Too many people looking back
In the editor, click on “Team” (button at the top), then your name, then “Edit My Profile” (link at the right).
(I know, not very exciting, but as near as I can tell, that was my first post to Blogger’s Discuss forum, making this my one year anniversary of helping people use Blogger, which is either interesting or horrifying to me: I’m not quite sure which.)
I…ummm…hmm…nevermind.
congratulations!
hehe
I would say that everything you do is exciting, interesting, and useful. So there.
Phil, did you see my mailing list post about a PHP class for doing ”This Day in” links?
Hey, now I get to bitch about Blogger! I posted about your last year class on Monday, but Pro was only taking posts and not publishing at the time. Looks like the post got stuck into limbo, still there in the preview frame, but unwilling to be published, and since I never read my own stuff, I didn’t even notice that it didn’t make it to the web page when Pro was back to publishing.
I was tempted to ask for a copy, even though my year-old content is nearly non-existent and mostly in the ”never to see the light of day again” file on another blog, but then I figured that me doing a ”on this day two months ago” link would be a little pathetic. Especially since my torrid posting pace means that two months ago could well be right down there at the bottom of the main page. Great idea, glad to see you releasing stuff for the masses, but it’ll be another 13 months or so (at least) before I need it for myself.
Well, I have had absolutely zero messages about this, on the mailing lists or via direct email. Just seems weird that no one would be interested even enough to say ”Oh you’re full of crap.” Made me wonder if the message got posted, even though I know it did since I received it back. I understand your situation; I didn’t think of writing this until I had 13 months of content either.
But do you know how to handle the template issue so I can get an a name= into the date header?
It’s a bitch to get something you can use as an anchor out of BlogDateHeaderDate. You can see how I did it for my calendar script (in javascript – clear down at the bottom), but note that it adds some serious complexity for a public script, because you have to give your users explicit instructions about what to do when they are using various styles of dateheader dates, and which sort they can and can’t use. May be a bit easier in PHP – I would guess without having looked that there are several dateheader formats that strtotime() can parse without any help, so you could just require that anyone using your script use one of those date formats.
The deafening silence when you announce something cool that you’ve slaved over? Oh, Christ, I know that so well. I did my calendar script last August, spent hours on it, the first piece of all-mine Javascript I released to a grateful world, taught myself DOM scripting to do it. A month or two later, someone described it as ”cunning, but convoluted” or something like that. I think maybe half a dozen people are using it. What it boils down to is that either you do something that Ev would like to use or that catches his fancy, so it gets a link from Evhead or the Blogger home page and people use it because they think it’s an official Pyra product, or else it just struggles along, picking up a few links from people who manage to pick the right search terms and end up with something that thrills them no end. The only two things I can think of that have made it without an Ev-link are Bloggar/w.bloggar (and it did finally get a link, during the beta for v2), and YACCS (which I’m pretty sure never did get a single link, but it probably got a longer run as a result).
Well, I would be thrilled to get an Ev-link. But I’m happy to have a Phil-link. Thanks! I will have to ponder your suggestion regarding the calendar script. But I was hoping for something that could just use blogger tags inside my regular template.
Oh, you can (mostly):
<BlogDateHeader>
<div class=”date”><a name=”day<? echo strtotime(”<$BlogDateHeaderDate$>”); ?>”></a><$BlogDateHeaderDate$></div><br>
</BlogDateHeader>
gives you <a name=”day1019545200”> for Tuesday, April 23, 2002 (better to stick that ”day” in there, to avoid confusion when Blogger post numbers go over a billion). Should be a pretty easy anchor for your script to look for, since you’re just looking for the Unix timestamp for a year ago (or a year and a day ago if there wasn’t a post a year ago, or…).
Woohoo, that looks cool, will be trying it shortly! Thanks, Mr. Expert!
Spoke too soon. The PHP expressin does not get evaluated and is passed through as a string:
<a name=”day<? echo strtotime(”Wednesday, April 24, 2002”); ?>”>
I wonder if this is because I publish to an html file, then have a php file that freads the contents, which would result in the embedded PHP not getting evaluated byt he parser.
Sorry about the double posting, not sure why it happened.
What happened that time? will take this to email now.
Double-posting was probably from refreshing a CrazyBrowser window that thought it ought to resubmit your last posted comment. Then everything went to hell because I forgot that my still barely-alpha dotcomments admin script has the bad habit of converting entities to characters when you do the wrong thing, so all that carefully constructed talk about <a name suddenly turned to crap when I forgot about that and deleted the doubles without watching out for entities. Really really need to fix that. And the way that preview converts entites, so that if you are very careful, and preview first, you are actually worse off than if you just post code blind.
Anyway, back to the meat of the matter: yeah, if you aren’t publishing PHP, then you can’t just use PHP to make an anchor. You could do a javascript version, but that’s not a very happy solution. Umm. Maybe there’s a dateheader format that does make a valid anchor? Then you could use that, and use script to parse it and convert it to a more pleasant format – as long as you always have javascript enabled, you wouldn’t ever see the ugly format (I think there’s one like 20020424 or something similar, isn’t there?).
Uggh, that’s getting too complicated. I need to lobby Ev to add something for this, hard to believe no one has asked for it before.
CrazyBrowser is cool but it does have a few weaknesses. Still, worth using.
People have been asking for it for years. It’s just like praying, though: sometimes the answer is no. Hard to say whether the rumored forthcoming someday soon archiving by day will expose a daily link (or just let you point to a daily file, for that matter).