Rainer Brockerhoff

[Rainer Brockerhoff]

OK, the new design is finished.

It took me two weeks of nearly full-time work, going through at least ten iterations. I started out with nothing more than insatisfaction with my previous site, some notes from Adam Engst's critique of it at his MacHack 2002 session "Hacking the Press", and the idea to implement both a weblog and support forums.

At first I tried simply implementing some of Adam's suggestions under my old design, and using Blogger. However I found it difficult to integrate, and I didn't like depending on someone else's site being up to be able to post stuff to my own.

Anyway, after looking briefly at some available options, I decided to download and try out phpBB. My provider turned out to have the necessary infrastructure installed (mySQL and PHP) and very soon I had a test forum running.

I looked at the several visual themes available for phpBB and the default one (subBlue) looked nearly like what I wanted for my site.

After several iterations of convergence between the forum theme and the rest of the site, here it is. It's now hard to tell which pages are served by phpBB and which aren't, unless you look at the URL; if it has the .php extension, it's a phpBB page.

Before anyone asks, I actually like Mac OS X's "metal" look. The site graphics (actually, there are only 3 graphics altogether for that) have a different blur level and are very slightly blue-tinted. So it will be easy to change in the future. Suggestions are welcome...

Please excuse any remaining inconsistencies (and tell me if you find any). I had no previous PHP experience, and stylesheets also were new to me. Hopefully it came out OK.

I checked the site with all Mac OS X browsers I could find. Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla and Chimera all seem to work OK and render things the same. OmniWeb still doesn't support borders in stylesheets, but seems otherwise OK. Opera does some strange things to column widths on some page; no time to figure out why. And iCab, so far, seems to have the most formatting problems.

[Rainer Brockerhoff]

One problem with IE; posting and editing posts has some problems. I think the JavaScripts that handle cursor position and tag insertions aren't IE-friendly. Sometimes, when I submit a message, the first dozen or so characters are mangled.

I've seen this before on other phpBB boards, so I suppose it's an IE issue. I'll look around on the phpBB support forums to see if there's a fix out...

Meanwhile, be sure to preview, double-check (and edit, if necessary) your posts.

[Rainer Brockerhoff]

I've updated phpBB to version 2.0.3, which just came out. It fixed some security vulnerabilities.



I've also done incremental fixes to page formatting inconsistencies, changed to grey smilies (the default yellow ones were rather obtrusive), added a link to the site map to the 404 page, and did some minor things I can't remember right now .

[Rainer Brockerhoff]

I'm slowly weeding out some little bugs and making formatting more consistent. Today I finally made my weblog the default topic, so linking to it is now easier: http://www.brockerhoff.net/bb/viewtopic.

This required changing over a dozen files, so as soon as I find the time I'll try to generate the header with php.

[Rainer Brockerhoff]

I fixed a bug that was, errhh... bugging me for some time. Linking to individual posts in the main weblog topic now works, and it returns to the correct place after posting, too.



I'm also checking out Apple's new Safari browser. Practically my whole site seems to work OK, except for button placement which sometimes is off a few pixels... no great problem.

[Rainer Brockerhoff]

More or less simultaneously with my discovery of RSS, phpBB version 2.0.4 came out.



So this was a good excuse to simultaneously update and implement RSS. It turned out that this wasn't as cut-and-dried as I first thought, since I had already modified the standard phpBB code quite a lot - mostly to force descending order for my main weblog topic and to do several cosmetic and functional enhancements. There are still several bugs in less-used areas, mostly related to administration and moderation, but I'm working on them...



In any event, BBEdit helped a lot with its "compare folders" feature. I even found some hidden bugs in my previous code. I was up and running in about 24 hours (not counting a week of learning details about RSS).



Nevertheless, there's still lots of thing to do. My RSS code now runs OK through the RSS Validator, but most of my pages still fail the HTML Validator, and the CSS stylesheet still needs a few tweaks. Even so, everything seems to work fine in all major browsers...



Besides some added functionality for phpBB, the major next thing to do here is to implement trackbacks. Stay tuned...

[Rainer Brockerhoff]

Found and fixed several bugs in the RSS code.

You can now subscribe to topics containing polls, and the RSS items have been cleared of superfluous <span>s and references to styles - simple old-style HTML tags are now used.

Also, the per-message "reply" button now works the same as the "quote" button, except that no quote is generated. In other words, it repeats the "Subject" line. In the near future, it will also keep a special thread index to keep all posts on the same thread together.

The former top-level "reply" button now says "new post". It will open a new thread inside the topic.

In the works: threads and trackbacks.

[Rainer Brockerhoff]

I think I'm getting up to a little speed with PHP and the phpBB source.



As I've said elsewhere, I can now receive trackback pings and they're automatically incorporated as preformatted posts. Also, I'm including RDF comments which allow Movable Type-compatible weblogs to autodiscover the correct URL to ping.



Today I included an option to type all phpBB pages; you'll see a line like "Page generated in 1.561 seconds, 12 queries executed" at the bottom of every page. This will help me get a measure of the load on the server.



Also, to help browsers and RSS aggregators preformat a page, images generated by [img] tags will now include the proper height and width values at a cost of a slight slowdown. As a side effect, non-existent images will spill several error messages over the page's header... I'm still working on failing more gracefully in this case without slowing things further. Anyway, missing images should definitely not happen a lot.

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