Showing posts with label Blogger Bugs?. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blogger Bugs?. Show all posts

Dec 16, 2009

The noscript tag

BLOGGER UPDATE:
Hey guys, I wanted to update everyone on the blogger bug that was making the comments count incorrect. They fixed it!!! I don't know what was done, but the comments have been accurate for the past week now, and I've been closely monitoring everytime I make a new comment and the numbers are all correct! This means no counting by hand! I hope everyone can make use of my application and if not, that's fine, but I know it has saved some people a lot of time. It kind of just became a challenge for me to do at one point. I started doing it, thinking it'd be cool, then I hit those problems and it became something I needed to figure out! lol

Anyway, the reason I'm posting is to talk about the noscript tag. The noscript tag is a tag used in HTML when JavaScript is disabled or not supported by a browser. This tag is very important in our class because everything we're dealing with is AJAX, so it's all JavaScript-based! If a user visits one of our AJAX-based sites without JavaScript enabled on their browser or with a browser that doesn't support JavaScript, they will not get any results. All the visitor would see on our sites would be the static information within the HTML. Obviously for sites like ours that are developed 100% around the use of AJAX, our sites pretty much become useless then. This is where the noscript tag comes into play.


The noscript tag allows the browser to display alternate information when/if JavaScript isn't enabled/supported. Using the noscript tag is extremely simple. All you need to do is type . Unfortunately, if JavaScript is disabled/unsupported on our sites, the noscript tag still won't give the results we want, but it will at least inform the user that they need to either enable JavaScript or find a browser that supports it if they want to experience the full effect and purpose of our AJAX-based websites.

The majority of the time, the text you place between the noscript tag is what determines whether or not a visitor stays at your site, or just gives up and goes somewhere else. A few important points you may want to consider in the noscript tag are to try and type as much relevant content as you can related to the thing the user is trying to view (in the case of this class, that would mean listing some sort of related information to the API the JavaScript is attempting to access) and telling the user that JavaScript is necessary to properly view this site. Sometimes it's a good idea to give short instructions to the user on how to enable JavaScript on a few popular browsers in case they aren't aware it's disabled and don't know how to re-enable it.

Nov 30, 2009

Interesting Blogger Bugs/Issues

Revisiting my blog counting application earlier today, created yet another source of confusion and frustration for me! Yesterday my application was working perfectly and counting all 55 of my comments. I double checked this number by going through every single post and counting by hand to confirm I had 55 as of yesterday.

Today, the number came back as 50 and after adding one more reads 51. Of course, my first assumption was that I messed something up yet again, but then I found an interesting result....

It appears that Blogger is handling some of the comments on certain posts incorrectly. If you go to Ahmed's post, you'll notice that although Blogger claims there is 5 comments on this post, only 2 show up! I immediately noticed this, because 2 of those 5 comments USED TO BE my comments.




I wanted to make everyone aware of this problem that Blogger seems to be having with comments. Yesterday, my comments showed on Ahmed's post, but today they're mysteriously missing.

Professor Drake, I think I speak for everyone when I say this: Please consider this bug when grading our comments, as this could effect some peoples' comments number! Thanks!


Update:

The comments from Ahmed's post appear to be showing up again, so I don't know if this bug was temporary or is something that will occur again...none-the-less, it's something to be aware of.


Update 2:

Checked it again, and now it's returning the correct number, and all comments are being shown...Blogger is very shaky with the comments.

Update 3:

The post immediately following Ahmed's post is giving the same results. The "Best of Both Worlds" post that Justin made has 4 comments, but occassionally only 2 are shown. It appears to be only the first and last comments for each posting.