By days Paging Type bug

[gristgal]

John, please take a look at my blog http://gristandgristle.blogharbor.com/blog. I have it set to display 30 days of posts per page. It's displaying the whole 13 months' worth. I went to Navigation settings, and it shows set to 30 days, just as it should.

I tried resetting it to 20 days, and reloaded. Nope, still showing Idunnohowmany days, but there are more than 200 posts. I reset back to 30, and reloaded again, not that it did any good.

What's going on?? Is this something you were aware of? I'm also curious whether anyone else is having the same, or a similar, problem.

[john]

This does look like a problem on our side. Though I am unable to replicate the exact problem I see on your blog on any of my blogs, I do see some issues related to the handling of the "By Days" paging type on other blogs.

I'll write this up for our developers to examine. In the meantime, I checked your blog and it does seem to handle the "By Articles" paging type properly, so I'd switch to that in the meantime.

Thanks for pointing this out!

[gristgal]

What's frustrating me most is that this was working just fine. I've had it that way for a month - probably more - and I only noticed the problem yesterday, when it took an inordinate amount of time to load the index page. I load it every time I put up a post - partly to reassure myself that it looks okay, and partly to check what kind of stuff is popping up in AdSense (I've had some problems). That leads me to believe something has gone haywire very recently.

I feel my reasons for prefering #days are good ones. I've been managing to post at least one, and sometimes more, articles per day for a while now. When I started my blog, I was doing a post a day - no more; no less. Then I got bogged down, and until sometime this summer, I averaged about 5 posts per week.

With this variability, I feel #days provides a better viewing experience and more manageable access to content for new readers than #posts. One of my concerns is that pages not be too looonng, :yawn: (which also take longer to load). Shorter is better, which is also why the vast majority of my posts are bubbled up from categories and sub-categories (like a file cabinet), with brief to very brief excerpts (and also why I imposed an arbitrary maximum length on individual posts, but that's a different subject).

I've (very reluctantly) changed it back to #posts. Please give me a heads-up when it's fixed? My dissatisfaction with this method has not decreased since I made the change. What I'd actually like most of all is an option to display by month, just like when one clicks on an archived month, but I do try to be reasonable in what I ask.

[john]

What's frustrating me most is that this was working just fine... That leads me to believe something has gone haywire very recently.

Yes, it's a new bug resulting from some code changes made a few days ago. As I said, we'll have our developers look into this and find where the problem was introduced.

I feel my reasons for prefering #days are good ones.

We think there are good reasons to prefer either method, which is why we provide for both options.

Please give me a heads-up when it's fixed?

I'll do my best to post here when this is taken care of.

[gristgal]

John wrote:
>We think there are good reasons to prefer either method, which is why we provide for both options.

Oh, I agree. The only option I find unacceptable is not dividing the posts up in some way, so that the reader can have quick loading and easier access to older material. I think this applies to any blog where there is objective content.

It was only after I realized that my posting more frequently had developed some consistency that I felt the need to go over to #days. But from my present perspective, #days is a better fit for me now - and for the foreseeable future.

Any forecast as to the time frame for the fix? Days, weeks, a month?

[john]

Our developers will take a look at this today and we'll try to get this fixed as soon as possible. I don't have a timeline for you at this time.

[gristgal]

Any word yet, or guesstimates on repair timeline?

[john]

Unfortunately it's always significantly easier to break something than to fix it... Progress on this bug is a little slow, as we're finding it difficult to replicate it on other blogs. We see it on yours, and one other account, and can't seem to make it occur on any other blogs, so this one is still under investigation.

[john]

Our developers have found a minor bug when the paging type is set to 'by days'. Any posts which were set as sticky posts are not being counted properly and are appearing in the category view regardless of the count of the number of days. Our developers are going to work on fixing this issue so that sticky posts are counted properly in the by days paging type; this issue does not affect the 'by articles' paging type.

For some reason, you have set the majority of your posts to be "sticky posts", so when your blog is set to 'by days' as a paging type it is displaying almost all of the articles you have ever posted... Which is why we were not able to replicate this: most accounts use the sticky post feature to pin one or two articles to the top of a category, we did not have any examples of blogs which posted so many of their articles as sticky posts.

It's really only necessary to set something as a sticky post if you want it to appear at the top of the category regardless of its original date. Unfortunately now you're stuck, no pun intended, since you set all of your posts as sticky posts you have to set all of your future posts as sticky too or else your new posts won't appear at the top of your category pages. The only way for you to actually regain the utility of sticky posts would be to go back to each of your articles and uncheck the Make this article a sticky post checkbox on each and every one of them, and I don't think that it would be really worth the effort.

[gristgal]

I really need a head-slap smiley right here. I didn't know the proper use of the sticky feature, and it wasn't explained anywhere. :sigh:

I'm glad you guys figured it out. After you said that the problem was only on two blogs, I wondered when - and if - you'd ever find out why. Kudos to whoever spotted that.

Now that you've seen this, have you considered putting that information in a note somewhere in the information for total newbies? Maybe in some page or section titled, "If you've never had a blog before"? I honestly can't imagine going back and removing that from 200+ posts, sorry.
_________________
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance."
Confucius

[john]

We did our best to educate our users about this feature when it was released. Unfortunately, that was prior to the migration of your account to our service, you were a subscriber of another blog service at that time and your provider may not have provided you with any information regarding this feature...

[john]

This issue with sticky posts should have been resolved, please let us know if you find any additional issues.

[gristgal]

I can change my paging back from posts to days?

[john]

Yes, that is what I am saying, that the bug has been fixed and you should be able put your paging type back to days and it should function as you would expect. Please let us know if you find that is not the case.

[gristgal]

I switched it back to by days when I read your reply (yesterday? Wednesday? one of those), but a few minutes ago, I saw it had gone back to listing all my posts from the beginning until now. So I had to switch back to by posts. :sigh: I wish we had a "slaps head" smiley.

I hope you can figure out why it did that.