Greetings to all of our readers!
As you may already be aware, Technically Motivated is a technology blog with a heavy focus on YOU, our dear visitors and readers. We encourage you to get involved with our website as much as you want – whether that be through leaving comments on our various articles; communicating with other regular visitors via our Forum or IRC; or submitting your own ideas for articles via our Write for TM page, where you can potentially get your own writings onto our blog and receive credit for your work.
Unfortunately, Technically Motivated was recently made aware that the "Write for TM" page has in recent weeks not been working as intended. After some investigation, we discovered that a recent website update caused a glitch in our User Submission form regarding the ability to upload images as part of the article. Somehow, the setting for "maximum images per submission" got set to a negative number. As a result, the form was rejecting all submissions for having too many images even when none had been uploaded. This unfortunate glitch resulted in the form being broken and all submissions being rejected by our site.
I am pleased to announce that this glitch has now been resolved; and it is once again possible to submit articles to our site. In addition to the fixes, I have decided to make a few tweaks to the page to make the experience much more friendlier to use:
- You can now use Rich Text editing to allow you to write new posts with the formatting and look you like – What You See Is What You Get. To enable this, select the "Visual" option on the Post Content box. The older HTML method is still available for expert users.
- The "Your Article has been submitted" and "There was an error" messages on submitting an article have been made more noticeable by using bigger, bolder text and a check mark or cross symbol to indicate success or failure, respectively, allowing you to more easily see if your submission was received.
- The look of the page has been generally tidied up; and unnecessary buttons have been removed.
I hope these changes lead to a more satisfactory experience; and we hope to see more of your contributions here on Technically Motivated – the Technology Blog made for everyone!
At first, the bugs were played down as it was not seen as a ‘persistent problem’. After months of forum posts, the issue was finally elevated to ‘high priority’ a few days ago, prompting an investigation into the cause of the problem. After said investigation had been held, engineers managed to replicate and fix the bugs. The reply said “It took us some time to reproduce this issue, as it appears that it’s only occurring very rarely. Even so, we’ve now managed to both reproduce it and develop a fix that we will deploy.”
A bit of bugfixing
Earlier this week, the Technically Motivated team became aware of some back-end bugs on our site that had affected various elements of our sidebar and made it difficult to make updates to our site layout. After some investigation, the bugs were traced down to a plugin we at Technically Motivated had been using for many years, to provide our visitors and members with a friendly, “what you see is what you get”-style comment box.
As a result of this bug, comment boxes were stripped down to small, basic text fields while we looked at a solution. We are pleased to state that we have now found an alternative plugin; and you will now once again be able to post comments on our site with all the visual splendour you like, in full confidence that what you see really is what you’ll get. The same plugin also applies to our newly-migrated Forum, and has allowed us to introduce many more features to allow our users to customise their posts as they like.
In other news, we have begun public testing of a new Private Messaging system, which registered and logged in members to our site can now try out through the “Private Messaging” link under Social, or by visiting https://www.technicallymotivated.com/social/private-messaging/ directly. This system also uses Browser Notifications to inform you of newly-received messages, if you have enabled the feature in your browser for our site. We hope to improve visibility of this feature in the coming weeks; and look forward to your feedback on how you find using it 🙂