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In a previous posting,

I covered an attempt to streamline the Blogware UI. Rather than state

my opinion on the change, I asked for yours, and got lots of responses,

all saying the same thing: bad idea.

Comments in Blogware now work this way…

If an entry has no comments, you’ll see this at the end of the entry:

If an entry has comments, you’ll see this at the end of the entry:

where n is the number of comments posted for the article.

You’ll still have to click on the permanent link for the article to see

the trackbacks, but we believe that comments are generally of more

interest to more people. The general idea is to stramline the

interface, making it a simple as possible, but no simpler.

Thank you for your feedback. It’s what helps us make our software better!

It’s a busy day for Yours Truly here at Tucows, where I’m doing all kinds of Blogware-related

stuff. Busy as I am, I still get the feeling I’m nowhere nearly as swamped as my nephew Nicholas,

who’s pictured below in a workstation that’s far cooler than mine:

Memo to Boss Ross: I think we should get desks like these!

It only looks as if they’ve vanished. What’s happened is part of Boss Ross’ usability inititative for Blogware.

If an entry already has comments, you should see something like this at the end of that entry…

…where n is the number of comments. You’d click on the n to jump to a page that contains only the entry, and specifically the part of that page which lists the comments.

If an entry has no comments, all you’ll see at the end of the entry is this:

To make a comment, you need to go to the page for the entry itself.

Click on either the Permanent Link at the end of the entry or the the

icon that appears beside the entry’s title to see the page for that

entry. The page will contain the text of the entry, plus the usual

fields for making a comment.

Do you like this change? Let me know in the comments and I’ll pass it on to Boss Ross and the development team.

…details are over here.

If you’ve used Blogware over the past week or so, you might have

noticed a couple of changes to the page in which you enter text for

articles, photo descriptions and reviews.

The original editor worked the way most web-based blog editors do;

you’d enter your article, complete with HTML formatting. If you wanted

a an entry that looked like this…

Here’s some bold text, and here’s some italicized text.

And while we’re at it, here’s a picture of one handsome fella:

…you’d have to type in something that looked like this:

Here's some <strong>bold</strong> text,
and here's some <em>italicized</em> text.

<img 
src="http://joeydevilla.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2003/12/joey.jpg">

If you wanted to get a better idea of what your entry looked like, you’d click the Preview

button to see your formatting in action. If you didn’t like what you

saw, you’d go back to the edit page, type in some more HTML, go back to

the preview, and so on. This back-and-forth is time-consuming, annoying

and feels rather like being in stone age, especially if you’re used to

using a modern word processor. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could make

blog entries is a more WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) way?

Blogware lets you do that now. Here’s a screen shot of the new rich

text editor as seen under Internet Explorer 6 and Windows XP:

Just so Mac users don’t feel left out (hey, I’m one too), here’s the same thing as seen using Mozilla and Mac OS X (“Panther”):

Just in case you’re feeling homesick for HTML source or need to use

some HTML formatting that isn’t covered by the controls offered, a

simple click of a button will take you from Display mode to Source mode:

For those of you using Windows, the rich text edior is available under Internet Explorer 6 and Mozilla 1.5.

Mac users who want to use the rich text editor should use Mozilla

1.5. It won’t work under Safari or Internet Explorer right now, but

we’re working on that.

Over the next couple of days, I’ll walk through the features of the

rich text editor and also show some tips and tricks. I’ll also be

updating the Blogware User Manual to cover the new rich text editor.

In the meantime, if you’re a Blogware user, give the new rich text editor a try!

(This entry also appears in the Blogware blog.)

Yup, it’s the beginning of a new year, which means that once again, I’m campaigning for a Bloggie.

The Bloggies are are publicly-chosen awards given to weblog writers and

those related to weblogs. The awards that I think I’m eligible for are:

• Best Canadian Weblog

• Most Humorous Weblog

I

think that 2003 was a helluva year for the weblog, as it featured a

number of entries you’re certainly not going to find anywhere else. To

paraphrase the great actor Troy McClure, you may remember me from such 2003

entries as:

• Accordion vs. Rock Star!
• The blog and my Tucows job interview
• My Carnival of the Canucks marathon:
  • Part 1
  • Part 2
  • Part 3
  • Part 4
  • Part 5
  • Part 6
  • Part 7
  • Part 8
• Meeting sci-fi author Neal Stephenson (here, here and here)
• The Best Accordion Picture Ever
• My Hot Tub pictures
• Worst Date Ever, waxing philosophical about it and the denouement
• The Infamous “New Girl” Story

As well as earlier entries including:

• The one with my trash-talking accountant
• The one where I talk about all my New Year’s Eves since 1989
• The one where the con man visits my house
• The one where the accordion gets me invited to join a stagette in San Francisco
• The one where the accordion saves my ass in customs
• The one where my accordion gets me a job as a go-go dancer
• The one where the accordion gets me a job while I’m on a date
• The one where I buy my friend some crablouse cream for Christmas

Pretty

wild stuff. Can any other blogger boast these acheievemets?

• Has Jason

  Kottke ever had to buy crablouse medicine for a friend?

• Has Cory

  Doctorow ever had a date end the evening screaming the the fetal

  position?

• Can Doc Searls go-go dance? (I get the feeling that Halley Suitt, Cheyenne and Madison “Moxie” Slade can, however…)
• Has Joi Ito ever been invited into a limo full of women?

Then again, I think Joi has, knowing him.

But that’s not the point. The point is that you get lots of entertainment bang for the no-bucks here at The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

All I ask for in return in a Bloggie nomination. Give the above links a

read,  and if you think I deserve a nomination, please head on

over to the Bloggie nomination page and nominate this blog!