Category

Internet

This category is for anything network / internet related. I use it mostly to describe website updates though.

Sunday, June 27, 2010

The Future of the AA Category

This website has always been about my life, my thoughts and my experiences.  It’s hard to separate different parts of your life and cut out some parts of it.  In my opinion, we shouldn’t have to.  Where I work and what I do for a living is a part of me and I’d like to continue sharing different things here.  But there are people out there who will take something the wrong way, and something bad will happen.  So as much as I hate to censor myself due to fear and intimidation, my job is important to me and therefore I am forced to come up with an alternative solution.

We’ve been getting notices at work a lot lately about staying off twitter and facebook and blogs and stuff.  I notice people find my site from a variety of different web searches.  A lot are interested in my post about rutorrent on the appletv, others want to read my review of the linksys NAS 200.  The standby travel post is bringing a lot of visitors as well.  From there they can read my work posts and potentially get me in to trouble.  One of my YouTube videos was already traced back to me and had to be removed.  However, this blog is mine.  I write it for myself to look back upon later, and I don’t want to never write about stuff that happens to me at work.

Right now, about half my AA posts are now marked “Friends Only”, and the older half are closed for now.  While creating new entries with “Friends Only” access is a possibility, it really hurts the flow of the archive pages, and the company logo is still displayed.  I think I will be editing the template to automatically hide all AA posts, unless you are signed into my website as a user with enough privilege to read “Friends Only” posts.  The good parts of this plan is that I can still write about work without fear of google or idiots finding it, but the bad part is that updates to the site might be harder to follow for my friends.  Announcing AA Posts on twitter might be an option.  As always, being logged into my site makes commenting easier, lets you keep track of custom friends on my friends page, and will soon display work posts as well. 

Obey.

Friday, January 22, 2010

It’s Been a Long Time

But my time is finally here!

Title continues with the “Faith of the Heart” lyric tradition started when I unveiled my Friends 2.0 page.  Today I am finally done with the third major revision to my friends page’s operation.  I announce Friends 3.0!  In my twitter feed I said you might actually care about this update, and here’s why.  My friends page has always acted similar to Livejournal’s friends page, except without the need to be a LJ user, and it can pull data from any website, not just Livejournal users.  To a guest, or someone who never sets it up, you probably won’t notice any difference between 2.0 and 3.0, but if you’re a user on my site, the new features are available to you.

Friends 3.0 is my friends page, but now with your friends on it!  I understand that not everyone I am friends with are friends with each other, and so it makes following my friends a little pointless.  Now you can remove people you don’t want to follow, and add any rss feed you do follow, and get all your RSS feed updates on one site!  It’s tied in with the user names on this site, and already available.  All you have to do is set it up. Sign up, log in, follow instructions.  It’s pretty easy.

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Once upon a Database Query

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions but I do sometimes make resolutions, and it just so happens to be the new year.  I’ve been neglecting this site for a while and while that’s not totally unusual for me, it’s the thing I would like to change.  I often abandon this site for long stretches of time, with little to no warning and I’m not sure exactly why.  I guess I just go through creative highs and lows.  Right now I’m definitely in a low spot, although it helps when I see other people post on their sites. 

To help myself in my resolution, I spent most of the last two days with the Query module in Expression Engine, which is an easy way to run mysql queries directly.  Instead of relying on built-in commands and variables, this allows me to manipulate my website data much more directly and gives me more flexibility.  I’ve used it to build a more complete statistics page that tells me the average amount of time that goes by between posts in a category over different periods of time.  It’s not complete quite yet; I still have to pretty it up with colored graphs and some RSS feeds for topic ideas.  Maybe eventually it will be like my friends page and order itself by most neglected category.  My idea is that if I can see more clearly when I should make a post, and have ideas presented automatically, I just might start to post more often.  It’s definitely a process that will take time and go through many revisions.

You can see my beta statistics site here.  It’ll eventually replace the stats link on the right side, but for now it lives only in the sandbox.

Happy Two-Thousand Ten :D

Wednesday, September 02, 2009

New Users Module

So far I’ve been pretty impressed with Expression Engine, the CMS software behind my current site.  It’s quite capable and has more features than I could probably ever figure out.  The core version is free for personal use, but doesn’t include many features that are found in the full edition.  One of these features is the user manager.  I’ve never been a fan of the idea of requiring my friends (or anyone) to need a login for my site and that will continue, but I think I’ve come up with a system that will work out pretty well.  Let’s face it: spam is a reality.  False comments required me to start using captcha’s to prove they were coming from real people.  But I know typing in a captcha phrase is annoying, and has led to fewer comments.  So I’ve added the ability to register yourself a username.  Having a registered username will mean no more captchas!

I also have had a few entries lately that I felt should be kept more private than usual.  This also goes against what I want my site to be about but reality is something to be dealt with, and I can’t be too careful in today’s world when writing about some things like my job.  Lacking a “Friends Only” ability on my site, I’ve made these posts on Livejournal.  The users module in Expression Engine now allows me to overcome that.  By registering as a user on this site and being approved by me, I can host all my entries on this site which I greatly prefer. 

Anonymous Level:

• Continue filling out all the form boxes as you have been doing
• A simple captcha text entry will be required to prove you are not spam

Member Level:

• Fill out the membership form once and you’re done!
• Doesn’t even require email validation (for now), instant access to advanced features
• Simply type the comment and press “submit”, no more name/site/captcha
• Choose or upload your own avatar to be displayed next to your comment!
• By use of cookies, you stay logged in (depending on your browser), so it won’t be a hassle to log in every time you visit the site

Friend Level:

• All features of the Member Level, plus access to posts marked “Friends Only”
• Create a member profile the same way as above and wait to be approved.
• No extra steps other than waiting/contacting me

To register on my site, use the links under the “Members” section on the right hand menu of this page, or click this link.
Any questions, just ask!

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Friends Page Architect

The friends page I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime. A triumph equaled only by one monumental issue. The inevitability of it is as apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every friends page, where I am forced to constrain other people’s web posts into a more limited format in my friends page. In the new 4.0 site, images wider than 700 pixels had a tendency to break the tables. After waiting 6 months for Swiftwulf to make an update and get rid that Obama picture that was too big, I started editing my friends script to detect images in the RSS feed and resize them.  But the [img] tag is too complex, even after spending hours researching Regex.  I was again frustrated by failure. I have since come to understand that the answer eluded me because it required a mind less bound by the parameters of perfection. Thus, the answer was stumbled upon by another, an intuitive person named Bobomega.  And the problem was solved with CSS by adding the following line to my CSS page:

img {max-width: 680px;}

A whole day wasted!  You can see the beautiful results at: http://www.darkmercury.net/site/friends/ and scroll down to Swiftwulf’s Obama pic.