What Can We Improve?
Ok, so it seems that the memory allocation errors on blogs.perl.org are finally behind us and we're working our way through the list of users who were semi-signed-up during the bad old times.
That means it's probably time to start looking ahead and discussing what improvements we can make to the system. The project team have an internal bug-tracking tool (er... ok... spreadsheet) which we'll make public very soon, but we're keen to have your ideas too.
We want to hear about two types of things. Firstly there's the actual bugs that you find - what's broken when you use the site. And secondly, what can we improve? What features are missing from blogs.perl.org? We want blogs.perl.org to be a first class blogging platform for the Perl community. What, in your opinion, does it need in order to reach that goal?
Please leave suggestions in the comments on this post.
Oh, and we're also hoping to get the MT templates that power this site onto github over the next few days. So if you're an MT hacker (or want to be one) there will be an opportunity for you to make your own fixes and enhancements and feed them back to the site.
Update: I've created a github repo for the site. Over the weekend that will be filled with the templates that we use to build this site. Whilst you're waiting for that, feel free to use the issue tracker to register your problems and ideas.
That means it's probably time to start looking ahead and discussing what improvements we can make to the system. The project team have an internal bug-tracking tool (er... ok... spreadsheet) which we'll make public very soon, but we're keen to have your ideas too.
We want to hear about two types of things. Firstly there's the actual bugs that you find - what's broken when you use the site. And secondly, what can we improve? What features are missing from blogs.perl.org? We want blogs.perl.org to be a first class blogging platform for the Perl community. What, in your opinion, does it need in order to reach that goal?
Please leave suggestions in the comments on this post.
Oh, and we're also hoping to get the MT templates that power this site onto github over the next few days. So if you're an MT hacker (or want to be one) there will be an opportunity for you to make your own fixes and enhancements and feed them back to the site.
Update: I've created a github repo for the site. Over the weekend that will be filled with the templates that we use to build this site. Whilst you're waiting for that, feel free to use the issue tracker to register your problems and ideas.
I blog about Perl.
Seems to be no way to view older blogs. No way to click for older items at the bottom of the page. Seems like a rather major thing to miss out.
Also clicking on "Recent Items" should take you to a much more extensive list.
Site-wide comments feed? I asked for it on the list a while back, but it was probably forgotten in all the “get the thing working at all” noise.
@Matt Easier access to older entries is definitely on our radar.
@Aristotle I remember your request. It's still on the bug spreadsheet, but nothing was done about it whilst the site was completely broken.
Can you clarify what you mean. You want a feed that includes all new comments posted to any post across the site. Is that right?
That is exactly right. Or in other words, I want the equivalent of http://use.perl.org/search.pl?op=comments;content_type=atom (except that the one here would be better because it would be full-text).
It would be cool if we could change the templates (or at least the CSS) on our individual blogs so they don't all look the same.
Most strange. To get to this "leave a comment" page I had to (re)confirm my e-mail address. Which I thought that'd I'd already done.
To start with - thanks for putting all the hard work into getting this up and running. But you asked for more specific feedback than that, so...
Not only doesn't the signup page work without JavaScript, it fails obscurely rather than detecting and warning. (Specifically, the ReCaptcha doesn't show, and so the form submission page gives an error of (something like) "text missing".) It would be good to (at least) detect no JavaScript, and give a helpful up-front error.
I might be missing something that already exists, but it would be nice if there was an automatic way to syndicate posts (or at least, the text of posts) to a use.perl journal, to point people from there to here.
1: Would it be possible to make pages on blog.perl.org redirect transparently to blogs.perl.org?
2: Can we get some sort of "subscribe to thread" that emails us comments on that thread? Without that, it's entirely too easy to reply to a post, and never see any replies. (Sadly, this is something that still doesn't Just Work on the web in general.)
I can now login (cool) but can't post. It tells me I didn't have the permissions to "access any blogs on this installation".
Perhaps you could consider a small "help" or "faq" in the main menu.
Thanks for your work.
:m)
@:m),
This is a symptom of a registration that wasn't completed successfully. You have a user record, but you're missing either a blog record or the permission record that links your user to your blog.
Drop me an email (dave[at]dave[dot]org[dot]uk) with your username and I'll investigate further.
Hi,
my suggestion for a change in BioPerl would be to change the module build process from your custom build system to either ExtUtils::MakeMaker or Module::Build.
It could save significant time to people hunting bugs in BioPerl (like me trying to fix Win32 compatibility couple of months ago)
--
kmx
sorry my comment should go to another blog
However it seems like a bug in the blog system
1) I open "What are BioPerl's weaknesses?"
2) Fill my comment
3) Click Preview
4) Click Submit
And in the end I posted my comment here instead of BioPerl related post.
--
kmx
kmx, that's a result of the migration data loss that we experienced last week, and shouldn't be an issue going forward.
(HTML tags for style?? WTF...)
When I tried to register from a user blog, it kept complaining about "text is wrong". After several futile attempts I tried again from the front page, and this time it showed a captcha. Aha!
So, when trying to register from a user page, it doesn't show a captcha.
And yes, Javascript was enabled.