Journal corrections go here

For those of you who are current users of our journals tool, please post descriptions of the corrections/fixes that need to be made to journals, including screen shots and/or links to specific areas that are not working as they did in the past.

Note: If you are not a journal user currently, please refer to this forum for tips and help to get started: http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/f/journals/all/

We all love a good conversation, but this thread is intended to be a very focused discussion on changes and corrections to the journal structure. Thanks in advance for your help in keeping us on track.

Thanks, Terry! I've been dealing with the problems and trying to skip new bug reports because I realize there are more important issues to deal with. I have quite a few issues and I'll try to prioritize them tomorrow.

Ok, to start things off here's something I found. I also DMailed this as a bug report.

See my test journal entry here (only viewable by some people):
http://davesgarden.com/tools/journal/viewentry.php?rid=384230

See my test journal entry here (external view):
http://davesgarden.com/community/journals/viewentry/384230/

Many characters included in Journal entries or initial comments still cause the text to completely disappear when the entry or item is edited. Often, I copy/paste information from PlantFiles into the initial comments like:

Hardiness: USDA Zone 4a: to -34.4 °C (-30 °F)

The “degree” character causes the text to disappear when I edit the item. Many other characters cause this as well- basically anything that isn’t in the basic ASCII 127 character set.

It’s been many years since I did any programming in PHP/MySql/HTML and these problems don’t seem to relate to any problems I remember having back then. I do remember that PHP, MySql and HTML all have functions for dealing with “special characters”, but these functions are for a small number of characters like single & double quotes, back slash, etc. One thing I noticed in common in the documentation for all of these functions was a reference to character sets/encoding. Could this be the problem? The following, for example, is a quote from the PHP manual for the htmlspecialchars function:

“If the input string passed to this function and the final document share the same character set, this function is sufficient to prepare input for inclusion in most contexts of an HTML document. If, however, the input can represent characters that are not coded in the final document character set and you wish to retain those characters (as numeric or named entities), both this function and htmlentities() (which only encodes substrings that have named entity equivalents) may be insufficient. You may have to use mb_encode_numericentity()instead.”
Above quote is from this page:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlspecialchars.php

I wondered how the degree character (for example) could be used in PlantFiles, and entered into a journal entry, but cause problems upon editing. I also remember users saying that text was disappearing when they tried to edit a post in a forum, but that issue was, maybe, resolved. I looked at the meta tags for pages and this is what I found:

PlantFiles:
meta charset="utf-8"

Journal and Forums:
meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"

“The first part of ISO-8859-1 (entity numbers from 0-127) is the original ASCII character-set. It contains numbers, upper and lowercase English letters, and some special characters.
...
The codes from 128 to 159 are not in use in ISO-8859-1, but many browsers will display the characters from the ANSI (Windows-1252) character set instead of nothing.” My note: the ANSI character set contains the degree and other characters I’ve seen problems with.
Above quote is from this page:
http://www.w3schools.com/charsets/ref_html_8859.asp

“UTF-8 - A character in UTF8 can be from 1 to 4 bytes long. UTF-8 can represent any character in the Unicode standard. UTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII. UTF-8 is the preferred encoding for e-mail and web pages”
Above quote is from this page:
http://www.w3schools.com/charsets/ref_html_utf8.asp

Also – from the ANSI documentation page:
“Important Note
ANSI and ISO-8859-1 are very similar. They only differ in 32 characters.
In ANSI, the characters from 128 to 159 are used for some useful characters such as the Euro symbol.
In ISO-8859-1 these characters are mapped to control characters which are useless in HTML.
Many web developers declare ISO-8859-1 and use these 32 values as if they were using Windows-1252.
Because of this common misunderstanding, browsers will change to Windows-1252 when ISO-8859-1 is declared. This is done for any DOCTYPE: HTML4, HTML5, and XHTML.”
Above quote is from this page:
http://www.w3schools.com/charsets/ref_html_ansi.asp

Perfect - thank you Sallie. Any others besides what Sallie has identified?

I'm not 100% sure of how that relates to the editing problems. I'm thinking it might be a PHP or MySql problem. I didn't notice until long after I posted that... if I go into PlantFiles and view an item, even though the page source has the meta charset="utf-8" tag, if I look at "Encoding" both Chrome and Internet Explorer show "Windows-1252".

As a comparison, if I look at an item on Amazon, both the page source and encoding show utf-8.

I spent many hours/days trying to document the journal bugs I've noticed, but I've been waiting to report any more until the ones I've previously reported have been fixed. In the case of the special characters causing problems I sent a bug report via DMail on 9/9/2014 in addition to my above posts. I just checked today and this problem still exists.

I created a journal category for all of the problems I've found here:
http://davesgarden.com/tools/journal/viewbycat.php?cat=107232

The external link (in case anyone other than admins & programmers want to look at it) is here:
http://davesgarden.com/community/journals/vbc/SallieKr/107232/

As I am working in my journal, I am coming across quite a few missing pics and/or empty entries. Could these entries be restored? I assume it is something that happened when the journal coding was being "enhanced" to newer and better.

I have also noticed the editing problem in the past. I had to back out or lose what was already in the entry.

bump

Sallie, the PF changes have taken priority over journal fixes, but we will focus on this as soon as we can.

echoes, can you give me some examples? As far as I know, we haven't done anything to journals that should have caused you to have missing photos or text.

I came across one today. I know I have pics for this lily, and pretty sure that these entries were pics. They would have had something in them.

http://davesgarden.com/tools/journal/viewentry.php?rid=80741

another http://davesgarden.com/tools/journal/viewentry.php?rid=68174

That's odd. i know the techs are up to their eyeballs working on the home page and forum page formatting, but once we get through these overhauls I will ask them to make journals a priority.

