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Andy, sorry about the bug where, if you attempt to post a note without a title, your post body is erased. This is fixed in the upcoming version.

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Some answers to j's bug reports.

I think showing the full thread of comments/discussion from the publisher page instead of threading them is an excellent idea.

Huh? That didn't make sense to me.

However, I think it's a little odd that someone can't comment on a post from a publisher page. At least I don't see any link to reply or add a comment. I don't think it's intuitive that if someone clicks comment(s), they'll go to a page where they will be able to reply to the post.

Agreed—I will add a direct comment link.

Since a number of Frasslers would like to use the publisher as their main site, i.e. direct readers there instead of to the regular Frassle blog, having the features listed on the posts in regular Frassle would be beneficial, like reply, categorize, email, edit, and delete.

I'm not sure about categorize, since I think that categorization is a fundamental reason to use the frassle reader/writer application rather than the web-facing publisher. Reply, email, edit, and delete are OK though.

Also, a better name than "the frassle reader/writer application" would be helpful. This refers to the non-publisher application.

Shimon explained to me offblog why the feeds for the blocks in the publisher won't work if someone subscribes to them in Frassle, like as a feed directed to a publisher block or in the aggregator. (I've been meaning to blog a bit about that, but haven't. Bear with me here while I don't blog it again for the sake of time and brevity.) I understand why they d/won't work, but I'm still frustrated by it. One of the magic things a blogger can do with the publisher is set up a block showing comments on her blog. If a Frassler could subscribe to that feed using Frassle's aggregator, it would be very convenient. It seems silly to force someone to use another aggregator to get that feed when Frassle has a built-in aggregator. That's dream big stuff maybe that isn't going to happen soon.

Yeah… this can be fixed, but it is going to require some cleverness that stretches beyond the aggregator as it is envisioned right now. Actually it provides a good opportunity to make the aggregator into a more customizable, flexible tool. Basically though, the problem is that the aggregator reads a set of feeds, whereas the publisher blocks are searches (that may select a subset of notes from one or many feeds).

Now that many people are using the publisher, I think Frassle's front page would work better if the two lists are swapped and the list showing which blogs have updated recently is at the top and the publisher list is at the bottom of the page. I suppose the order is based on where people reading these blogs should go.

Done in alpha 8.

What would also be really cool is if Frasslers could have a choice as to whether their publisher or regular Frassle blog is on the list. Some users have expressed a desire to only have people look at their publisher site and not "find" their blog at all. Others would like to be omitted from the list entirely.

Hmm… I'll think about this one.

Actually, what about reworking the front page so people's blogs and publisher sites are listed together along with the time of last blog update (as the time is indicated now)? I know people can create publisher sites independent of their Frassle blog, so maybe that's not a brilliant idea.

Is there some way to do a better index of the publisher sites so people know what kinds of pages there are, like the fab Frassle page?

I don't neccessarily want to list all pages, but perhaps some kind of popularity index on the front page might be helpful. I should also see how other sites, like livejournal and typepad, do this.

Is it possible to do a feed of recently updated blogs on the front page or somewhere else on the site maybe? Then instead of getting a list of blog titles, which might not necessarily be useful to someone not familiar with Frassle and those who blog here, someone can read some things that are being written. It could help a lot with blog discovery (people finding blogs to read) and help sell Frassle to a prospective user.

Good idea. This is a quick hack and can be done for the next version.

At some point, perhaps there will be more Block style options. If this isn't going to happen any time soon, would it make sense to combine the one option that's there, which toggles the publisher showing the title of the feed in its blocks, with the other options on the Edit a block page? It seems a little clunky to go to that extra page for that option.

Actually, that separate page is needed. The block style options actually vary depending on the block style. For the "Basic Blog Entries" style, there is indeed only that one option. But other styles, such as "Quick Links List", have lots of options. Because you can select a different style on the first page, you have to submit and go to a different page in order to see options for that style.

Is there a way I can make it clearer that there are different styles and each style can have its own style options?

I think some of the language on the block editing screens could be a little clearer to better reflect what the options are.

• Perhaps "Show title" should say "Show block title" to indicate that option is connected to the title of the block and not, say, the titles of blog posts or blogs appearing in that block. The heading "Block display style" implies it, but it could be clearer.
• The buttons saving the choices and moving between style and basic options don't completely indicate what they do. Both seem to save the selections, but save actually changes modes from editing the block to editing the publisher page. In many systems, when someone clicks save, there's some kind of message indicating changes have been saved and the person remains on the same page. It isn't clear that save will exit the mode with saved changes and moving from the different option pages will save the changes. How about altering the text to "Save and Exit" or "Save and [change mode]" to clarify the actions? That might be easier than adding a third button and separating the actions, which could be another possibility to work around the potential confusion. Since there's already another button for returning to editing the publisher page, maybe "Save" should just save and not exit, also.

Good ideas. Will incorporate into alpha 8.

Is it possible to have a preview of the publisher page during the editing process, like it's possible to preview a blog post? I often find that I have one window looking at the page and another open for editing and I hop between the two, refreshing the page as I edit to see the changes.

