10 June 2008 Archives

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I never realized before that the difficulty with XHTML and allowing comments has a solution so breathlessly simple that I hit myself for not having seen it before.

I have configured the htmLawed module to “scrub” comments, but that wasn’t the solution. The solution is not to allow a person to save a comment until they preview the comment, first. If the input is invalid XHTML, they won’t see the form, or the form save button, in order to save the comment.

htmLawed should help with the accidentally invalid XHTML, and preview should help eliminate the deliberately invalid XHTML. We hope.

I’ve turned comments on. We’ll see how it goes.

update

Yesterday I discovered that the htmLawed module was still allowing the infamous U+FFFF et al through, and submitted a bug. Today, the htmLawed Drupal module was just updated to point to htmLawed source 1.0.9, which neutralizes the illegal Unicode characters that caused so many problems with my WordPress installations.

I am absolutely astonished at how fast and how responsive the htmLawed Drupal module developers are. I submitted a bug yesterday, and it was fixed by today. My comments should now be XHTML safe.

Though I detailed my move from WordPress to Drupal in Live, on Drupal, I wanted to provide a short summary of the changes made at all of my sites.

I’ve implemented the three phase 1 sites, Painting the Web, RealTech, and my personal site, Just Shelley using Drupal. The main Burningbird feed will list entries from all of the sites, while the Tech Only feed is for the tech-only sites (if you don’t want to deal with all that oogie personal stuff). You can, of course, just subscribe to the individual sites, or even individual categories.

The main main Burningbird page is now a portal, maintained by the aggregator software Venus, listing all of the entries from all of my sites. It’s the only page that’s using SVG as part of the theme, though I probably will end up changing the design, eventually. I also need to add links for my books, especially the newest, Painting the Web which was released to the streets in May.

I’ve only enabled comments here at RealTech, and only within the newly created Burningbird forum. All of the sites, except for Just Shelley, have their own forum category, and several forum topics. Using this approach, I can aggregate all discussions in one spot, while preventing some of the problems I had with XHTML and comments in WordPress.

You don’t have to register to comment. If you do register, and you’re someone I know, I’ll assign you “trusted” user status and you’ll be able to create your own forum topics, in addition to the ones I create. You can also use OpenID to register for the forums.

My RealTech site design is pretty conservative, and is based on the Drupal Garland theme. Painting the Web and Just Shelley are quite different in that neither site has sidebars, both use vertical images placed to the left, fixed in the case of Just Shelley. I just got tired of header images and multiple columns, and wanted to try something new.

I’ve given my Browser Shots membership a real work out, and all of my sites should show up in all of my tested browsers: Firefox 2.x/3/x, Opera 9.x, Safari 3.x, IE 6 and up, as well as several others. Do provide feedback, especially if you run into browser specific problems. At a minimum, I provide print only pages, which strip out all markup, if you run into problems.

Enjoy.