Goli sez: “You don’t gotta lie to kick it”

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

Remember how I was angsting about increasing the line-height on our articles, but worrying about affecting all our style? Well, this doesn’t exactly fix that, I’d still just want to affect article content, but it’s related.

Eric Meyer: The property line-height can accept unitless number values.

And for future reference (unrelated to line-height), Dave passes along this A List Apart article: In Search of the Holy Grail (of CSS Layouts)

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

In the blogosphere (and on the web) permalinks are sacred. Every broken link is like a demerit against your credibility. Even more so with syndication.

So I spent my day trying to figure out why Movable Type 3.2 occasionally appends an “_1” (an underscore followed by the number one) to the end of a published permalink (a basename in MT parlance) when there is no conceivable collision with any other basename, and without creating a duplicate entry.

We thought maybe Ecto was to blame. But I couldn’t recreate the problem with the latest versions on either Windows or Mac.

I talked to a few of our bloggers, and no one could point to a discernible pattern—other than that it only seemed to happen after an edit was made to an already published post. So I tried multiple combinations of setting a post from Published to Unpublished and then back again. But no game.

I reached out to the MT ProNet list and someone suggested that this may be a “known issue” in MT 3.2:

When an entry is saved from the Preview screen, the entry basename may be incremented or, if the title was changed, altered to fit the new title.

Turns out this was spot on. Here’s how to reproduce the bug:

1. Create a new entry and Save it (the Post Status is irrelevant)
2. Click the Preview button and click Save this entry
3. Notice that the Basename now has an “_1” appended to it
4. Click the Preview button again and click Save this entry
5. Notice that that the Basename no longer has an “_1” appended to it
6. …

I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I knew my blogging platform was producing unstable permalinks when users preview their posts and resave them. This is a problem on the scale of “our software is breaking the world wide web.” C’mon Six Apart, can I get a little more gumption than “this is a known issue”? This has been a known issue for five months!

Update: after my rabble-rousing on the ProNet list, Jay Allen posts a patch for fixing the “MT incrementing basename bug”. Thanks Jay!

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

…you tell someone who’s looking for something in a book to “scroll down a little.”

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.

Goli on negative user feedback:

“There’s a bastion of ill sites that you could be targeting with all your energy.”

This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.