very sophisticated. (Nor is PolkaDot as a whole.) But it works.
Another change is that PolkaDot now actually uses the correct construct for fetching parameter values from the query string. I was lazy in the initial coding.
I don't have any other major features planned.
PolkaDot 1.1 Released
I've officially released PolkaDot 1.1. The only added feature is RSS 2.0 feeds. This also required adding another option in the config.php file. Sorry about that.
My goal is to allow users to upgrade by simply replacing the index.php file, leaving their configuration and styles alone. Alas, I had to add an additional option. Just look at config.php. It's pretty clear what to add.
