Changing Diary Descriptions

We’ve been getting a lot of cries for help the last few weeks from people who have had trouble with their diary descriptions.

As our diarists have started adding visitor counters, pictures, animations, and all sorts of other custom HTML gadgets to their descriptions, problems associated with descriptions gone bad have gone way up. Symptoms of this sort of problem can include not being able to see the entry list on your diary table of contents, or not seeing a Save button when you go to change your diary description.

We’ve made some changes today to help protect everybody from accidentally messing up their diary descriptions. Many of these problems were caused by diary descriptions being trimmed to the allowed 6,500 characters (if they were too long) when they were saved. We had been doing this automatically, and it would cause trouble when part of a description was trimmed off that contained code needed for the description to work properly. In other words, you might have gone to add a piece of script for a web counter, but if the description was too long, part of that script would be trimmed off, the script would fail, and as a result your diary description would display incorrectly.

We’ve changed the process so that instead of just trimming and saving the description automatically, you will now see an error message if your description is too long – and it won’t save until you shorten it yourself. Also, we’ve added a character counter (like the one on notes and entries) to the Change Diary Description screen, so that you can see if you’re running out of room. These changes should help to keep these sorts of accidents from happening in the future.

One other thing – many of the problems we’ve seen in diary descriptions are the result of unclosed comment tags (if you don’t know what I’m talking about – don’t worry – you can skip this part). Many of these little scriptlets that people are putting in their diary descriptions include comments – designated by an opening tag of <!–, and a closing tag of –>. If you enter an opening comment tag in your description, but don’t include a closing comment tag, the web browser considers everything after the opening tag a comment and does not display it. This can cause all or part of the description to seem to disappear. So be careful with those comments, and make sure they have a closing tag.