I see we're going to continue the random background patterns... As for the front page, no one used it. Everyone just clicked through it anyway.

Now if only Jeager would get rid of his useless clickgate.

I happen to believe that a well-done background pattern adds "texture" to a site.

For examples of some truly cool web eye candy, check this out. They don't all work in browsers that have less than perfect CSS support (a browser used by the majority of the web browsing public comes to mind), but damn, are they cool! I've been considering using some of those ideas on my page, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

I'm not sure if this is a bug in mozilla or not, but the WYWIWYG handle does not update when you change the color with the keyboard.

Go to Preferences, click on the color thing, set it, then just use up and down (without rolling down the menu) to change colors. They don't change unless you hit enter.

Odd.

When you update your user profile, you get two password boxes, the password box, and the "repeat password" box. To not change your password, both must be left blank. To change it, both must be populated.

However, by default, the password box is populated. This forces you to either delete the text in the password box to *NOT* change your password, or retype your password in the "confirm" box to "change" your password.

They both should be defaulted blank, or, if the confirm box is empty, assume the user does not intend to update his password.

When I go into the preferences page, both the password and repeat password boxes are blank. Further, after looking at the code, I don't see how they could ever come up populated by default, since the value is hard coded to blank. (The user's real password can never be echoed out to the browser, since it is stored in the db as a hashed value.)

What browser are you using to get this?

I'm not seeing it either, but I have a theory. If one is incapable of remembering web passwords and relies on one's browser to do so, it seems entirely possible that the browser will see the password field named "password" and blissfully assume it's supposed to fill the password there.

Naming the field something else (say, "password_first" or whatever) seems like it could work around the browser "feature".

I suppose that's as plausible as anything I can think of. It would be easier to test (to say the least) if I knew which browser and under what conditions it happened.

I noticed the same thing when I was testing in mozilla. Since it worked like you would want in konqueror, I assumed it was a browser quirk; one area where Mozilla is not 100% up to spec. (Yes, I'm one of these wierd people who believes in coding to the official w3c spec, even when the browser I happen to use might deviate from it. Although for the sake af pragmatism, I have deviated from this ideal on an occassion or two.)

Now that you mention it, and I'm looking at the relevant section of the spec, it appears that mozilla might actually be doing the correct thing, and I need to alter my implementation.

The onchange event occurs when a control loses the input focus and its value has been modified since gaining focus. [italics theirs]

Looks like maybe I should also include an onkeypress event handler to get the behavior you, me, and probably others want. Thanks for the bug report.

onkeypress event call added. That one was easy.

And now, we see the real value in the threaded comment feature: An ad hoc interactive bug tracking database. Maybe I really should get back to coding traqer. :)

I seem to recall that onclick invokes the desired behavior, although that's somewhat counter-intuitive.

here's a lesser known one: http://jaeger.festing.org/rss.cgi

Once upon a time in the very distant past, Bitscape's Lounge featured an RSS feed. It was almost never accessed, except by x13.com. When I took it down, I don't think anybody noticed.

It would be simple enough to code up a new one, or even re-use some of my old code. Perhaps I shall do so.

my blog now lives here. that's right. visit this site hourly for the latest updats, cause i will never update my own site, and this site is soo much cooler anyway.

I suppose if I wanted to clone another yanthor.net feature, I could setup a user journals feature. That might be interesting. I wonder how much interest this would have?

Looking to compete with the big boys, are we?

Actually what might be cool, something I haven't seen yet, would be an RSS v2 Aggregator anyone can signup and use. RSS 2 is far more useful, and if you combine it with some data proxying, it would be a great way to catch up on the lives of geeks everywhere, without having to click through Jaeger's evil takes-ten-minutes-to-load-even-on-an-oc-128 clickgate.

After a couple days of jumping straight into bitscape's lounge instead of going through the front page, I've decided I definitely prefer having the cover page and have it bookmarked instead. So please don't break it Bitscape.

Honestly, it's very difficult to navigate the lounge from the on-page interface, I often just load the cover page to see if there's been new content posted, and if I've been away for a while, I like seeing that there have been like 4 new ramblings posted recently instead of scrounging my way through each link looking for unread stuff.

Since I now there's at least one person who uses it, I'll keep the cover page around as is for the foreseeable future.

I've been thinking about possible ways to make the main page more navigable for stuff like that. One possible feature idea for logged in users would be to make it display the next article the user hadn't yet read instead of always showing the latest. So if you hadn't visited in a week, you'd see whatever came after you last read, instead of the most recent. Then you could click forward to catch up in order.

Another way would be to make the "nearby content" section more like the cover page's menu, to have a link to everything from the past week instead of just a fixed number of articles. Thoughts?