Quantcast
Channel: Richard Eriksson's blog
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 30

Celebrating 4 Years of Urban Vancouver (With an Upgrade!)

0
0

Today we celebrate the 4th anniversary of Urban Vancouver's launch with an upgrade of the software that powers it to the latest and greatest, Drupal 5.7. With it we've improved the back-end a little bit, added a few little features. Technical details to follow for those who are interested.

  • Spam filtering is now powered by the newly-released Mollom, so some people might see those annoying CAPTCHA's you've come to hate. This does not apply to people who have signed up for accounts with Urban Vancouver. I've gone back and outright deleted some posts and comments that are obvious spam, though I've surely missed some. If you notice something that is obviously an attempt to spam our service that escaped our radar, please point it out (gently) via our contact form with the URL.
  • A WYSIWYG editor: we haven't tested it out fully, so it's not the default yet. If you go to your user profile page, and then click "edit". You'll see a link called "TinyMCE rich-text settings" and set that to "enabled". Then your blog posts will have a Microsoft-Word-like interface to do bold, italic, and create links. We're also testing out an easy image placement tool that cuts down on the steps to adorn your posts with photos or other images. Look for the camera icon camera icon when you have this enabled, which will give you a pop-up window with previously-uploaded images and the option to upload your own. At any time you can click "disable rich-text" and go back to regular HTML mode, but for many, the rich-text editor will be easier to use.
  • OpenID support. This is still a little geeky, so for those with an OpenID provider, you can go to your user profile and click "OpenID Identities" and match up Urban Vancouver with your OpenID URL, meaning you have one fewer username and password to remember.
  • We now have a better sense of the reader statistics on Urban Vancouver. For example, at this writing, over 450 people subscribe to the front page RSS feed. If you needed incentive to post, that extra little audience might give you a little boost in attention to what you have to say. As some of you know, I've been cross-posting from my personal blog Vancouver-related writing, with a link back to my original post, and I encourage others to do so too.

Anything out of the ordinary since on the site a couple of days ago? Please let us know and we'll try to fix it. The website's design could use a little tuning up, we know. We're looking to get a few more people writing featured articles on Urban Vancouver, and we can announce that Duane Storey will report for us at this year's Juno awards in Calgary. This will be a little preview our coverage for when next year's Canadian music awards are hosted in Vancouver.

An extra note for those who have read this far: I've been using the Urban Vancouver channel on Jaiku as a miniature change log for the site. (Jaiku is like Twitter where you post 140 characters, forcing creativity through brevity. While Jaiku has a few more features, it's also invite-only at the moment.) The idea is that I keep the site a little accountable by noting some of the tweaks we make to the site, as well as a notice each time that we've added a a feed to the Urban Vancouver blog aggregator.


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 30

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images