This is BrainLog, a blog by Dan Sanderson. Older entries, from October 1999 through September 2010, are preserved for posterity, but are no longer maintained. See the front page and newer entries.

May 6, 2000

Woohoo! The New BrainLog is even newer! :)

You're now looking at a PHP+MySQL rendition of BrainLog. This includes a spiffy new comment system, which you'll find at the bottom of each entry. Note that, ala Slashdot or MetaFilter, the "permanent URL" of an entry is its comments page. Because I know you're going to be linking all my stuff on your own blogs.

I've imported all of my archives since October 22, 1999, the day I started. All imported data are lumped by day, one entry per day. Future entries will each have their own entry and set of comments.

Please let me know if there are any problems, or you find any bugs. I want to stomp them swiftly.

As with any blogger discovering PHP and MySQL, more features are to come. Search engine almost definitely ('cuz I'd use it frequently), and I'm considering category icons so you can skip over the boring tech geek stuff (or the boring movie geek stuff). Any other ideas? Send 'em my way, or heck, post 'em publicly in a comment!

comments...

Dan Sanderson, May 6, 2000 6:15 AM:

Hi all. Just wanted to mention that a limited set of HTML formatting tags are permitted in comments, including bold (<b>...</b>), italics (<i<), strong, emphasis (<em>), code, font, and anchors. Line breaks (<br>) and paragraph tags are also supported--and are automatically inserted when you press Enter.



I already know I'm missing out some crucial HTML filtering rules, so please let me know if you discover any problems or think of any others.



Oh, and for now, your comment is posted when you press the Post Comment button. (I'll probably add a Preview screen later.)



Thanks, all!



Dan Sanderson, May 6, 2000 6:41 AM:

*sigh* I really should finish stuff before posting about it.



I just added ul/ol/li tags as allowable in comments.



Also, for those who don't know HTML (and don't care): At this time, three characters need to be specified in a special way in order to show up properly:



  • a less than sign, <, should be entered like this: &lt;

  • a greater than sign, >, should be entered like this: &gt;

  • an ampersand, &, should be entered like this: &amp;





I may implement smarter parsing at a later date. (I'm actually rather busy these days, but I wanted to finish this because I was almost done. :)

Dan Sanderson, May 6, 2000 7:59 AM:

Hmm... Some people are having problems posting already, gosh darn it. Please send me a copy of the error text that appears, and a copy of the text you attempted to post if possible.



Thanks, all. heheh... :)

Matt, May 6, 2000 8:23 AM:

Okay, I keep having problems while trying to post.

Matt, May 6, 2000 8:25 AM:

Okay, let me try this again.

You da man, Dan! I can't wait to see what cool PHP/MySQL features you come up with, so I can steal them for my blog.

I would suggest that you maybe try to work up a little mod_rewrite mojo, so that people can link to you comments with /2000/05/06 or /post/149 instead of /view.php3?entry_id=00149.

This entry is no longer accepting comments. Feel free to contact me if you have a question or a correction. Thanks!