Just Journal Developer Blog

I fixed the comment mailing code.  You can view it in cvs if you are a developer. 

I've killed two more reported bugs in just journal this week. 

I've corrected some rendering bugs in Internet Explorer on the first page.  I've also added some statistics for the site.  I'll commit the statistics class to cvs soon. 

Comment mailing is down at the moment.  My new code is not working properly and I'm in the process of debugging it. 

I've been working on some of the outstanding bugs in Just Journal.  There is a list of bugs on the source forge page.  I've closed a few in the last two weeks.  Today, I'm about halfway through fixing the comment notification bug.  There are cases where comment notifications do not get sent.  One reason is that the mail server I use requires authentication.  I've just changed the mail sender code to use a username/password combination from now on.  That should solve quite a few problems. 

It also brought up another problem.  Settings.  Just Journal has a Settings class which is rarely used.  In fact, I never populated the database with values for it.  I'm working on integrating that feature with the settings database.  This should allow me to change the behavior of just journal while its running.  (except mail settings will require a reload of the web app) 

This is a large step toward my goal of getting just journal to run on any website or server. 

While doing some database maintinence, I accidently disabled the stored procedures in use on the site.  This has been corrected.  I also restarted the database and servlet container servers. 

I've also made progress with some bugs in the RSS Subscription system.

I fixed a long standing bug with the RecentBlogs feature.  The month in the individual entries were wrong.  I've fixed the problem.  I'll commit the patch to cvs later today.

Also, I've fixed some links on the older pages of the site to aid in navigation. 

I've added a snapshot of the current java source code (minus jsp/templates) to source forge.  The snapshot was directly from the latest cvs version and features the avatar, weblogs.com pings and other code. 

It might be useful to others working on java based blogging software, but its not ready to use on your own server just yet.

Initial experiments show there are still bugs in the feature.  I'll continue to work on it and post when its fixed. 

Hopefully i've got it now. I got a ping ok message. I still need to limit it to 30 minutes somehow. That's the next problem. :)

I've finally managed to get intellij and sourceforge cooperating again.  The changes over the last two months have been commited.  (well most of them) 

Yes, its been awhile.  I've just written some code to ping weblogs.com when new journal entries are created.  It will only work with public entries.  The code needs improvements and I'll start testing sometime today. 

The point of this is to make your blog more visible.  I'll add an option to disable it as well.

I performed a server upgrade last night and forgot to restart tomcat.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

I've moved just journal to a new server with a new internet connection.  The new setup should save me quite a bit of money at a slight speed decrease. 

There have been a few issues during the move.  I'm still working on them.  If you have any problems, email luke@foolishgames.com with a description of the problem.

During the last code roleout I severely screwed up the user class. As a result, you could login but some pages (including the initial login page) didn't display properly. This bug has been fixed. The actual issue stemed from using Null in the database but not checking for it with the style classes. Several pages now import the user's style. Since I have values in my account and most of my test accounts, I did not trigger it during testing.

I cleaned up a few problems with the journal css themes.  Many of them did not display the background color properly in firefox. 

A new version of JJ should be loaded on the server by this weekend.  I'm reworking the preferences code and want to make sure it works ok.  The new version should be a bit faster.

I noticed the new login page code displays "JJ: Add comment" or something of that nature.  That will be fixed with the update as well.  The reason that happened is that i've moved to a simple template system for all servlets and used copy and paste. :)

Sourceforge recently changed their cvs policies.  I've got two weeks worth of code changes that i can't commit to the repository.  I'm considering moving the cvs to my own server.  Sourceforge can't seem to keep things up over there.

On the new feature front, I'm about half way done with adding links and photo gallery code.  The database schema is done for both and links just need management pages.

My hosting company had a network outage which lasted over an hour today.  I appologize for any downtime.  The server remained up during the outage.

If you don't have the .NET 2.0 framework needed to run the JJ windows client, you may acquire it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=0856eacb-4362-4b0d-8edd-aab15c5e04f5&displaylang=en

I just added the source to the repository.  It should be visible on source forge in the next few days.

I just uploaded the new windows client.  Its a bugfix release. I changed the toolbars a bit so that the are no longer movable, fixed some problems with the Music Detect options and a few other minor things.  I also changed the popup window background.

The new version is about 100KB smaller on disk and 500KB less in memory upon startup on my system. 

I uploaded screenshots earlier to source forge of the 1.41 client and more recent website shots. 

The source and binaries will be uploaded to sourceforge later.

I've almost completed a new feature where URIs would be automatically converted to hyperlinks when journals are posted.  Unfortunetely, SF CVS has been down most of the weekend.  I can't commit the code and I've done so much now that I feel like I need to before I continue.

Many people mistakenly use URL instead of URI for a full address like http://www.justjournal.com/ 

URI = URN + URL

Aside from the server issues/upgrades, I've installed a new version of the just journal server software. 

The website now validates usernames and passwords against regular expressions.  If you have ANY login problems, please email luke@foolishgames.com and let me know whats happening along with your username. 

I'm testing new add comment code as well.  The output screen reads a tempate file.  Part of the roadmap was to get all servlets to use templates instead of silly sb.append or printwriter.out type statements.  So far so good, although i need to extend the template a bit.

I had hoped to get more done, but its a great start.

It appears there are some problems with the apache server running this site.  The java end was up, but for some reason i'm getting internal server errors.  I suspect I'll need to update some software soon to fix it.