I know two ways to do this. Either way you do need some kind of sysadmin status.

Stefan, Andreas, close your eyes for the next sentence.

1.  Set the computer/server clock to 5th October, make the entry, set the clock back again.

2.  Make the entry as normal, then go into the logbook directory and find today's 130912a.log entry - now create a new 131005a.log file, and paste in the relivant entry into this - not forgetting to change the day and date at the top.  Save the file.  Ensure that 131005a.log has the correct permissions and ownership (compare with all the other files) - you do mean you're using linux, didn't you.  Cannot answer for what to do/happen with Windows.

Now I too have this issue - there is one entry I want to keep at the very top of the list until a certain date has passed.  The way that Stefan/Andreas may offer probably will work, but I've never tried it - which is that the entry goes into today's log file, but has a "entry date" category.  I don't know if that would keep the entry at the top of the list until the 5th October has passed.  As I don't want to have an "Entry date" category, I resort to one of the two methods above.

The fact that the ID numbers become out of sequence doesn't seem to affect the performance of ELOG at all in my perhaps rather more extensive experience than the developers would have wanted me to try.

> is there any way to get a larger text box to type in when making a new post?
> the default box is rather small and you have to scroll up and down when
> making a new post or editing an existing one.

Message width = <number of characters>
Message height = <number of lines>
 
> can the normal text look like the html does without submitting it as html?

No. 

> > is there any way to get a larger text box to type in when making a new post?
> > the default box is rather small and you have to scroll up and down when
> > making a new post or editing an existing one.
> 
> Message width = <number of characters>
> Message height = <number of lines>
>  
> > can the normal text look like the html does without submitting it as html?
> 
> No. 

thanks stefan. it looks like it was right in front of my face the whole time (on
the elogd.cfg syntax page). but, somehow i missed it.

Having the URL link to a different logbook is right now not possible. But 
what about setting up a single logbook with a write password. Everybody can 
access it for reading, but only these people who know the write password 
can enter messages.

I have fixed this issue in the current develop branch of elog.

Stefan

-- 
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> of course elog should remember the choice, so it will be possible to expand
> N threads over the M total ones..

How should elog remember that? If you put this into the URL like

http://<elog-host>/<logbook>/?exp=12&exp=14&exp=18

to expand the entries 12, 14 and 18, it might work fine. But imagine that some uses
have very long list with thousands of entries. This would make the URL very long,
everything very slow and could even crash some browsers.

What I usually do is to not expand the list. If I click on an individual entry, I
see then the expanded thread for that entry above that entry. But you probably
realized this possibility already.

> > of course elog should remember the choice, so it will be possible to expand
> > N threads over the M total ones..
> 
> How should elog remember that? If you put this into the URL like
> 
> http://<elog-host>/<logbook>/?exp=12&exp=14&exp=18
> 
> to expand the entries 12, 14 and 18, it might work fine. But imagine that some uses
> have very long list with thousands of entries. This would make the URL very long,
> everything very slow and could even crash some browsers.
> 
> What I usually do is to not expand the list. If I click on an individual entry, I
> see then the expanded thread for that entry above that entry. But you probably
> realized this possibility already.

:-) yes I do 

A way may be using cookies, otherwise one can implement a kind o session mechanism
(using cookies or QS to pass sessid and storing user data on the server for a limited
time...)
the session method may be useful, but more difficult to implemnet, of course

> A way may be using cookies, otherwise one can implement a kind o session mechanism
> (using cookies or QS to pass sessid and storing user data on the server for a limited
> time...)
> the session method may be useful, but more difficult to implemnet, of course

The concept of a session ID is not present in elog, so implementing it would be harder
than writing elog from scratch. Keeping the thousand 'expansion' flags in cookies is bad
as well, because your browser will send them all each time you request a page, which can
then slow down things considerably over slow lines.