Greetings, Cranky Users! Today we have a veritable potpourri of items we hope will take the edge off your crankiness!
◊ First, let's revisit the perplexing Facebook issue. In this comment, Mehitabel9 gives the clearest explanation I've seen of what the issue is, and also suggests something to do about it. You should definitely click the link if this is an issue for you! In a group message, Nurse Kelley adds this:
Thanks! I did that, plus one other thing I found out from a facebook friend:
Here's a new bit of security that I just learned about. While on Facebook, look at your URL address; if you see http: instead of https: then you don't have a secure session and you can be hacked. Go to Account|Account Settings|Account Security and click Change. Check the first box. Otherwise FB defaults to the non-secure setting.
When I was following the advice from my friend, I noticed another security feature I wasn't aware of. You can set your preferences to receive an email if someone signs on to your fb account from a different 'puter or mobile device.
◊ And before we go below the fold, let's keep a promise to repeat some advice about linking, to oblige our friend high uintas. The link button has been observed to be a little flaky. There are a couple of ways to type your own links. The easiest is the shortcut method using [square brackets]. Inside the brackets, you put two things -- first, the url of your link, and then, after a space, whatever text you want the link to show. For instance, [http://dailykos.com Daily Kos] yields Daily Kos. You're typing all those things anyway, except for the brackets, so why not put them where you want them?
OR, you can type exactly what the link button would insert (h/t to gratis4), using the <a> tag, like this:
<a href="http://dailykos.com">Daily Kos</a> yields Daily Kos
Breaking it down, we have the <a> tag containing href= the url in quotes, then the text, and then the </a> tag.
Now, before I geek you all out completely, let's edge past the squiggle!
◊ We note a recent change presented by elfling. We can now recommend comments for a whole week, not just for 24 hours as before. I don't know whether this will extend the discussion in comment threads as hoped, but it does help a bit with custom tip jars (and other diarist comments added pre-publication) not expiring quite so quickly.
◊ I filed a bug report yesterday! If a comment gets a lot of recommends, like starting somewhere around 65, then if you click on the number of recs to expand the list of recommenders, you don't see the whole list. It cuts off the end, often in the middle of a name (that's how I'm so sure I'm not seeing the whole list!) as if the box had run out of space. So if you see this too, perhaps we've both reported it. It's not a big bug! Probably I wouldn't even have noticed it if I weren't so desperate to see if my recommend had worked.
◊ Here's a good tip from the apparently well-named gooderservice, to help us (Firefox users, at least -- anyone know if it works in other browsers?) look through a thread where we've been commenting, to see if we have replies:
I use Find Next in a diary when I comment a lot just to see if I got any replies. I find that easier and faster than going to the comment page. ...in Firefox I just tap CTRL + F, type my name, enter, then just keep tapping F3 to run through the whole diary to look for replies. It only takes a couple seconds and I don't have to leave the page.
◊ If you are a member (contributor, editor, admin) of any groups, and you publish diaries to the groups, we have a note to help you avoid trouble: when you click Publication Manager and get the box with publication choices, and you want to queue to a group, it is very tempting to dive straight for the little dropdown box to pick the correct group. DO NOT FORGET to ALSO click the radio button next to the Queue to a group blog option! The default radio button selection is for the first option, Publish now (under your own name, not a group). If you leave it there, having picked the correct group won't help you -- it will ignore that and publish immediately, not to the group but only as yourself. You can still republish to the group, assuming you notice, but if you look on your group queue and don't find the diary, it can get confusing.
◊ Lots of people trying to find a particular kind of group, for whatever reason, have struggled with how to do so. We know that, if you click the GO button for Search, and then click the orange Groups when it finally appears, you can choose to search either the groups' username or description for whatever search string you type. We've talked before about how nice it would be if groups had something like tags, that could be searched to help you find groups in a certain category, but it will probably be a while before we see that. So I have a suggestion for group owners: help interested people to find your group by making your own informal tags. People do it all the time with websites! They know others will use search engines to find sites like theirs, so somewhere they include the keywords that a searcher would be likely to type. If I have a group about New Jersey, I can call it the Garden State Gazette if I like, and say in the description that I'm interested in the goings-on in Trenton, and indeed, someone who happens on my group and is looking for New Jersey will know enough to follow me. But unless I include "New Jersey" in the description text somehow, somebody using Search to look for New Jersey groups is not going to discover me, and may needlessly start a competing group instead. So do your group a favor and help readers find you! If the description text you've planned allows you to include the obvious keywords, great, but if not, how about adding a line at the end like Tags: New Jersey, llama farming, extension ladders. Or, you know, whatever fits your group.
◊ Do you like my little diamond shape? It's called a "lozenge". Coming up this week, we'll talk about how to make it show up here. Meanwhile, please have at the comments! In a couple of hours, I'll be out for a while, but that should not inhibit you from being cranky!