There are still a few minor (I hope) issues with the blog.
RSS Feed
1) Thomas Presslie mentioned that the success of the RSS feed is intermittent – it seems to miss posts or they appear late. I haven’t noticed any problems myself and then realised that my Thunderbird feed-reader is still pointing at Feedburner. If you are having problems with feeds from here I’d appreciate it if you could
a) Let me know you’re having them; and
b) Try switching to http://feeds.feedburner.com/DougsOracleBlog to see if it helps.
Line Breaks in Internet Explorer
I’ve given up on this one, frankly. Where Firefox treats consecutive line breaks as, well, consecutive line breaks, IE treats them as one. I originally thought this was only a problem inside code examples, but I’ve noticed it in various places, including the ‘Housemate of the Month’ section. Although there are various hacks that fix it, the hacks themselves make code examples a complete nightmare to work with, once the blog software has got round to helpfully reformatting them. As there’s no information with incorrect or lost information here, just how the examples look, can I respectfully suggest that this blog is ‘best viewed with Firefox’? I’m going to have a look into what Opera does soon.
Background shading on comments
Again, this varies from browser to browser. Sometimes there’s a white background to the comments, sometimes there isn’t. I’m a bit more hopeful of sorting this one out.
Serendipity
Just a quick word on Serendipity. With the exception of the issues mentioned so far (at least one of which is probably down to me), I’m finding it a joy to work with and I’m pretty pleased I made the decision. Self-hosting makes things a little more tricky, particularly once I went my own sweet way with the template, because it means I can’t just jump all over new themes a la Andy C (but note the very smart lack of any code examples in his blog). Support has been great, too. Near instant response from the developers in the forums.
WordPress might well be better, I don’t know, but the Serendipity experience is far, far better than Blogger.com, even without including the blog-jacking nonsense.