OK, so I spent a few hours this afternoon cleaning up PlanetMySQL‘s stylesheets and layout, and fixing some bugs in the code. You’ll notice a more streamlined PlanetMySQL now, with the following bug fixes and changes:

• The truncation of entries now works correctly without stripping HTML tags, so that the content does not get all bolded or italicized like it was doing. Thanks to Monte Ohrt’s Smarty plugin “truncate_tagsafe”
• Fixed a bug in the “Read More” links for truncated entries so that short entries don’t show the Read More link anymore
• The Most Active Authors list is now just the top 30 most active authors and does not include MySQL AB and aggregate feeds. It was getting a little out of control with well over 200 authors…
• The Most Active Authors links now show a number next to each author. The number represents the number of blog entries in the last 3 months (which is how the authors are ranked)
• Added a new paging utility to both the top and bottom of the entry list, which now shows where you are in the list of entries
• Fixed a bug in the stylesheet which was stretching the main content area if a blog title was overly long
• The rest of the changes are stylistic changes to make the appearance a little more readable and easy on the eyes, especially with the right sidebar

The last remaining item is making sure that character encoding for UTF-8 works correctly, but I have put that item off for a tad while I experiment with some things on my local setup.

Enjoy the new styling and please email me at jay at mysql dot com if you have any suggestions on making our beloved PlanetMySQL better! Thanks.