What's New, Early March 2023 Edition

Carl Milsted, Jr on Mar 1 11:34:38

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In this post:

• Recent Bug Fixes
• New Navigation Features
• The Wide Tag
• New Link Features

Recent Bug Fixes

Some people have reported forms not working, specifically the join form and group creation form. These problems have been fixed, but there may be forms with similar problems. If you encounter a form which refuses your data for weird reasons, please report it in the comments instead of enduring the frustration of multiple attempts.

The problem is a quirk in the Go standard library. If I don't parse the incoming form data before sending any response, that data gets thrown away sometimes.

The fix is simple, bug grepping through all the code to find all the instances where I did parse the form data first thing is tedious. I may have missed some.

New Navigation Features

Ye may have noticed that the Fnora logo has disappeared from the top of some pages -- along with the entire menu. On those pages, including this one, you will find floating icons in the upper corners of the viewport which allow you to quickly navigate to parts of the page:

	Click this to go to the bottom of the page, where you will find the Fnora logo and other menu items.
	Click this to go to the unread item which brought you to the page. (This one only displays when you are browsing comment replies or unread comments on your posts.)
	Click this to go to the beginning of the comments.
	Click this to go to the top of the page

My main reason for making this change is to downplay the Fnora brand on pages where your brand should be the prominent brand, such as post pages and About pages. I also made the change for pages where jumping around is pretty handy, such as private message pages.

The Wide Tag

Reading really wide columns can produce eye strain. It is fatiguing to go from the end of a long line back to the beginning of the next line. It's harder to keep your place. For this reason, the main text column has a maximum width.

But sometimes it really helps to go wide. For example, a large table:

Or maybe you want to show some computer code that's wider than the middle column:

Hello fnora, welcome to hack!


                                                             ---------
                    --------##      #########################+......<|
      ----------    |......|#           --------------       |.......|
      |........|  ##+......|#           |............|       +.......|
      |........+####|......|#         ##+............+       --+------
      |........|####|......|#         # |............|        ##
      |........|   #|......+#       ### -------+------        #
      |........|   #--------#       #          #              #
      ----+-----   ######## #       #          #              #
          #          #  #   #       #        ###              #
          ###      ###  ### #       #        #              --+---+---
            #      #        #       #       ##            ##+........|
          --+--  `##        #-------#    ---i------       # |........|
          |...+# #          #|.....|#    |..i.....|     ### |........|
          |...|###          #|.....|#    |........|     #   ----------
          |...+#            #|.....|#    |.....@..+######
          -----             #+.....+#    ----------
                             -------


Level 2    Hp  10(30)   Ac 2    Str 16      Exp  3 

Or maybe you have a really long equation to show.

For all these situations, we now have the wide tag. Just surround the blocks of content you want to escape the column boundaries with the opening and closing version of the wide tag.

Just don't be silly if you want it to work. Don't try to extend part of a paragraph or whatnot.

New Link Features

Notice the table of contents at the top of this article. Those are actual hyperlinks to the sections of this article. To make that work I have added two new features.

First, I have added the this option for links. Normally, links launch a new tab in your browser. But sometimes you want to make the current window change addresses. When that is the case, just add the this (as in this window) after the web address.

The other other new feature is the ability to add anchors to parts of your post. These are invisible targets with names that can be addressed with links. For example, in the beginning of the heading for this section begins with

 .a linkStuff

Note that this is a one line tag. There is no closing a tag.

To jump to an anchor, link to the link name preceded by the # sign. That is, in the table of contents, I have the link

.link #linkStuff this
New Link Features
..link

Still to do: I need to disable this feature for comments. The potential for messing up a page is too great. What if two commenters use the same anchor name? I also need to put it checks to make sure post authors don't make the same anchor twice, or use an anchor name which the system uses.

That's All Folks!

That's it for now.

Please use the comments section to both comment on this post as well as report any bugs found in March.

Thanks.