Update 6: Other fixes

Submitted by Admin on Mon, 08/15/2022 - 14:40

Various minor fixes and improvements.

Fixed problems caused by switching domain gwulo.com to the new server:

  1. Map overlays (ie the scanned old paper maps) weren't displaying. Copied all the tiles from the old server to the new server.
  2. On the new server, the What's New page is at url /whats-new, but on the old server it was at /tracker. Redirected any attempts to visit url /tracker to the new url /whats-new, so that old bookmarks continue to work.
  3. The wartime diaries daily emails stopped sending. The RSS feed was invalid. Updated the base_url on the old.gwulo.com site and it is working again.
  4. Connected the new server to Google Analytics.

I spoke too soon - it didn't work today either. I think I've got it fixed properly now, we'll find out tomorrow. I've also recreated the pages that show today's diary entries:

The '77 years ago page' is worth a look today, as 16th August 1942 is the day when the Stanley Camp internees discovered that Japan had surrendered and the war was over.

Spam bots are already visiting the new site, so add defences against them.

Guide the search engines' web crawlers to stop trying to access files that existed on the old server, but that aren't present on the new server.

Thanks to Andrew Suddaby for letting me know there wasn't any easy way to access the galleries of photos.

If you visit the Photos page, you'll see I've added a Photos by Gallery tab, where you can choose a gallery and see all of its photos.

If you notice any other important feature from the old website is missing, please let me know in the comments below.

Got the newsletter service synching its changes to Gwulo.com, so if a user clicks on the link in a newsletter email and edits their subscription preferences, their account on Gwulo is updated to match.

apologies David if this has already been flagged but I notice that the feature to jump to the most recent comment from the main forum page (by clicking on the "x new" link that appears in the comments column of the main page) seems to have broken. Now the link just sends you to the top of the page as if you just clicked on the title link (I'm using Chrome on windows 10)
Phil

Checked & fixed.

(Note of the fix for any other pages like this: I changed the page's input format from Full HTML to Basic HTML to fix problems with embedded atoms displaying as full entities including their comments.)

Phil, please can I double-check the steps to repeat?

If I go to the main forum page at https://gwulo.com/forum/2 and click on one of the "x new" links, it correctly takes me to the new comment.

If I go to the what's new page at https://gwulo.com/whats-new and click on one of the "x new" links, and it is for a page with url /node/... it also correctly takes me to the new comment.

BUT, if I go to the what's new page at https://gwulo.com/whats-new and click on one of the "x new" links, and it is for an image page with url /media/... it takes me to the top of the page as you describe.


 

Is that the same problem you're seeing?

The standard software that runs the site doesn't consider media pages to be as important as the node pages, and often ignores them. I had to customise the code for the what's new page to get it to include media at all, but I haven't worked out how to get the "x new" links working yet. I'll add a note for this to the Known Problems page.

David, it sounds like the latter. I'll test again later and give you the exact issue (currently travelling). Cheers, Phil 

David

Can confirm it was a media page where the x new link wasn't working.

Cheers

Phil

Hi Klaus,

This was one of your early posts, and I can see you'd pasted images directly into many of the comments instead of uploading them first. That often causes problems on the upgraded site (see https://gwulo.com/node/58819), so my first recommendation is that you go back through the comments and delete the pasted photos (you may have to switch to 'Source' view to), and see if it solves the problem. If it doesn't help, I'll take a closer look at what is upsetting things. Then once it is working then you could look at https://old.gwulo.com/node/24636 to see what the photos were, and decide which ones you'll upload and re-insert.

Regards, David

Hi David,

this was really hard work which I glady took on as this was my first major project on Gwulo. Fortunately, I saved all of the images I cropped from others. Now I come to an end as the last comment (Final entry regarding the history of Richmond House (2nd gen.)) is incomplete, and there is no EDIT button. Could you please check it, otherwise I have to retype it and you have to delete this old comment.

Regards, Klaus

Hi Klaus,

Thanks for re-building that page, I know it is tedious work.

I can see the edit link on that last comment now. Does it show for you too? (I guess that as you fixed the pasted images in the earlier comments, this last comment could start working properly again.)

Regards, David

Hi David,

almost made it. While editing, I had some problems with this page, e.g. edit button missing or "see more photos" was missing. Probably problems with the pasted images. There is only one last item to fix: my 1980 photo appears twice, one as a photo with a link to media, and one obviously just pasted. I retyped this part of the last comment, but still the pasted one is there. Hopefully admin can help.

Regards, Klaus

Hi Klaus,

The What's New page is working correctly. The red "new" or "updated" shows you what's changed since your last visit. If you're the person who created / updated a page, the site knows you've seen that change already, so doesn't need to highlight it for you.

When I looked at What's New, I could see the red "new" on the line for "Douglas Wharf (first generation) [????-c.1895]". After I viewed the Douglas Wharf page, the next time I looked at What's New the red "new" was gone, as we'd expect.

Regards, David

Hi David,

yes, that is very reasonable and easy to understand.

