I spent the last few days cleaning up the privacy and contact pages. Most of the effort went into updating the style so they matched the main content. Besides fixing titles, I removed the old table forms and cleaned up some input prompts. I also made some tweaks under the hood, so to speak, to get things working a bit better. There is still more I could do, but it gets the job done.
I decided to add back in a site menu at the bottom of my site. I’d removed it quite some time back, but I decided to add back in a contact and privacy statement. Although I still need to clean up the style of those pages, they do work. I also added some icons for consistency.
While working on the site menu items, I also decided to clean up some of the member menus. I reordered and renamed a few things to make them more useable and compact.
Most people don’t bother to sign into the site, but if you do, you can create a custom profile, gallery and menu. I could turn a forum on as well, but since this is more of a blog site I don’t bother. I gave up trying to complete with Discord and Redit.
While adding a new ZX81 program today, I uncovered a couple of bugs that needed to be squashed! The first I noticed was the <samp> tag wasn’t displaying properly. I used to leverage the <tt> for sample text, which is now deprecated and must have missed adding this newer one. An easy fix, once I found the code reference to update.
The other issue spawned from my earlier ZX81 change to add a sort routine. For the admin, I grab all the files in the directory, but aren’t yet in the database. But, the sort code only includes database entries, hiding newly added programs. I had to tweak a couple of items to get things to work, but in the end it worked out better for me. I tweaked the routine to sort new programs a the top of the admin listing, making it easier for me to edit them.
Although this is internal only, I cleaned up my ZX81 administration console a bit. Noticing the sort wasn’t correct—not matching the program page, I decided to correct that. While there, I also added a list and play option. It was bugging me that I had to go to my main site while adding new programs to pull listings and such. Really, I need to figure out how to pull the comment as the title. Sigh. More ideas, not enough time.
TL;DR—You can click the preview image to navigate to a story from the home page.
While navigating around my site I thought I’d just click the top image to navigate to the article. To my surprise, and realization, it didn’t work. That got me thinking about a quick enhancement. That, being the realization, proved not to be true.
After a bit of hacking and slashing, I got the feature to work. It took me on quite a journey and, I soon realized, just how much of a mess the code really is. Note that most of the code isn’t mine, but that isn’t an excuse. Although the new feature works, I really need to document and rewrite the entire code base. On my Trello board for another day.
Yet, there is a silver lining. In all my digging around the site, I think I finally figured out a little bug in my code. I’d worked around an issue with breaks (<br>) in the past. But I never really found the issue. I think I did today. Of course, I uncovered a couple of other issues still to be fixed. Small wins!
One other fix, but not really a bug, is the use of the zoom-in cursor when you hover over images with a URL. Although it makes sense if the images are meant to zoom, for some reason the theme I was using had them set for all anchor tags. I removed the offending code. If I really need to use zoom-in, I’ll make it a style specifically for a modal.
One last bug I found while fixing this log. I noticed the category was wrong after editing. Took me a minute to realize the edit form wasn’t honoring the saved value. This fix was much easier. I found I was using the wrong variable. An easy fix, but I’m surprised it took me so long to notice.