h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

About two weeks ago, we were given a test version of h2g2, running on a Noesis server. The contents of it were a snapshot of h2g2, there were entries, users and conversations.

The site was displayable in any of the old skins - plain, classic, brunel, alabaster, and even pda! We were asked to test the site to make sure it could do everything that we need h2g2 to be able to do.

Initially, things looked good. The entries were there. The conversations were there. We could make new conversations, and continue existing ones.

Then we started to notice problems. The biggest of these is that you couldn't edit any entries. The conversation side of things all looked OK, but without any way of editing entries, it is just a forum.

I recorded 13 separate problems with the site. The next day, one of these had been fixed. I thought if they fix one problem a day, the system will be ready by the time we go live.

But nothing further has been done with the test site. It's still not working, and the go live date is officially only one day aware.

This is very depressing.

Every morning, I say "What's the worst that can happen?"

Then I log on to my e-mail and find out.

On the other hand, I've figured out why non-blob pictures don't display in the Plain skin on the BBC h2g2.

Later, we can fix that on Noesis h2g2.

Chin up!

We'll get there!


lil x

Optimists! Don'tcha just hate 'em

Hey, Gnomon, Could you check on the new site on my personal space (U69725) if My Messages (ie messages from people visiting my personal space) are there? They seem to have disappeared here. No one else seems to be affected.

Try a different skin for checking, CZ. The other day all entries missed from one person's PS - but only in brunel. They were all there is alabaster.

I liken it to when you have a car that develops a rare fault, by talking to the garage mechanics you get a little bit more insight into how engines actually work.

I never really wanted to understand the ins and outs of websites and how they are built and maintained, but I find that I am discovering all sorts of arcane and mysterious language.

Need to know and all that jazz.


My favourite phrase so far is 'vanilla zend' - I think that's what it was. My understanding of the word vanilla has grown yet another use, apart from ice cream and

You have conversations, journals and messages on that Personal Space.

Vanilla is a word used by programmers to be the default setting for everything, with nothing changed. Don't know what zend is.

Lanza, I work with websites - I'm an ex-developer and software support person who was put managing my company's websites about 10 years ago and I've been doing it ever since. I've always been the best there is at finding obscure faults in things and fixing them. It's doubly frustrating that I can't do anything here.

Phew...

I just checked here in goo, alabaster and plain and the entire message section is just GONE. In brunel it's there, but empty and if anyone tries to post a message it refuses to accept it, just refreshes the edit post page.

You mean here, on BBC h2g2?

Did you make any changes to your personal space, and introduce some dodgy GuideML?

Yea, here on BBC is where I'm having a problem (I don't know the secret location to check the other).

I haven't made any recent changes to my personal space and even the most recent were small changes to my intro (adding a link).

Of course, I don't know when my messages disappeared as I don't look at my personal space often, but if they're there on the new site they should be fine.

They're on the new site. But that's a copy of h2g2 as it was three weeks ago.

Tomorrow, the BBC will close down h2g2, then take a copy of it as it is at that time. That's the copy we'll use on the new site, so your messages will be missing from that too.

I seem to recall someone saying there was a bug that hid or deleted people's message spaces in the past, but I don't remember the details.

Try backing up your personal space to a text file, then replace it with something really simple and see is there still a problem.

Bugger!

Well, I've sent an email to the eds (and Lil sent one a few days ago). Let's hope someone is available to look into it.

>>On the other hand, I've figured out why non-blob pictures don't display in the Plain skin on the BBC h2g2>>

That'd be great, since plain is the skin I use at w*rk because it uses the Windows theme, which makes it look rather inconspicuous

> Vanilla is a word used by programmers to be the default setting for everything, with nothing changed. Don't know what zend is.

Zend is the engine which runs PHP.

TRiG.

And, don't tell me, PHP is a kind of API which isn't ASP?