Site news -- great new feature and a general update...

May 30, '06 03:04:00PM

Contributed by: robg

Some of you may have noticed that the site was down for the last 10 minutes or so. I hate taking it offline, but I had to do so to correct the issue we had with historical comments. So as of now, here's an updated status report on the site upgrade...

First and foremost, I am pleased to announce that Mac OS X Hints now has ... an official new comments RSS feed! Just point your favorite RSS reader to this URL:

feed://www.macosxhints.com/backend/commentfeed.rss

You'll see the 30 newest comments on the site, with a link to the original article along with the comment's text. This has been near the top of my wish list for a very long time, and now it's here. A big thank you to Michael Jervis of the Geeklog team for creating this feature in literally a few hours. You see, he saw a poor half-hearted attempt I made at the feature, and took it upon himself to build and release a Geeklog plug-in to handle the task. Thank you, Michael! This will make it much easier for all of us to keep up with the comments on the hints published here. It's still a bit tricky to find the comment itself when visiting the site, but I'm working on at least a partial solution for that as well.

In the less exciting but still interesting department, here's what else has changed recently:

  1. Historical comments (those posted before Friday, May 26th at about 2:00pm Pacific time) should now be correct. We had issues with quotes and backslashes, which can really mess up code snippets, amongst other things. If you're reading an old comment, and you notice something that looks wrong, please use the Contact Us link to let me know about it--there are a lot of old comments, in a lot of different formats, and while I think we found the proper fixes for all of them, that may not be the case.
  2. I've tweaked the Search preferences to match the old site's behavior. This is just one of those niggling little details that, despite my best attempts to think of everything, I overlooked. Geeklog's default search (what you get by using the search box) is a "phrase" search -- search on finder folder, and you'll only get matches with that exact phrase. Not very useful here, obviously. I have switched it around so the default search is now an "and" search -- the same search will find any hint containing the words finder and folder. I also switched the order of the pop-up in the Advanced search page, so the default is an "and" search as well.
  3. I've cleaned up some layout issues with the Classic theme, most notably on the Pick of the Week pages.
  4. I brought back the hint counter in the menu bar area. Sure, not too important, but it was another of those details I overlooked.
That's about it for now; thanks for the feedback thus far, and overall, I'd have to say it's been a relatively smooth transition.

-rob.

Comments (9)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20060530150441946