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Smalltalk Daily Delay

July 14, 2010 10:09:31.617

I use YouTube as one of my options for the daily videos, and this morning it seems to be having problems processing video. So.... I'll be posting when that clears up :)

posted by James Robertson

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Stupid Commenting Issues Addressed

July 11, 2010 12:15:47.204

Well, I ran into the commenting bug that a few people have reported over the last few weeks. It turns out that there were two of them:

  • If you changed the title of a comment, the comment failed. That was due to my sending a spam check to a class instead of the sole instance of the class. Doh
  • Depending on how you entered a comment, the first character of a new paragraph would get chopped off. That was just a dumb mistake in the code.

I'm pretty sure I got both of those dealt with, but if not - I'm sure someone will let me know :)

posted by James Robertson

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Now With More Social Media

July 6, 2010 11:24:59.047

I was on a conference call for almost 90 minutes this morning, so while I was listening, I wrote some more social media link stuff for the blog. Check out the bottom of each post - in addition to the Facebook "Like" button, I've added a Facebook "Share" button, and a Twitter "Tweet This" button.

Of course, those only work if you're on those systems; if you're not, just ignore them :)

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posted by James Robertson

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Wages of Technorati

June 15, 2010 8:34:02.191

Apparently, I need to toss this into a visible post: VNFTCYW39SMP

So that Technorati can tell that this is, in fact, my blog :)

posted by James Robertson

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How the Like Thing Works

April 22, 2010 12:12:54.878

I got a question about the new "like" button - specifically, why "liking" the news stream entry on Facebook doesn't reflect back to the blog (and vice versa).

Well, that's because the two things aren't really linked. Here's how the news stream entries land on Facebook:

  • I post to my blog
  • The server auto-tweets the post for me (to Twitter)
  • I have my Twitter stream linked to my facebook news stream, so that anything I tweet lands in the Facebook news stream

Which means that the blog post and the news entry on Facebook are not the same item. Adding a "like" to one will not add a "like" to the other. To get the two linked, I'd have to do some investigation of the FB api, and see if it would even be reasonably possible :)

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posted by James Robertson

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Now With Like

April 22, 2010 10:57:23.762

At the bottom of each post there's a Facebook "Like" button now - if you have a Facebook account, hitting that will just up the "like" count for the post over there. It was simple to add (once I fixed the stupid CSS styling issues I had with my copy/paste job).

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posted by James Robertson

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Dumb Mistake of the Day, Blog Edition

March 30, 2010 13:22:12.351

I noticed a couple of days ago that the category selection option wasn't working in WebKit browsers on this site; it seemed curious, since the same code was working over on my Cincom blog. Well - the issue was fairly simple. A while back I changed the way comments get added (I now include the comment box on any single post page). However, the only place I was assigning the user agent was in a bit of template associated with the old way of doing comments - which meant that I was never checking the user agent at all.

That hit the category selectors, as those boxes are Javascript driven, and the Javascript differs for IE6 and "everything else". So... I slapped the user agent check back in, and now it all works again.

posted by James Robertson

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Puttering with Silt

February 12, 2010 13:37:11.403

I've been puttering with the Silt codebase (which powers this, and my Cincom blog). There's some cruft in there, but one place I haven't spent much time until recently was in the "how do I set it up" region. The blog creation UI now works properly in 7.7 (under the tools menu), but that's not really sufficient. What I really need is a simple base image, with a listener already running, and a simple "set up a blog for me" tool. I'll have a look at that over the next few days, maybe it'll be worth a screencast :)

For now, grab VW 7.7 NC, connect to the public store (a connection is built into the NC image), and load Silt. Then pull down the tools menu, and try "Blog Manager". Hit the "New" button, add an email address for "maintainer", and you should be good to go with a localhost setup.

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posted by James Robertson

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Setting up Silt

January 30, 2010 12:41:18.930

When I first set up this site on Slicehost, I pushed up a "how did I do it" post. I recently got an email telling me that I skipped a step of interest: how did I set up the actual Smalltalk blog server?

Well, I do that somewhat manually, because I'm familiar with the process. However, I created tools for this a long while back, and I just refreshed them this morning. There's still a manual bit of intervention - my tools aren't quite as finished as I'd like. However, it works, so here are the steps:

  1. Load Silt from the Public Store
  2. Under Tools, select "Blog Manager"
  3. Click the "New" button
  4. Fill in the required fields, click the Set Up button
  5. Your blog has been set up
  6. Save the image
  7. This image can be used by starting it headless

I should also document how I start the server, since it's a bit different, and structured so that I can do live patching - I'll get to that soon.

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posted by James Robertson

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Brief Outage

January 29, 2010 22:41:30.242

Slicehost tells me that the server running my virtual machine needs to be rebooted for some patches, so sometime between midnight and 2 AM tonight (US EST), this blog will be offline for a bit.

Update: The server update came and went, and things are back to normal

posted by James Robertson

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