New release, new bugs

I just released a new production version of the Inner Drive Journal (the software the Daily Parker runs on) with 7 bug fixes, 9 new stories, and a technical task. Most of these Jira cases took me less than 15 minutes. Yesterday, though, I wound up spending 5 hours on a new system configuration management tool because (a) it's complex and (b) I changed my mind about the interface after I ran it a couple of times.

The coolest new feature is the Calendar, which allows you to view whatever was posted on a particular date. That's...well, that's the only feature that anonymous users can see. (So create an account already!)

The same with the bug fixes; for now, I'm the only one who will notice them, because I'm 100% dogfooding. For example, the Edit Blog Post page has an auto-save feature: every n seconds (which is now configurable by project), it saves what you're working on as a draft. Once the post is published, though, the feature turns itself off. You can control whether it's on or not at any time using a checkbox on the Edit page.

That's a super-useful feature, solving one of my biggest irritations with BlogEngine.NET. We can all agree it's no fun losing a draft you've worked half an hour writing. However, as I first implemented the auto-save feature, it simply called the general Save method on the page, which happily tells you about its every success with a banner at the top of the page. This causes everything to shift briefly and can cause the editing box to lose focus, which interrupts the writing flow. I fixed it by only showing the "success" banner when you actively click the Save button, but not when it auto-saves. I'm now 10 minutes into writing this post and, yes, it's a lovely improvement.

Unfortunately, a couple of the new features work in the dev/test environment but not in production (timing issues, I'm pretty sure), and I got the logic wrong in a couple of places. I'll fix those quickly and probably have a new release on Sunday or Monday. I'm also going to start working on some of the more journal-like features, starting with new layers of privacy, and possibly some external interactions I've wanted to do for years. We'll see. Plus, I'm starting to see some opportunities for better app performance, though I am really very happy by how it's running—especially compared with its predecessor.

And, yes, I'll have another How This Works explainer up as soon as I can.