Doubtful for a whole publisher page, but for individual blocks, it's on the todo list.

It's a little confusing to me that when I change the width of the table columns, they don't actually change on the editing page. The numbers do, but the columns don't. Sometimes it's difficult to gauge what the page will look like without actually seeing the width of the columns. Maybe that's a browser issue, not a Frassle issue, but I have a feeling that it isn't.

This is actually intentional, so if you enter some absolutely wacky values you can easily change them back.

The position of the add a column button seems strange at the bottom of the page when the other options are nicely grouped near the top. It's easy to miss on a page with lots of content.

Will move to top in alpha 8.

In a few places, like the pop-up Frassle Noteset Reference page, it says to send comments to shimon@ and in others frassle@. The inconsistency can be a bit confusing for new users, especially if it's unintentional and all Frassle comments should go to the same address (or blogged under the category Frassle).

Fixed in alpha 8.

I much prefer the page with noteset expression examples to the Frassle Noteset Reference page, though they both have their utility, and think it might be useful to combine the two or link them together or something.

To fix in alpha 8 or next version.

It's annoying that when I'm categorizing things, the category tree collapses when I click on the head category. Most of the time, I remember to click on whatever I want in the expanded tree first, but sometimes I forget. Would it be better to start from an expanded category tree anyway?

This behavior actually varies between browsers. I will try to get Josh to fix this.

In Netscape 7 on a Mac running OSX (I haven't tried this in other browsers yet), the frassle it! (pop) window is too small.

I'll see if I can change the bookmarklet so it loads a new window of an unspecified size. This way perhaps your browser will be smart about what looks good on your screen. If that doesn't work, maybe I'll let you specify the size on the bookmarklet page. Next version.

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Thanks Randy! Am I mistaken or did you just volunteer to write documentation, and otherwise explore how we can keep frassle's publisher powerful but also make it accessible? This is a major challenge and your input would be highly appreciated.

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This bug is due to the use of a relative link in the post body. Particularly in syndication, only absolute links should be used. I think this is normally not a problem, but perhaps sometimes the HTMLarea component tries to be smart and translate absolute links into relative ones? I'll have to test this out.

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Frassle actually restricts, a little bit, what HTML is allowed in a post. This is mostly to prevent insertion of scripts and other risky stuff. I suppose the filter block target="_blank". However I don't consider the target tag particularly risky, so I'll see about changing the filter so it's allowed.

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Jessica— this was indeed a bug and will be fixed in the next version of frassle. That post won't show up under 7/2004 anymore. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.

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Hey, just as I was typing that response about frassle bugs, and actually checking off my "bugs" category, a little summer insect landed on my screen. Right next to the "bugs" label in fact. He even stood still long enough for me to take a picture. I hereby christen thee the official frassle bug bug.

Oooh, he just walked a bit! He must like the backlight.

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• The title is a required field.
  This is by design; frassle often displays only the title of a note. It would be possible to default to using the first few words of the body, but requiring the title is not unusual.
• If the title is left empty, an error is displayed and the link and body of the post are not preserved.
  This is a bug.
• In the publisher, if I add a block, and go to advanced style options, then click save, I get a pagekit error
  This is a bug. Fixed.
  
• If I specify a category for a block, then later rename that category through manage categories, the block no longer works correctly — I assume.
  Your assumption is correct and points to an interesting problem. The interactive noteset builder, when ready, will reference categories by ID# rather than by name, avoiding this problem.
• Tree pane does not expand correctly on the post page in firefox when you expand the tree with +s
  Is this a firefox bug? Or can we work around it by setting a width for the div that contains the category tree?
• How do I use more than the ten most recent items in publisher?
  Prepend the noteset expression with something like: !limit=50
• I cannot make any aggregated content from my LJ site appear on the my blog in the publisher
  Fixed in this specific instance. This was an instance of subtle bug having to do with the use of a space at the end of the URI for that feed. To be fixed in future by stripping trailing spaces from URIs.

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Who do you think we are, abusive, criticism-fearing sociopaths who believe everything we do is perfect? Picky (but polite) users are our best friends!

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A frassle bug where you would be logged out after a few minutes has been fixed on this server. Checking "save login information on this computer" at the login screen will now leave you logged in for something like 10 years, whereas before it was incorrectly keeping you logged in for 5 minutes. If you didn't check this box, you would stay logged in for as long as you kept your web browser open, but of course you wouldn't get the convenience of staying logged in.

Thanks to Jessica for finding this bug (and many more). Thanks to Boris Zentner, maintainer of Apache::PageKit, for a prompt and helpful response.

The problem was in the date calculation inside libapreq2 (look for "cookie expiration" in the changelog), which divided expiration time by 1000. I used a cruddy but safe workaround, which was to use CGI::Cookie instead of Apache::Cookie. My shoddy workaround and Boris' instructions for a real fix should be documented in today's pagekit-users list archives. The bug did not appear until recently in frassle because libapreq1, which was used until I upgraded the server to Apache 2.0, did not have this bug.