Assorted Things – WebTV, Diary Search, etc.

Hello everybody,

Well, I found the culprit for the slowdown in the early morning hours over the weekend and taught it some manners, so that problem should be taken care of.

Here are various comments and/or fixes that resulted from my daily trip through the support e-mails:

Fixes:

1. I’ve fixed the display problems that were causing some diary pages to appear black to users who visit our site using WebTV. Thanks to the people at Microsoft for helping to figure that one out. HOWEVER, if you use the “classic” version of WebTV, you still may be having trouble saving entries and/or notes. We are working on the solution to that, should be soon.
2. The Note History screen (available to Plus users only) was MIA this morning – not sure what happened, but I reset and reloaded it, and it works now.
3. I fixed (I think) the problem that was causing paragraph breaks to disappear if you went back to edit an entry using the WYSIWYG editor. I have seen the one where you may get an “operation aborted” error when trying to edit using IE, and am working on that.
4. Somebody mentioned that the special front page for Plus users was displaying excerpts from ALL diaries in the recent entries. This has been changed so it only shows excerpts from Plus members.
5. Somebody else asked if I could add a link to the Interests index to the site map, I have.
6. If you did a diary search (available to Plus members only), and there was more than one page of results, and then clicked on the link for the second page, there was an error. This has been remedied.
7. Many people were confused with the Open Diary Help link on the Help menu, which directed them to the front page of the site (nice, but not Helpful). I am working on a new Help facility for the site, but it is not yet finished – that is what that link will access eventually. Until then, I’ve removed the link.

Some Friendly Reminders:

1. I am working on a new subscription reminder for Plus users, to tell you when your subscription is about to expire (remember the Yellow Box of Doom – it’s not there anymore). It should be up shortly, but in the meantime if you want to check on your subscription status – you can do so by clicking “Subscription Information” on the Diary Maintenance menu.
2. I’ve had a couple people have problems with entry templates, related to pieces of script they have put in them. Script is fine, but be careful of comment tags. HTML comments start with a tag that looks like “<!–” and are supposed to end with “–>”. If you put the beginning tag in your template, but no end tag, the system will treat everything after that beginning tag as a comment – and won’t process it through your browser. As you can imagine, this causes a problem when you try to read or edit the entry – so be careful with those comment tags.
3. Finally, this one is important. I receive many e-mails from people who have lost their password and can’t unlock their diary. I cannot send passwords out willy-nilly to people – since we are an anonymous service, there is no way to confirm that you are actually the owner of the diary that you’ve forgotten the password to. Open Diary 4.0 provides a facility to e-mail your password to you if you forget it.

   However, this facility won’t work if we don’t have a current e-mail address for you (don’t worry – this address is for our security use only, we never resell or redistribute e-mail addresses from our database). Please go to the “Personal Profile” screen on the Diary Maintenance menu and check the e-mail address field at the bottom. If it is blank, fill it in (or if it is wrong correct it) – unless you don’t mind that you won’t be able to retrieve your password if it is forgotten.

That’s it for now – have a good day.

The DiaryMaster

Really…should “willy-nilly” be a word?