Changelog


A fun and fresh way to display changes I’ve been making on my blog.

Squashing a couple of bugs: ZX81 and HTML

Bug Fix Sep 30, 2020

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.


ZX81 admin tweaks — sort and other options.

New Feature Sep 28, 2020

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.


Clickable images and other fixes.

New Feature Sep 22, 2020

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.


Fixing Userbars.

Bug Fix Aug 23, 2020

I noticed that my Userbars were failing. It seems a couple of the Perl libraries were generating errors. I’ve updated or reinstalled the failing libraries and things appear to be working again.


Cleaning up comments.

Bug Fix Feb 07, 2020

I found that replying to comments was missing the title, not looking quite like the rest of the site. The issue was using the wrong variable, probably a hold over from an earlier configuration. Things look a bit better after I cleaned up the code.