I’ve now downloaded a copy of Movable Type 3.12, and so I’ve worked out how to add the insert & delete buttons to it too. See the update on the prior post. Still very simple, involving the same two files.

For those who came in late, this is to add two buttons to the Movable Type editing page, to allow you to mark text as inserted or deleted as needed. Read the whole post for a full run-down of the idea.

<shamelessplug>Also, you may be interested in my idea for using CSS to display document revisions clearly: Part 1, Part 2</shamelessplug>

Nick Bradbury has announced the latest, and probably last Release Candidate for TopStyle Pro 3.11.

Release candidate 3 of TopStyle Pro 3.11 is now available to registered customers. Note that even though the release notes mention only a single fix in RC3, intenally a lot of changes were made, including disabling the debug code that has been in all prior builds of v3.11.

The best CSS editor, bar none. If you’re a fully paid-up user, go download the update, otherwise, go order a copy.

(Standard disclaimer about this being a pre-release applies, but Nick’s pre-releases have never crashed on me.)

Following on from last timelast time.

Next comes the javascript. This script is "borrowed" from Paul Sowden’s excellent article on A List Apart, Alternative Style: Working With Alternate Style Sheets. Here’s the script:

function setActiveStyleSheet(title) {
var i, a, main;
for(i=0; (a = document.getElementsByTagName("link")[i]); i++) {
if(a.getAttribute(”rel”).indexOf(”style”) != -1
&& a.getAttribute(”title”)) {
a.disabled = true;
if(a.getAttribute(”title”) == title) a.disabled = false;
}
}
}

You’ll need to include this on any page you want this to work on, either in script tags in the page, or in an externally linked javascript file.

Read the rest of this entry »

Following on from the last post on adding inserted and deleted tags to Movable Type (or at least adding automation for them), I was having a bit more of a think about how to display that information on a site. While searching for info about online readability, I came across this thread on the WebAIM Forums from last year:

At present, there is no markup that you could use to indicate changes in any reliable way, except for mere insertions such as new material added. (And even for that only if it is not necessary to indicate it as inserted, since <ins> is not consistently supported, and even then probably with a style sheet rule that tries to make the rendering better. Internet Explorer uses underlining for <ins>, and this tends to create confusion with links. It’s probably best to use CSS to remove the underlining and to add a coloured dashed bottom border, or something.)

There’s a serious argument against <del>, <strike>, and text-decoration: line-through especially in situations where the “work”: the line through feature very often has the effect of making the text almost impossible or very difficult to read. Besides, although the line through probably conveys the idea of deletion to most people, many of us will be puzzled by the question what this really means. Is the user expected to read, or to be able to read, what has been deleted? If it has been deleted, why is it there at all?

Read the rest of this entry »

Updated for MT 3.1

If a blog, or any online publication for that matter, is going to have any sort of decent reputation, the author(s) must have the integrity to publicly correct any incorrect information that they’ve published. We all make mistakes, whether they be typos or actual factual errors, and it is often necessary to re-edit or change the content on our sites. In fact, this is one of the great advantages of the web over traditional print media. There is no need to publish an errata list, you can simply modify the original.

However, it is also important to acknowledge the mistake and not just silently update the text and act as if the change had always been there. If the change is simply correcting a misspelling, this may be alright, but for correcting factual errors, it must be stated that a change has occurred, as people may quote you before the change, and you will be making them out to be liars. Also, it’s simply a matter of integrity to publicly state "I made a mistake, I have now corrected it"

Read the rest of this entry »

PuTTY, a great little freeware SSH client, has had a security update. Anyone who uses PuTTY should upgrade to version 0.56.

PuTTY 0.56, released today, fixes a serious security hole which can allow a server to execute code of its choice on a PuTTY client connecting to it. In SSH2, the attack can be performed before host key verification, meaning that even if you trust the server you think you are connecting to, a different machine could be impersonating it and could launch the attack before you could tell the difference. We recommend everybody upgrade to 0.56 as soon as possible.

That’s two really bad holes in three months. I’d like to apologise to all our users for the inconvenience.

Considering Simon Tatham & his team do all this work for free, I don’t think he should be too upset. The fact that they patched the flaws almost immediately speaks volumes for their commitment & integrity. Kudos to you!