another link..

and so there was the dev blog..

this is like corzblog, but just for software. I realised there were too many compelling reasons to stop dropping this stuff into my main blog, not least of which the opportunity for users (you) to drop yet another useful link into your news aggregators.

you can be informed about important updates, new releases, beta versions and whatnot, without all that corzblog text data getting in the way.

I've been working on beta versions ofeverything these last couple of weeks, a wee bit here and there as I get the time, and in particular, ironing out a few wrinkles, not to mention adding a fair few features to corz distro machine for its new release..

security reminder: if you are using any version of corz distro machine prior to v0.7b7, thenPLEASE UPGRADE IMMEDIATELY!

changes since last release version..

v0.8rc1(release candidate one)

Improved the overall logic of the html structures, they were confusing even to me. the embedded output, as ever, is a self-contained table which will take up 90% (you can change this) of whatever width you give it. the powerbar's squishing is now greatly improved, and it will appear even if nothing is available.

some css improvements, removed background white in the jump bar (oops), underlining in the links, etc. for both in-built & external green.css

improved some error/user-error handling. attempting to embed from a distro machine running in secure mode produces an embedded user message, for instance.

the name of the subsection you are in is now displayed if you get a "nothing available" page. also works when embedded.

added various options for embedded custom text, menus and titles. you can even embed top-level menus; the machine will deliver the sub-sections in a pop-up window. you can set a few options from the embedding URL now, see the install page for more information.

added prefs for a few things, machine widths among them.

made it easy for you to syndicate your downloads to other sites, they can embed your machines on their pages!

some internal restructuring; with all the new features, things were starting to get a bit inneficient. the table generation is becoming modularised, which should hopefully make things simpler for me, and folks who want to hack the php, editing one place instead of three or four.


v0.7b10

fixed a bug where the downloading link on the source page gave an incorrect URL

greatly expanded the machine's list of mime-types. whatever you need to share is probably covered now.

added "multimedia" downloading switch. useful if you use the distro machine to distribute images/media files/etc, the user gets the file in their browser as opposed to their download manager, in theory.

squished a bug I introduced in the last beta - php error when no custom text file was present.

finally moved the source highlighting colours out of the .htaccess and into the script itself. Apache throws up errors of level warning at the .htaccess versions and advises that we use quotes around the values, even though we already effin did! it was starting to annoy me, not least all that pointless server-side error logging. clearly this makes them easier to change, too. I think I wanted folks to "discover" them, which is just plain silly.

cleaned up the counter code, removed some duplication, that sort of thing. improved the safety of the scores file, again. there was a (very very slim) possibility that one machine process could attempt to read the scores at the exact moment a parallel machine process had the file locked for reading. no more.

custom text can now be displayed in the "nothing available" page. not on "clean" embedded pages, though.

fixed bug where stats link was appearing on embedded pages (see, you should hide that baby!)


v0.7b9

Fixed a minor bug where "special links" for source files weren't being correctly parsed, instead the generic link was showing.


v0.7b8

Cleaned up the formatting of the embedded menu when nothing was available, it shouldn't mess with your page too much now.

Fixed a browser-dependant issue where editing scores directly wouldn't work, the javascript was inserting a literal "&" instead of the encoded & I just removed it. so much for standards.

available from the usual place.

I'll get around to wrapping up the corzoogle and corzblog betas sometime soon. looking good so far.

for now..

;o)