But talking about the What's new page, the current version of Gwulo brings many more entries compared to the previous one. To me it is sometimes confusing as I do not see immediately what is really new. If - for example - I want to give a comment for a photo and it takes a few days to do so, the photo is possibly buried under so many new entries and already moved to page 10 (or so), and therefore difficult to find. 

It could be a good idea to think about limiting the entries to What's new. Currently, when a photo is linked to a place, both appear as new. When only a tag is added, it appears, too. So possibly "minor revisions" should not be displayed there.  

These are my thoughts, but others might be happy with the higher number of entries. 

Regards, Klaus

Hi Klaus,

I agree there are too many entries in the "What's new" at the moment. They are the result of several changes during the upgrade:

  1. The new "Add new tag" feature
  2. The new "Add new connection" feature
  3. The way that connections between pages are managed.

Item 3 is the main culprit. 

Before the upgrade, if I edit a photo and add "photo shows Place" connections to several buildings, only the photo is shown as new, because the connections are stored separately.

That way of working isn't supported in the new software, so after the upgrade, each of the Place pages for the buildings is also updated and so appears in the "What's new".

I'll look into this to see if there is a way we can make the changes to the Place pages without marking them as updated.

Regards, David

Hi Klaus,

I think I've implemented a working solution to this.


Before fix: If I edited a photo and added five Places to the Shows Places connections for that photo, then looked at the What's New page, I'd see the photo and the five Places at the top of the list of new and updated pages.

After fix: Using the same example as above, after updating the photo only the photo is shown at the top of the What's New page.


 

This should reduce the amount of "noise", showing less updates to regular readers and making the What's New page more useful.

As always, there's a risk that making a change here will break something else, so please let me know if you spot any problems. Most likely they'd be with the What's New page.

Regards, David

Maps on Gwulo (Map of all Places | Gwulo) have the layer box top right. When you click on it, the different maps appear and can be chosen, also markers. By default, the box Markers is ticked and active. When you click on this box, the tick disappears, but the markers are still on the map. Something happens after the click, possibly the markers are displayed twice on the map.

Please check.

I confirm this is a bug: the "Markers" layer is duplicated in the list of layers, so there is one at the top of the list and one at the bottom.

If you want to hide the markers from the map, the temporary workaround is to untick both copies of "Markers", then the markers will disappear.

Further investigation and a fix to follow.

Annelise noted this bug:

... the email link to a new comment from the automatic emails jumps to the top of the page. I think it before it used to jump to the actual comment itself.

Example:

> Subject: Gwulo :: new comment for your post
>
> Automatic notification from Gwulo for annelisec:
>
> You have received a comment on: "Kowloon British School [1902- ]"
>
> You can view and reply to the comment at the following url
> https://gwulo.com/comment/66251#comment-66251

I can repeat the problem, and see that it happens on Place pages. I think it is caused by the map details Gwulo adds to the URL on a map page, so in the above example the link starts as:

https://gwulo.com/comment/66251#comment-66251

But then the map code changes it to:

https://gwulo.com/comment/66251#17~22.30159~114.17221~Map_by_GovHK-Mark…

Then the browser cannot jump to the correct comment.

More work needed to investigate and fix.

AndrewS asks if there is a way to upload multiple images at a time.


 

The solution I implemented for Klaus's "What's new" isn't working in all cases. I edited a Person and added two people to the "Child of" connections. When I saved, all three were shown as updated in the What's New page.


 

Search is taking a long time to return results, especially when searching for multiple words.

The slow-down was caused by adding the second index. I've removed it, but there may still be a need to add a second index to help with sorting so that results with the same weight don't appear on multiple pages.

Please can I check that you're asking about the Link button showed circled below?

I haven't noticed any problems with it. When I look at the buttons to edit this comment I can see the Link button is displayed, and I can click on it to use it.

If you're still experiencing this problem, please can you tell me where you see it happen? e.g. does it happen wherever there is the box to edit text (comment, Place page, Person page, etc.) or only on certain pages?

"Link" button

I've tracked down the problem with the Markers layer on the maps. It should be working properly again now:

  • Only one copy of the 'Markers' layer is displayed in the layer switcher
  • Un-ticking the box next to 'Markers' hides the markers from display

I've made some changes to the way the main map page works: https://gwulo.com/map-of-places

That page should now be faster to load for people who have slow internet connections.

If you see any strange behaviour, the first thing to try is to clear out your browser's cached files. Before I did that the popup messages on the map would show html commands instead of showing the name of the Place.

If there are still any problems after that, please leave a comment below with the details.

When searching for tags (e.g. market), results appear on the webpage. When looking for places (of markets), it works for Places (list), but not for Places (map).

The recent changes to improve the speed of 'Map of all places' introduced some bugs with the other maps.

I think they're all working correctly again now, but please let me know if you see any other problems.

I use Google Chrome. I noticed when looking at the juror list for any particular year, the Book Navigation quick links mask or cover-up the addresses of the jurors to about 20 rows from the top on the very first page. Not sure if other viewers/contributors have had similar problems.

I've made a change to the Book Navigation block of links. If you click on the text "Book Navigation", the links are hidden to reveal the jurors that were covered. Click on the text "Book Navigation" to show the links again.

Does that solve the problem?