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!
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 1.4.2 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 1.3 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.)
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.)
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.
Fallen and Can't Get Up
Alas, PolkaDot has fallen off the Freshmeat main page. I guess I had better make some meaningless changes so I can release a new version.
But 220 folks did look at the Freshmeat entry. (And 138 of them followed the link to the site. That's about 138 more than I expected.)
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.
RSS Feeds
I have a general rule that I don't read blogs that lack RSS feeds. That makes it a little embarrassing because PolkaDot doesn't provide an RSS feed.
So I added the functionality today. It's RSS 2.0. (Sorry ATOM and RDF fans, RSS is all you get. Mainly because I'm hand-coding it and RSS 2.0 is the simplest with which to deal.)
I'm not releasing the new code yet. I haven't really tested it out very well. But it does validate. And it works in FireFox's LiveBookmarks, Sage, and via NetVibes.
Freshmeat
I guess I should have checked Freshmeat before posting that I had submitted PolkaDot. By the time I posted, it had already been approved as a project.
In submitting it, I learned three things about Freshmeat that I didn't know:
- There's an approval process. They reject things that they deem trivial. (I was a little worried about that requirement.)
- Projects don't have to be open source.
- Projects must run on either the PalmOS or on a Unix-like OS. No Windows-only software allowed.
Of course, it was approved in the wee hours of the morning and had fallen pretty far down the front page by morning.
