The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Tuesday, October 29, 2002

Naming names

Well that was certainly painful.

I wrote the previous entry only to have some of it show up. Odd, I thought. It's never done that before. Of course, I had just updated the codebase to support more more <META> tags (DC.Date.Updated and WMDI.LastUpdateType if you're curious) so the code did change just prior to the previous entry, even though I did a test and it shouldn't have affected the addition of new entries (shouldn't).

Throw the code under the debugger and place a stopping point jusr prior to the program exiting, then run.

It's exiting normally. Only it's getting a partial entry.

Now, when I cut-n-paste the excerpt, it did pick up a few characters that gave my editor fits but I thought I had gotten fixed that. Check the contents of the entry (as I sent it) and it's all ASCII—no funny characters at all. I even retype the lines around where it's failing and still it's not getting everything.

And that's when I see the problem:

<class="…" href="…">

It should have read:

<a class="…" href="…">

My HTML parser was bailing out on bad input. Sigh.

Fix the text (which is easier than fixing the code) and try again. Test goes fine. When I go resubmit the entry for real it crashes.

Insert primal scream.

Think think think think think

Okay, I submit entries via email. The email system feeds the email (in RFC-822 format to the submission program. When testing, I fed the entry the same was as the email system. When mailing, I was sendind my test file, which included a duplicate set of email headers! Which my program couldn't deal with—or rather, it dealt with it by crashing.

Sigh.

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The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

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