Dec 2004
Articles published during this month
 | Add 150 avatars to your site - The standard YACS archive has 20 avatar images. Do you need more? Get the full library users/avatars/index.php at this site. Edited on Sep. 3 In Software installation and upgrade |
 | How to link to your gravatar? - If you create a new user profile and provide your e-mail address, YACS will automatically use your http://www.gravatar.com/, if one exists.
Or maybe your user profile has been defined some times ago, and you want to change it to benefit from your brand new gravatar?
Since YACS combines your gravatar with the library of avatar files at one single page, switching to a new avatar becomes as simple as clicking on an image.
» File uploaded on Aug. 28 2007 In Membership |
 | Yet Another Community System - Sent on Dec. 31 2004 to "all" » Created on Dec. 31 2004 In Archived letters |
| | Improve Firefox response times - As a network specialist, I've always been interested into protocols. More specifically, the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which is used for web access, allows for several transfers through one single TCP connection. This is called HTTP pipelining, and it has been extensively http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec8.html. Actually, this is not a new topic, since http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/Performance/Pipeline.html the interest to add pipelining to HTTP version 1.1.
What is new, however, is the http://news.com.com/Firefox+surpasses+10+million+download+mark/2100-1025_3-5488279.html to browse the web.
By default Firefox has a conservative setting and it makes only one request to a web page at a time. Moreover, this clever piece of software may benefit from HTTP pipelining. You just have to activate it properly. When you enable pipelining Firefox makes several requests at once, which really speeds up page loading.
» Published on Dec. 31 2004 In Membership |
 | Dec-27, neighbours, manual layout, navigation, files syndication, ie bookmarklet and more - This is probably the very last 2004 release of YACS, and we have put as many gifts as possible into the basket.
The first gift was on Eoin's wish list. It was about geographical distance computations. YACS has now the complex MySQL statement that makes it all. As a result nearby articles and user profiles are automatically listed where appropriate. All you have to do is to attach one (or several) location(s) items to your pages and/or to your user profile.
The second gift is not ready yet, but will pop up in coming weeks. We are preparing an on-line user manual for YACS, and have enhanced the layout articles/layout_as_manual.php to support structured lists of articles, similar to table of contents in electronic books. The outline is based on dotted strings of number (eg, 1.2.3.0), that allow for up to four levels of classification. The next step is to apply this layout to articles anchored in the section "How to use it?" and to turn this section into an electronic on-line manual, with the support of end-user comments.
The third gift is a navigation bar for articles. They make sequential reading of blogs a breeze. Links to go to the previous or next pages appear automatically in the sidebar. Of course, the navigation bar is compatible with the manual layout described previously.
Several gifts have been included for people who syndicate everything. The most notable one is the creation of a RSS feed for public files shared at any YACS server. files/feed.php.Note that <enclosure> attributes are provided as weel, to enable a bare form of podcasting. Moreover, YACS better integrates with Radio Userland, with Sharpreader and with Moreover.
A special gift is given to people who are using Internet Explorer with Windows. They can benefit from a contextual bookmarklet to blog to their YACS server. This is a special gift, since we prefer to support portable solutions. But at the same time we have to recognize that Firefox has not taken over yet...
Another big gift for Unicode supporters: YACS translates HTML entities to Unicode, and this means that any character will have only representation in the database. Ok, this may be a little bit too technical. What is the actual impact? First of all, this improves results provided by the embedded search engine. Secondly, this enables a better interoperability of w.bloggar and YACS web forms.
See you in 2005! » Commented on Dec. 27 2004 In Releases |
 | YACS has less bugs (supposedly) - Open-source advocates have stated for a long time that sharing source files had very good effects on program quality.
This http://www.wired.com/news/linux/0,1411,66022,00.html?tw=wn_story_top5.
Moreover, while Stanford University computer science researchers have not looked at YACS yet, I'm pretty sure we are already doing better than usual commercial software. 8) » Published on Dec. 23 2004 In The capability |
| Ten things your web sites should be doing - http://www.digital-web.com/about/staff/nick_finck/ wrote on Dec-15th: "Rather than posting about my web predictions for 2005 or rambling off a list of products or tools you must have, etc. I have decided that this year I will post a list of things you should have or be doing on your web site or Intranet. After all, we are living in a modern world, it's time your web sites start acting like it."
Ok, lets see how this site -- and, more generally, any YACS server -- compares to http://www.digital-web.com/news/2004/12/ten_things_your_web_sites_should_be_doing/. » Commented on Dec. 19 2004 In The capability |
| | How to use the side panel? - The side panel is a convenient form featured at the left of the browsing window. It is aiming to let you prepare your next blog entry during a normal surfing session. » Reviewed on Dec. 14 2004 In Authoring |
| | 18,750,552 gravatars served - http://www.gravatar.com/ seems to be quite successful » Commented on Dec. 14 2004 In Post your requirements here |
| | A few questions - After succesfully installing YACS I have some questions.. » Commented on Dec. 14 2004 In Installation support |
| Dec-12, sidebar editor, gravatar, page locator and more - With this release we have added a handy feature for bloggers: a smart side panel form to post new articles. If you are using Firefox 1.0, Mozilla 7 or Internet Explorer 6, you can authenticate to your favorite YACS server, visit the Control Panel, and click to add a side panel to the browser window. Then browse as usual, and push some text in the side fields to develop your blog entry. When you are ready, click on the submit button to push the new page to your site.
