Planet updates

The DAIMI Planet has been updated once again! Changes/fixes include

  • Some of the timestamps were not formatted in the GMT+1 timezone. This should have been fixed now.

  • Several of the faces have been color corrected by my super fiancée! Compare this row of before and after images:

    Fitzi Gabi Martin Rune Mirka Peter

    Fitzi Gabi Martin Rune Mirka Peter

  • The faces (new and old) have now been moved to a box in the right margin. The faces are sorted by the last modification date of the feed. If you can come up with a good algorithm for sorting and/or resizing the faces, then please let me know. I’ll then tell you how to checkout the source from Subversion :-)

  • The error handling has been vastly improved: if a parse error is found deep within the HTML, then the output will be aborted and all open tags will be closed correctly. Before a single stray <i> tag could turn half the Planet into italic…

  • Caching works again. This should speed up the execution of planet.py and will hopefully make the Planet display all comments for the posts instead of just the 10 most recent comments.

As always, please tell me if you find any problems with the Planet or if you have suggestions for improvements!

7 Comments

  1. Martin Geisler:

    By the way: if you find yourself cut off by the box on the right, then note that this is a feature and not a bug… simply make a post to get to the top :-)

  2. Tord:

    The problem with bar to the right is that it eats up much of the viewing space without adding much. It is also not scrollable so it does not go away (Firefox 1.5). This is a major grief for me, especially if I want to check some blog where the person has not posted for a while, and I can’t get to his picture because it is to low down on the non-scrollable screen.
    It also eats up space for the blogs, which is really why we check your site. Also where are the small numbers underneath, I miss them.
    If you do not fix this soon I will start to update my post with invisible changes. (This causes them to be viewed as new posts).

  3. Martin Geisler:

    I meant the box to be fixed and not scroll, exactly like it is! Isn’t it kind of cool that it is always visible?

    Why would you want to scroll down to the blogs that haven’t been updated anyway? They’ll pop up to the top when the feed is updated (I have noticed that Mirka’s feed claims to be updated every time it is fetched…)

    As for the numbers beneath, then I agree that it would be cool to have some fancy statistics on the blogs and use that to order them. Previously the numbers simply counted the number of posts that each blog had on display at Planet DAIMI, but I was never really that happy with it. Do you want to look at the code? :-)

  4. mirka:

    what does it mean? does it affect the position of my face? at least, my posts don’t bubble to the top, if I just update them.

  5. Martin Geisler:

    Exactly, with your “cheating” feed, you always have the first spot in the list :-) Nothing to worry about, I’ll try and fix it at some point…

  6. Tord:

    Thanks for the fix, the page is now much more readable.

  7. Martin Geisler:

    No problem, I’m glad you like it!

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