11:43 PM -:- Posted by Allen    

Bloggers Beware!

Software is really stupid.

Until a programmer notices or is told that there's a need for a fail-safe, a computer program will actually help you make stupid mistakes. It might even make them for you. (And then, I suspect but I can't prove it, the entire computer silently snickers at you when you get a completely unexpected and astoundingly wierd result.

My own claim to infamy...

Back in about 1989 I wrote the original version of the Effectiveness Profile self- and professional-development diagnostic software.

One of the nifty things it did was turn on the numeric keypad for the convenience of users who seemed all the time to forget to do it themselves. It also turned the numeric keypad off at the end.

Except... Just about that time, laptops were becoming popular. IBM came roaring out with the Thinkpad, at a whopping 50Mhz pf pentium speed. And slightly different programming codes for certain keyboard functions, because of the different keyboards. So, even though the program turned on the number finctions in the right section of the keyboard (u=4, i=5,o=6, etc.), it used a code for turning it off that didn't work on laptops.

So I started getting frantic calls from people with laptops who couldn't turn the Num Lock off!

Okay, so that one wasn't fair to me: I was a victim of changing technology, it wasn't my fault, don't blame me, that's my story and I'm sticking to it {{sob}}.

Now, of course, the program is actually three times larger than its essential routines alone would require, just to make sure that users can't give it bad info. What a difference a decade of complaints can make!

Now it's 'BloggerWare's' turn...

Blogger's software has a nifty feature in that little pop-up dialog that makes it so easy to insert the URL codes for a link. As in,

|a href="http://my.blog.address"|MyBlogName|/a|

(Notice that I had to use the | character instead of the < (less-than) and > (greater-than) characters, because <, and >, are the opening and closing characters of html tags and your browser would believe them and turn what I wrote into an actual link that would look like this MyBlogName instead of simply displaying what I typed to illustrate what a link's code looks like. So, when you see |, think <, or >. {please}

But there's a weird quirk. (I really like the way those two words look next to each other, neither of them even having a right to exist....)

You highlight the link name in your post text, click the litlle planet/chain-link icon, and an insertion dialog box opens for you to enter the internet address. Only look carefully. It already has some stuff in it: the "http://" part is already there. But it's highlighted.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN???!

It means that the "http://" part is required!

But if you just start typing, or if you paste in something from the clipboard, that existing code goes away, because when you highlight something it is put into "overtype" mode, which is exactly what happens: you type over it, or insert over it, and wipe it out.

That's a good thing if you're pasting in a complete reference code, such as,

http://my.blog.address

After all, you'd get a failing link if the http:// code were included twice in the same link, so it's good for it to go away. (Which is probably why it's highlighted in the first place.)

But it's bad for it to go away if you're only pasting in the actual URL of a site, such as,

www.somesite.gnat

Here's why it's bad:

If you don't put the http:// part at the beginning of a link to a website, the blogger software assumes you're referring to a location within your own blog. So it publishes that link looking something like this:

|a href="http://my.blog.address/www.somesite.gnat"|MyBlogName|/a|

Which, of course, even with <'s and >'s instead of |'s, is a bad link, no such address, 404 Error: Page not found!

The user-based solution:

Pay attention.

Make sure of what you copy before you paste it into the insert link dialog. If it has the http:// included, then leave the dialog's existing http:// fragment highlighted, and the paste action will delete it. If what you copied doesn't have the http:// included, hit the [End] key before you click into the insertion dialog box. That will un-highlight the existing code segment and your paste will be placed at the end of it.

The Blogger solution:

Use a standard form-checking routine that corrects the errors automatically. The rules should be simple. Blogs don't allow for subdirectories, so if it's not an internal link to a previous post, it's not a valid link if it begins with the posting blog URL. Stuff like that.

This explains it!

Now we know why we sometime hear from each other that we put a really strange link into a blog-post, when we know for certain that we didn't do any such thing.

Of course, we actually did. With a little secret help from our friendly computer and its idiot-reinforcing software.

But that's why it's not our fault, we were framed, daemons did it....