Just a quick note to say that I am aware SSR has all sorts of speed/data/performance issues recently and that I am going to start looking at a dedicated host for the website.

I am also going to change my ISP. I don't think the host your website in your basement is quite ready for primetime yet.

Via Bill de hora:

I [Bill de hora] am moving off Movable Type. In favor of my own codebase. I've decided weblogs are to this decade as editors were to the 1970s. You have to write your own. It's a pretty thin rationale - the 1970s more or less sucked as I recall.

South Sea Republic has done the same. I have moved it from scoop to a homebrew.

It is pretty basic at the moment, and I will start adding more features once it gets established and running in a stable configuration. All the users, articles and comments have been moved over to the new schema; (apart from Damien sorry) and excepting the passwords. I have to confirm a few things in the production environment first and then I will start contacting people to reset their passwords. I didn't 'unhash' them from scoop. Currently they are garblish in the new schema and unusable. I also have registration turned off for now.

Again I will start turning these things on once I become confident of the hosting, setup and installation.

Update: Parts of the site like ass in IE. I will fix those over time, but they aren't a priority.

Update II: The index.rdf file name still works for backward compatibility, though the /rss/ is the official one. It is rss2.0, if anyone begs I can add an atom feed.

Some more changes/updates. An alternative intro could be, "what cam did on his friday night ..."

Replies: There is now a replies link which shows a registered user's comments and articles with the number of replies to them. I have yet to add scoop style 'new' comments functionality.

Register: This is now open again in the scoop style. Since SSR has anonymous commenting, as per the blog style, the only reason to register is if you want to write articles or view replies to your comments.

Comment rating: There is now comment rating, currently it is open to anonymous rating, but if there is obvious abuse or mod-bombing I may make it registration only. There is no 'mojo' involved, so there is no punishment for being rated down. It is mainly for fun and appreciation. The descriptors are currently emoticons which are synonyms for +1, 0 and -1. :) means rate up, :| means meh, and :( means rate down. First time I have used JSON in that environment, big improvement over XML.

Parent: As per Avo's suggestion a parent link on comments. A top-level comment goes to an article. When replying to an article the complete article text is displayed below the comment form.

Update: The demoroniser needs improvement, word type ' cause an error. Will fix that.

A rundown on some of the updates with SSR's blog software.

1. For those that comment with an account, you can now edit your own comments. Mainly for when a typo escapes you.

Originally I designed it so that a user would only need to log in when they write an article. Everything else can be done anonymously; but I break that design parameter, adam does; and I am betting others do too.

So ... bad design decision.

The issue there is that the session only lasts as long as the browser. On my laptop a logged in session will remain up to 60 hours if I leave the browser open and put the laptop to sleep. On the PC which goes up and down like a toilet seat the session doesn't persist between browser sessions.

It must be some obscure configuration setting that I am missing. I will continue to hunt for it. I increased the hours the session will remain open in the cfg file but it still appears to be limited by the browser not being closed.

2. You can now preview your comment before publishing it. You might need to shift-reload the page to update the javascript file.

This is a round trip so you may have to be patient at times but it should mirror what will display very closely as it uses the same algorithm that converts text into html.

The only difference is that javascript strips EOLs in urls, so a regexp puts in P tags before sending it up.

Have to comment on JSON here - massive improvement over XML in parsing out the return values. XML always ran the risk of null blowups and required all manner of defensive programming. JSON is much more resilient in that respect.

3. None's should no longer appear in RSS feeds if there is no body in a story (oops).

4. There is a now a recently popular articles which is the articles that have the most views over the last 60 days.

5. There is an article reply bar at the bottom of the page (if there are comments) under the comments section to stop confusion between replying to a comment and replying to an article.

6. URLs with article/id now redirect to the article without the RESTful read descriptor.

7. Rating a comment that has not yet been rated will now show the rating/rated ratio immediately after (oops).

8. There are some other under the hood updates, but nothing that affects the end user.

9. Still no cure for cancer.

From the how to blog design guide the components of a modern/standard blog are broken down. In trying to simplify the design of SSR in its current incarnation I removed the header and secondary links sections. Most blog headers are too busy or too big. For instance Design Observer's header draws the eye away from the content. I am probably going to redesign SSR again soon, once I decide on a layout. I want to integrate camriley.com and the AFC site into it. Probably through some form of tabbing or javascript switching - I am not sure yet.

I still like the current SSR design, I think it has aged well. I bought The Best of Brochure Design 07 recently. The designers that create layouts for brochures and print media have a wonderful understanding of white space and how the eye flows across a page. I will probably trawl it for ideas. Another good place to search for layout designs are in magazine adverts. They are usually exceptionally well layed out as well.

Update

A fellow I work with who specialises in user experience pointed out that sites with different designs and audiences can use an icon rather than tabs to point that out. For instance the flyted link on the united airways site.