Tuesday July 27, 2004

Improved Search

Earlier tonight I committed a long-desired Search improvement: Paging. The results are broken into pages of 10 entries. Try this search.

At the top you‘ll notice a new select list labelled “Restrict by Category“. This allows the user to select a category to narrow the results. Also, after each entry is a link “restrict search to just this blog“ which will narrow the search to that entry‘s user and display in that user‘s template.

If you scroll to the bottom you‘ll see “1 | 2“ which are links to the pages of results. This is the href for “2”:
http://brainopolis.dnsalias.com/roller/search?q=help&username=&n=10&o=10.
The ‘q‘ is the query, ‘username‘ is obvious and optional. ‘n‘ is the number of results to display on each page, and ‘o‘ is the offset (the current page is displaying items 0–9). If ‘o‘ is greater than the # of results it gets reset to 0, so no thinking you can dink around and break it!

So you can play around with this href a bit and get different paging.

I haven‘t added the necessary velocity code to individual pages yet, so currently this is limited to the sitewide search only.

favicon and a simplified display

I love it when users post about how they've customized Roller.
( Jul 27 2004, 08:28:44 AM ) Roller Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/favicon_and_a_simplified_display

For further reading on today's posts:

Blogging Roller : Lance has been working on improving Roller's search interface and making numerous other fixes.

Friday July 23, 2004

Re: Google circa 1960

Some ideas just really catch your imagination. What this put into my head was "Wouldn't it be cool to create a CSS theme that looked like this?". I don't know enough about CSS, but it seems it'd be possible to use a font like that and to get text boxes to display as an line rather than a box. Consider this a LazyWeb request.
( Jul 23 2004, 08:37:15 AM ) Entertainment Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/re_google_circa_1960

Tuesday July 20, 2004

Referer Spam Master List

Arjun Ram has contributed to my "link spammers" list. See them all!

( Jul 20 2004, 05:15:38 PM ) Technology Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/referer_spam_master_list

Monday July 19, 2004

Here we go again.
( Jul 19 2004, 12:46:47 PM ) News Permalink Comments [1]
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/here_we_go

ACLU Pizza Scary. Via Ben Hyde.
( Jul 19 2004, 11:19:50 AM ) News Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/aclu_pizza

Template Decorators in Roller

Last week on the Roller-Dev mailing list I promised to post an example of the "decorator" support I'd built into Roller. This functionality was inspired by Matt's post about supporting SiteMesh decoration in Roller. While I don't know if this could truly be called a Decorator, it does at least approximate what SiteMesh does (for Velocity).

To demonstrate I put together a page to display the most recent comments for Vanity Foul. Besides implementing a Latest Comments page I also created a Decorator page (_mydecorator) to wrap the page in a familiar look. By specifying #set( $decorator = "_mydecorator" ) in my Latest Comments page I inform Roller of which Decorator to use (currently it defaults to a "no-op decorator").

See the Pages:
• _mydecorator
• Latest Comments

Wanna see how I wrote that View Source Page?
BTW: I know the layout html is ugly, but I "inherited" the HTML, didn't design it myself. I keep telling myself that I'll get around to improving it....

Update: I like this idea so much I converted my To-Do List and Wish List to use the Decorator as well.
( Jul 19 2004, 10:16:52 AM ) Roller Permalink Comments [2]
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/template_decorators_in_roller

For further reading on today's posts:

Raible Designs ~ We Build Web Apps : The Beauty of SiteMesh Category: Java I'm pumped that I recently switched from Tiles to SiteMesh in AppFuse . Not only was it easy to learn when I integrated it into Equinox , but it easy to replace Tiles with SiteMesh in AppFuse. The best part of SiteMesh is once you have it setup and configured, you rarely have to muck with it again - it just works. In fact, it's so non-obtrusive that when I re-worked all AppFuse's tutorials last week, I was a...

Friday July 16, 2004

RSYA

Or "Referer Spamming Yet Again". The issue of referer spam has come up again, so I'll repost about my referer-spammer list. I've been listing it in XML, but I see now it will be more valuable to the Roller community as a comma-delimited list (suitable for copy-pasting straight into your own Spam Prevention box).

Also worth mentioning is that Roller supports directly deleting Referer Spam, using the Weblog::Referers tab.
( Jul 16 2004, 10:14:29 AM ) Roller Permalink Comments [1]
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/rsya