Happy Thanksgiving! Today I'm giving thanks that we're just about wrapping up the Ajax Diary Editor, after only a few days out in the field. We don't have a massive budget for user and beta testing, so we rely on you guys to help us make this work for you. Since 200 diaries were successfully posted in the first 24 hours of going live, and hundreds more since, I think we can call this an unqualified success.
But we still want to hear about any problems you're having! The code had a major update yesterday that might have fixed your problems.
Please click There's More... for more details, and to add your comments and reports...
Notable bugs fixed were the size limits on posting...it's now back to 65535 characters in the body after formatting...and curly quotes in markup. Some people like to edit their diaries in Microsoft Word and type links in even though Word uses curly quotes that are illegal for HTML markup. <a href=”http://www.dailykos.com”>Daily Kos</a> is illegal, but <a href="http://www.dailykos.com">Daily Kos</a> works. I've added code now that automagically straightens those curly quotes, while leaving the other quotes smart & curly if that's how you like them. I thank Bill in Portland ME for sending me the markup that tracked this bug down.
We fixed RSS feeds, we got rid of the separate Preview Intro and Preview Body features (which was too ambitious a design on my part I admit) and made them both Preview Diary. That lengthens the edit-test-debug cycle a bit but it's easier for the novice user to master. We've also got a feature that if you celebrate the success of your diary with too much champagne and then go to edit it, you will have to be able to type "delete" manually into a box to prevent accidentally deleting it!
The most vivid bug was the tragic "dog vomit" situation the morning after we shipped. I had just woken up and found the recent diary list filled with the same diary, with an unfortunate title. Given the title seemed anti-Democrat, our initial impression was that we had opened a security hole with the code changes, and were under attack. A combination of users reporting the diarist's history was sound and technical analysis quickly discovered that we were not under attack, but instead there was a bug that we didn't understand. Somehow, not only was the autosaving draft system making the drafts submitted Published, it was also circumventing the posting limits of one diary per day!
It took about four hours to track down exactly what was wrong and fix it (although in a few minutes we had most of the repetitive diaries cleared). A couple other users also showed the problem, but likely less than 1% of the users were affected who tried editing a diary that day. The problem was apparently brittleness in Internet Explorer clearing a hidden form field, which was then sending in incomplete drafts. The server had been made excessively robust, and when receiving an incomplete draft, it created a whole new story for it, and published it! Ignoring the posting limits.
The bug so scalded us that it has been killed in about five different manners in the client and middleware. Moving forward, the opportunity to prevent this entire category of problems is to move security into the database, using the new features of MySQL 5. That way posting limits are absolute, corruption is filtered, integrity is constrained. The database also needs rearchitecting to support the burgeoning traffic this site is enjoying as well.
I apologize to the diarists affected and I invite them back to post again...it's safe now, I promise!
As for browser support, all modern desktop browsers should work. Netscape requires version 7.2 or later. Internet Explorer requires version 6 or later. The polls aren't animated in Safari unfortunately.
Update [2006-11-23 19:25:11 by peeder]: I wanted to post a usage note: when you have a draft, and go to delete it, sometimes the draft is still in your Diary Drafts menu when you get to the front page. That's just the system being a bit tardy in cleaning it off there, a reload of the front page will usually clear it.
So what's your experience like with the new features? Do you have any questions? Is there anything we could do better? Do you have any tips to share? Just wanna suggest new feature ideas for the future?
I've been very impressed with the great diaries we've had so far this holiday week, and I look forward to plenty more.