With all these communities we are involved in today there is this common issue to register again and again. Some weeks ago we introduced the Drupal login RPC interface to allow for some centralisation of user profiles. Today we are moving forward with the support of gravatars. Simply stated, a gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is an 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog. If you provide an e-mail address to YACS, it will be checked against the http://www.gravatar.com/ to load any defined gravatar you can have. With gravatars, we do have a simple system to spread our visual appearance across web sites.
YACS now also has a page locator, which is aiming to streamline the usage of nick names. YACS is supporting nick names for a long-time for articles, categories, sections and also for user profiles. Nick names are good, except that you have to remember the kind of things they are referencing.
For example to view the user profile associated with the nick name 'foo' you have to use the URL '/yacs/users/view.php/foo'. But to view the category with the nick name 'bar' you would use '/yacs/categories/view.php/bar' instead.
The page locator will take care of nick names at a central place.
This means that to look for user 'foo' or for category 'bar' now you just have to submit nick names to the page locator with either '/yacs/go.php/foo' or '/yacs/go.php/bar'. » Edited on Dec. 13 2004 In Releases |
| YACS preserves Unicode - YACS is now able to preserve UTF-8 entities, even if PHP and MySQL (version 3) only support ISO-8859-1. To achieve this, YACS translates extended characters into Unicode HTML entities. » Edited on Dec. 7 2004 In The capability |
| | Want to copy the index.php to a second index page with another skin style. - Sent by Joe Young (actually, [user=123]) I want to have a second index page that has a stripped downed skin that shows only the blog entries. I have the skin that I want. I cp'd the index.php and I can not figure out where to refernce the alternate skin. Please help.Commented on Dec. 6 2004 In Post your requirements here |
| | How can I make a YACS page the home page? - Sent by Tim Trimmer:
I tried installing YACS per the directions and it works fine... except that someone who types in just, say, 'timsblog.com' goes nowhere. Can YACS be installed in the root directory or is there a trick I've missed?
» Commented on Dec. 6 2004 In Installation support |
| Dec-4th, Unicode support, blogging templates, and more - YACS is now able to preserve UTF-8 entities, even if PHP and MySQL (version 3) only support ISO-8859-1. To achieve this, YACS translates extended characters into Unicode HTML entities. For example, the euro character € (UTF-8 bytes \xE2\x82\xAC) is translated into the HTML entity €.
Once again, this simple mechanism is enough to preserve UTF-8 entities, and therefore to make [user=Skara], articles/view.php/364, happy ;-) When both PHP and MySQL will actually support UTF-8 natively, we will change YACS to streamline the whole thing... » Commented on Dec. 6 2004 In Releases |
| | Issues when posting articles Commented on Dec. 5 2004 In Bug tracker |
| | How can i delete a Bloger theme? Commented on Dec. 5 2004 In Installation support |
| | Setup Issues Commented on Dec. 4 2004 In Installation support |
| | Newbie How To Questions - As [user=Mark] stated it: 'I've just discovered YACS a few days ago and am really impressed so far. I've been reading and playing and trying to figure some of these things out but am still unclear about some of them. If I've overlooked something obvious that is explained elsewhere I apologize.'
Here we go, a mini-FAQ for Mark, and for all of you who are new to YACS.
» Edited on Dec. 3 2004 In Post your requirements here |
| | No download link? - Sent by ST:
I found your download link but it wasn't easy.
You need to make it easier to download YACS. There is no link that I can find on your front page for actually downloading the software.
» Commented on Dec. 2 2004 In Post your requirements here |
| YACS supports blogging templates - The templating system used by YACS is, by far, more sophisticated than usual blogging models. This sounds normal, since YACS is aiming to support different kinds of web communities and is not restricted to blogs.
However, this power has a price, and I know that a lot of you are so poor ;-)
First of all, regular bloggers do not want to be considered as specialists of PHP or of XML nor even of CSS. Let face it: bloggers mainly focus on content and brand. Content is in the blog itself. And for the brand, why about reusing templates made by others? Of course, these would be changed a little bit to make the thing more 'personal'.
Secondly, bloggers are used to changing templates directly from within their blogging software. For example w.bloggar features commands to do exactly that.
Lastly, we also have to better support those of you who'd like to take the most out of YACS. Are you coming from the blogging world? If yes, we probably have to take your preferred template into account.
In order to address blogger needs, we have added an importing facility to YACS, and we have exposed it behind standard XML-RPC primitives. » Published on Dec. 1 2004 In The capability |
