Working out the kinks

Yes, yes, the old Xanga entries are back on top. I cleared pX’s cache, which should solve most of the problems the site was having Sunday after I upgraded. I also had to desyndicate Phil Todd’s wonderful Xanga, because it was making Planet choke for some reason. I’ll try to get him back in sometime, since I know all of you love the wonderful images he provides this community. ;^)

Once again, I’m asking Xangans to find out if Xanga automatically strips HTML comments from your posts. This is what the commented-out code looks like:

<!-- PLANET_GO_AWAY -->

… but for testing purposes, you can put anything in the comment, unless you really want that post excluded from pX.

Some of you have undoubtedly noticed that I’ve also rigged Planet to display times in our local time zone, EST… sorta. For some reason, the Last Updated widget on the side is one hour behind, and I can’t track down the line of code that’s causing that to happen.

Thanks, by the way, to Alvaro Mera del Castillo for the code which I adapted for this fix.

A funny side-effect of this issue: often, the newest entry listed there has a newer timestamp than the page itself – it must be from the future! Must be poetic justice for bringing up the logic errors in Peter Rother’s calendar implementation.

Next on my ToDo list:

1. Fix the one-hour time difference, so that people don’t start coming to school one hour late on accident. ;^)
2. Figure out how to make Planet read the non-standard dates that Xanga puts in its post titles.
• And maybe get Planet to look for the post titles that Xangans includes in their posts, like the ones that John Ariosa uses on his Xanga.
3. Adapt Jamie Zawinski’s Cheesegrater script to screenscrape St. X’s website, so that I won’t have to update their feeds manually like I do now.
4. Import the Rollcall list into my Movable Type installation, so that I won’t have to manually maintain it in a plaintext file and upload it via FTP like I have been doing, and so that I can get others to help maintain the list.
5. Figure out a way to automatically update Planet. Yes, I still do it by hand, because wget doesn’t work on my account for some reason.
6. Finally start working on the redesign.

As you can clearly see, I’ve got enough to fill my time between now and graduation…