Weblog entry #167 for Steve
See all weblog entries made by Steve.
Over the past week I've been tweaking the site a little. Nobody has yet complained so I'm going to assume that the changes are welcome!
The biggest issue has been the changed behaviour of the "forgotten password" facility.
Previously if you had forgotten your password, and clicked upon the appropriate link, your password would be immediately changed to something random - and a mail would be sent out to your registered address telling you what it was.
This clearly allows abuse. Somebody could click the button, resetting your password to something random. If you'd lost control of your mail account you'd effectively be locked out of the site.
After a message from rpetre, which I misunderstood, I've now updated the facility so that it works in the way you'd expect:
- You claim to have forgotten your password.
- A mail is sent to your registered email account with a link in it.
- You click the link and can enter a new password.
This system still fails to work if you lose your mail account - but otherwise it is much better. It even forces you to use https for the reset step which is a nice bonus.
Over the next few days I'm going to be updating the location of a few things, smoothing out the appearance. Volunteers who wish to submit design change suggestions, or new stylesheet snippets would be very welcome!
In other news the site will be down briefly on Saturday morning whilst I upgrade the host machine to Etch.
I've been thinking of postponing it for a month or so, but I think I'm confident now that the upgrade should be painless. Why run Etch?
Well with Etch we can get some newer Perl modules from the Debian repository. Specifically we can start GPG-signing outgoing emails which appeals to my geeky nature.
There are other interesting possibilities too.
I still plan to split up the site into a clustered setup with Xen but that will wait a while .. there are some challenges involved, but it will avoid a lot of downtime in the future and allow easy migration of different components.
PS people who were keen to avoid the Bayesian comment filter? With it disabled we get things like this. Grr.
Comments on this Entry
That's the Austrian word for "Hello", it's from me.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servus
Regards,
rjc
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There are only a few things I'm not happy about on your site. All of them - Atom/RSS related:
1. Feed channels for article comments always use the same name (at least in Google Reader). I'd really like them to use the article titles as a part of the name.
2. There is no accumulating Atom/RSS channels for comments on *all* articles or *all* weblog entries from the same author. (I'm not really sure about this. Depends on the frequency of new comments. But at least I'd like to try. BTW, such accumulating channel works great for me on Debian POTD web site at the moment.)
3. The order of feed entries in comment feeds is often broken in Google Reader no matter what sorting type I use. Currently used scheme looks fine in Sage style readers but I guess any reader tailored for *stream* of entries will show the feeds in broken order.
Hope you'll have a chance to fix them some day...
In all other regards the site is close to perfection :)
Keep up the good work!
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...Bye..Dmitry.
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Hope you'll have a chance to fix them some day...
I think I fix most issues pretty well when they've been reported! Or at least explain why I won't. So thanks for giving your comments, which I'll now address in order.
1. Now that you mention it that seems like an obvious bug. I'll get that fixed very soon.
2. Something that I'd not considered at all. Again that will be added, and linked to on users' profile pages (beneath their recent comments). Right now there is only the single global recent comments feed which I guess is not so helpful.
3. I'm not sure how that could be fixed. Most of my feeds validate correctly most of the time, and I'm usually careful to add date attributes correctly. If you could suggest changes to my feeds which would allow them to work correctly theN I would be pleased to include them.
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There are no dates in it. Probably, <rdf:Seq> was meant to order the items properly... Looks like GR ignores the tag. And because it does not re-add all the items every time to the server-side list, (but rather only new ones are added), the order becomes cranky in some situations, (in particular, when several new items are added at once).
I'm not Atom/RSS expert but I think simply putting items in the reverse order they were submitted should do the trick. May be adding dates instead (or in addition?) might help as well.
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...Bye..Dmitry.
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Points/bugs 1. and 2. should now be addressed/fixed.
Please let me know if it breaks or doesn't behave as you'd expect.
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If yes, lets take for example the excerpt from RSS channel for this weblog -
http://www.debian-administration.org/comment/feed/onweblog/3773
<title>Debian GNU/Linux System Administration Resources</title>
<description>Comments on Site plans & updates</description>
Both GR and Sage use data from <title> to show the channel in the tree list. This means that all comments channels from your site have the same title in the list. (BTW, Sage shows <description> data at the top of rendered page with channel feeds, but GR currently does not show <description> at all.)
I'll follow up on #2 & #3 soon.
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...Bye..Dmitry.
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Ahh I see what you mean - I updated the content in the "description" tags, not in the title tags. I will correct this first thing in the morning.
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a) for comments posted by anybody on any article;
b) for comments posted by anybody on any weblog entry from particular author.
also I missed polls:
c) for comments posted by anybody on any poll;
What you did, if I understand correctly, was adding aggregate channel
d) for comments posted by particular author on any article, weblog or poll entry.
I admit [d] is quite interesting feature, but I'd like to see [a-c] as well.
Initially I considered this a minor inconvenience, but now as I have subscribed to 38 onarticle + 12 onpoll + 6 onweblog channels, (which look exactly the same in the list so far), I feel like this is overkill for channels that are updated only occasionally.
P.S.
As for http://www.debian-administration.org/recent/comments, I didn't know about it... It is not linked from the main page. Also it is not mentioned at http://www.debian-administration.org/about/Syndication.
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...Bye..Dmitry.
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Just a thought: probably it makes sense to change this item to
d) for any content (comments, weblog entries, polls) contributed by particular author.
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...Bye..Dmitry.
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I think I misunderstood your request - as you suggest.
Right now there are several feeds:
- Recently published comments, regardless of target.
- Recently published feeds.
- Feeds of content matching a particular tag.
- Feeds of comments posted by a particular user - which I just added.
The way I understand your suggestion now you seem to want a feed of recent comments posted upon articles, recent comments posted upon polls, and recent weblog comments. Is that correct?
I'm really not too sure why that would be useful. I find it plausible that you might care about all comments on article XXX, poll YYY, or weblog entry ZZZ - but I find it hard to see why you'd only care about a particular class of comments.
Is there a good rationale for this? Some way that the "recent comments" feed doesn't give you enough detail.
As for the feed links - yes there are a couple of semi-public feeds which aren't explicitly advertised. I will get round to documenting them shortly - thanks for the reminder.
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"Recently published comments, regardless of target."
Actually this feed is close to what I needed, except I'd like weblog comments to be in a separate channel.
"The way I understand your suggestion now you seem to want a feed of recent comments posted upon articles, recent comments posted upon polls, and recent weblog comments. Is that correct?"
Almost, except I suggest every weblog to have its own aggregate feed for all comments on all entries in that weblog. (See below.)
"I'm really not too sure why that would be useful. I find it plausible that you might care about all comments on article XXX, poll YYY, or weblog entry ZZZ - but I find it hard to see why you'd only care about a particular class of comments."
As for me, combining article and poll comments is fine. I just thought someone might want to read all article comments, but at the same time they might not like polls by some reason, hence it would be inconvenient for them to see comments on polls in the aggregate comments feed.
And I'd really like to differentiate weblog comments by weblog author, (as described in 2.b). While many haunters read (or at least skim through) most of the articles, I don't think they read all weblogs.
Now suppose I'm interested in a few weblogs - I read every entry posted to these particular weblogs and want to follow conversations on all of them. For that currently I have to subscribe to a dozen of feeds. (E.g. if I wanted to follow your weblog + comments, I'd need to subscribe to one weblog feed + 167 onweblog feeds at the moment. I want instead to use 1 weblog feed + 1 aggregate onweblog feed.)
--
...Bye..Dmitry.
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