Now my journal is all messed up. I guess this must be another improvement.

After a search, I can't get into the entry. The action column is not there.

http://davesgarden.com/tools/journal/viewentry.php?rid=88278 more pics missing here.

That's odd... I have no problem navigating through my Journal:

http://davesgarden.com/community/journals/sj/SallieKr/6263/

Your journal entries are still separated by lines, Sallie. Mine looks a lot different now.

That's really odd... maybe something caused your journal to get corrupted. Hopefully they can restore it from a backup!

Well, I see that my journal has a new look, probably in keeping with the changes to PlantFiles, etc. Actually looks pretty good. I haven't had time to check if any of the problems, well documented by myself and others over the last couple of years, have been addressed though. Well, I did check one just now. When I view an item in "External View" (ie: as someone else viewing my journal) if there's more than one photo for an individual entry, only the first photo can be viewed as an enlarged image. For example:

Shows image:
http://davesgarden.com/community/journals/si/289188/

Can't enlarge to show full image:
http://davesgarden.com/community/journals/viewentry/344728/showimage.php?eid=289188&extraimg=0

Another omission in "External View", which I don't think I've mentioned before, is the lack of the PlantFiles link for the plant being viewed in my journal. From what I've seen so far, all of the DG changes so far have been purely cosmetic, perhaps hoping to attract new users. I try to promote this site by sending links to my journal through email or on Facebook... what my friends see is my photo & notes about a specific plant, but no link to the detailed information. So, they go to Google and find the info (elsewhere, most likely.) And, of course, they'll be further frustrated by not being able to see the enlarged images if there are more than one attached to an entry. Sorry, but this is NOT good advertising for the site. Fix the real problems first, then worry about cosmetics.

A space between fields would be very helpful. If this design is supposed to be more attractive, I would prefer functional. This is not easy for the eye to organise. I can't post a pic here for some reason or I would show you how entries are running together.

This message was edited Oct 23, 2015 2:18 PM

Posting your rant here won't likely aid you in your prize quest. As you can see, admin does not frequent this thread very often and we have our own concerns in this thread, about our journals.

Another thing I've noticed is that when I try to add images to a journal update, if one of the images is too large the entire update fails. I'm pretty sure I've reported this before, and asked what the maximum image size is. I can't find any documentation for image size limitations. For example: I tried adding the 3 images below (6.01MB, 6.57MB and 6.66MB). Even though I got no error message, the entry wasn't added. I had to only use the first 2 images for the update to succeed. All 3 uploaded OK here?!? When I created a separate journal entry for the 3rd photo, however, it uploaded OK.

This message was edited Oct 26, 2015 11:00 PM

I just joined today and I have tried to blog three times. Every time only the title is recorded and all the text is lost. One time I added a photo and only the photo was saved. If this does not function, why say that it is a feature?

Welcome to DG. The site is going thru some technical difficulties. If you don't get an answer on this thread I recommend reposting on this thread http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/1414587/.

Good luck!

My journal page has been invaded by stuff on right which doesn't allow me to see totally entry. How do I get rid of that stuff? screen shot posted Thanks Patti

That's odd bbrookrd... I found the same "Features" column to the right of my Journal search results. Unlike your screen cap, it doesn't cover up part of my journal results however.

BUT... today I tried to search my journal and had the exact same problem. The search function is totally useless when the "Actions" column is missing. Also, the image column isn't a link, so there's no way to access any of the items. Oh, wait, I just discovered that if I scroll all the way down to the last of the 39 results, there's a horizontal scroll bar which can be used to scroll the Actions column into view. Not user-friendly or intuitive at all. I don't understand why "Today's Features" are even on that page.

I'd dmail Terry directly.

Another missing entry, should be a photo, I assume. http://davesgarden.com/tools/journal/viewentry.php?rid=69444

I don't suppose it will get fixed, but just in case it's ever a possibility I am mentioning it. ...again...

Oh, goodness, I am deathly afraid of looking at my Blog!!!

My heart couldn't take all that info being messed up, too...

DO NOT edit your blog. If you edit anything, the date will change to 1970 and all order will be lost. You can't fix it.

LOVELY!!! You're right. Everything I added yesterday has the date 12/31/1969. I experimented just now. I added a new item- it had today's date. I tried to edit it, just changing the status, and the date changed to 12/31/1969. I found I can add an entry and photo, though, and the date was OK.

Edit: I just noticed, however, that the entry I added has the date 12/31/1969. Trying to edit it to change it fails.

It's bad enough that the old problems aren't being fixed, but now the journal is becoming unusable.

This message was edited May 7, 2016 11:51 AM

That happened in your journal? or your blog? Whoa, I'm not editing my journal til this is sorted. If ever.

Thanks for warning. I will leave alone for now and just use it the way it is. It has a few few problems that I hope they will fix, but I doubt it will ever be a priority.

I seriously doubt IB will ever figure out how to fix the existing problems. I'd rather they did nothing, if they can't figure out the coding, than do something to make it worse :-(

Well, not only did IB not fix the existing Journal problems, but they made it totally unusable. I've tried submitting a bug report via the Contact Us link, in addition to posts on this and other forums. No response. I just tried sending alisonrose a direct email about the Journal date problem. I'll see if that works. If not, I hate to say, I'm going to have to call it quits. I've tried to promote this site by recommending it to my friends and posting links to the various gardening pages I'm interested in. Not anymore. My subscription expires July 1st and I don't plan on renewing it.

Yippee! Thank you techs. The date problems in my Journal are fixed! I assume the Blog dates are also fixed, but I don't use that feature.