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.

Changes include: not needing to enter an email address when commenting anonymously, some search engine optimization with the slugs for the articles, comments and usernames, line height changes for white space, some more advertising but it is hidden away and shouldn't affect day to day readers, jots don't have titles in the title position instead they are in the tags, comments on an article now go onto the articles page as well and can be replied from there.

I am guessing the few that read this blog do so through rss readers, so the visual changes shouldnt be an issue.

More: Added black and white photographs through flickr's webservice API to the articles with black and white photography; such as this one. Hopefully it isn't cluttering the design too much.