Russell Beattie

Ooops. I ran into a pretty big bug already, but it's fixed. It was a pretty obvious error. If you've ever looked at the xml file that weblogs.com pushes out, it has the date at the top and each line has a "when" tag that denotes the seconds since it was last updated FROM the published date at the top. It took me a while to get the grasp of this. At first I was only paying attention to the seconds, thinking that if you were watching weblogs.com all the time, you wouldn't need the date. That was pretty dumb on hindsight since a post can appear in weblogs.com farther down than your last record. I couldn't figure out why it was sometimes skipping updates at first. Duh.

The fix involved touching the db to add a Long for the date then updating all the data that's in the db already, and then figuring out that my server in El Paso is a few hours in front of weblogs.com, so I can't just say "now" because my now is ahead of California's and behind GMT. Double duh. I finally just decided to use the header on weblogs.com for all the dates. If you add or import a blog to watch, it pings weblogs.com to see what the current datetime should be and marks that record with that info. That way when weblogs.com says later that the page has been updated, I know that I've used the proper baseline to notify the user.

Whew! Now let's see if the app continues to function as more people use it. ;-) If you're using BlogAgent already, sorry for the ups/downs and mis-posts. It should work better now.

-Russ