Monday, May 10, 2004

Follow up: Blogger redesign.

I've enabled the comments and single post page as mentioned (very!) early this morning. Click on the comments on of of the last few posts and you will see what the single post page post malarkey looks like. Each post is put on it's own page along with it's comments.



Comments are on automatically for each post - you can turn off comments on one of your own posts through the blogger interface. They are not on our older posts. If you want to enable comments on an earlier post we need to edit the post, choose more options and turn comments on. Word of warning: Our old icon code (the javascript getHTMLForIcon()) is no longer accepted in posts. I'll have to read up on this but it doesn't affect us anyway due to the new icon code I released yesterday. If you edit a post with the old icon code just replace it with the new icon code.



I tried to republish the whole site (creating post pages for all posts retrospectively) but the process keeps timing out due to the number of our posts (1805 in 6 months - woo!) so some pages may be a bit screwy until I get this sorted. We have also lost access to our old comments as I have removed the Haloscan code from the template - unless I do some code that checks to see if there are old comments (via the Haloscan comment count bit) and display a 'read old comments' link where necessary. I probably won't though. :)



I'll need to jig the template about a bit as each post page is currently a copy of the main page (with long sidebar) and is a bit unwieldy. Blogger have intoduced condition tags (Something along the lines of if front page show this, if post page show this) for the templates too so that should be easy.



Talking of templates Blogger have added loads more - they now have 33 to be precise instead of the 6 or 7 they had. Some of them are not bad at all so if your design skills are cack, or unlike us, you care about not releasing a half designed site to the world there should be something for you.



Disappointingly there is no built in search which would have been nice but this is outweighed by the single post page - Google will index the new pages so that when you get a link back it should be to the post page which has it's own URL instead of a single target on a page with hundreds of posts. This should making finding old stuff a lot easier.



First impressions? Woo Yay!!!!!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is all a bit of a pain in the 4r53.I think i preferred Haloscan.
ILuvNufc

mmChronic said...

You'll have to expand on that for me - how is it a PITA? You click on comments, type it in and it's published. That's the same as Haloscan. OK if you want to post with a name rather than anon you have to log in - but you only have to do this once and it is remembered by a cookie. The management side of things is *MUCH* better than Haloscan, the speed is *MUCH* better than Haloscan. The only disadvantage so far is the lack of HTML formatting you can put in comments. I'm afraid Haloscan is gone forever from New Links.

Newcastle Photos said...

I just think it is a pain to have to open 2 pages to comment and after you're comment the link should take you back to the main page not to the post and most importantly i hav'nt seen any smileys anywhere.

mmChronic said...

2 clicks? You'd better go and have a lie down before you get RSI you lazy fscker! The grouping comments with the post they refer to is way more logical. Smileys? Try :) or :P or 8) or whatever - you know actual smileys rather than those modern new fangled graphic things. As for returning to new home page after commenting - try clicking the back button on your mouse. Some people want the moon on a stick...

bungers said...

Or indeed, click on the newlinks logo, for homepage action!

Anyway.. ILN... what happened to you coming out of retirement on Saturday...? We've got more Tour Action™ coming up soon, so you'd better start polishing that helmet!

PARP! ;)

Maybe we can link to smileys..

EDIT : Nope. You can't. Bugger.