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Throughout the internet, you'll find a slew of geeks who refer to their projects by "code name." Realistically, this isn't GI Joe, so there's no real reason to need a code name for your projects, right? I'm here to argue that.
Since I'm involved in several web endeavors, there is always a lot of development code on my computers. When I start something like a firsttube.com redesign or something much larger, like an OSNews redesign, it doesn't make sense to have a hundred folders called "osnewsv4" or somesuch littered about. I used to date the folders, but osnewsv4-tuesday doesn't help. And something like osnewsv4-20071017 doesn't help much either.
Now it gets even more complex: what if I build something and then decide to approach it differently? How will I know which folder is the one that contains relevant code? Enter codenames!
When I knew I was going to build a brand spankin' new version of OSNews, I knew it would eventually be called version 4, so it made no sense to start calling the first code off my fingers "v4." As it turns out, there were actually almost 10 versions of "OSNews version 4" before we accepted a codebase. The first ones were much different in both look and feel and code. So, for my own organizational purposes, I use code names. All that matters is which code base eventually gets promoted to the "version 4" title.
So, here a list of the codenames I've used on my projects in the past, going back as far as I can remember:
I used to maintain an open source weblog called Flip, which later become Small Axe. Although Flip 2.0 may have had a codename, I can't remember or find any reference to it. Flip 2.1 was called Lobster. Flip 2.2 was called Shark, although I never released that code, largely because before I finished it, I released Flip 3.0, Turtle. Flip 3.1 was to be called Jackrabbit, but again, I never released it. Flip 4.0 earned the codename Blueberry, but it was merged into the first release of Small Axe. We'll get back to Small Axe in a minute. The nicknames of Flip were entirely random, they meant nothing, except that I wanted the 2.x and 3.x family to be animals, and for 4.x, a complete rewrite, I decided to use fruits. That never materialized.
A large part of why verison of Flip went entirely unreleased is because the app became big and tough to handle. As a result, I stripped out the core of it and released "Flip Lite," which was called "Red Squirrel." There was a running joke in college about a "blue raccoon," so "red squirrel" was a silent tribute. When Flip Lite 2 came about, it was called "Rivet Boy." Here's why I called it "rivet boy".
Small Axe Weblog took over where Flip left off - I really need to get around to updating it, since I've probably worked up to v 0.7 by now! - but the roadmap, along with the codenames, are listed here. They are codenamed after the japanese Iron Chefs and their popular guests.
firsttube.com itself had codenames, some of the time. firsttube.com 3 was "Milky". 3.1 was Crossbow because it was built to be cross-platform. 3.2 was Scoop Face, because it was inspired by Scoop. 3.3 was "Semi-Scoop", much for the same reasons. 3.3.1 was "Flip", because it was the first version to use code from the Flip project. 4.0 was lazily called "Lobster" because it was running Flip 2.1. 5.0 was "Linkfarm", because it was - for the few weeks it lived - a link farm. 6.0 may or may not have actually had a codename when I built it, but it was listed in one directory as, "Wikitube", because it ran phpwiki software. I merged it and my weblog for version 7.0, which, along with 8.0, didn't earn codenames. The recently released firsttube.com 9.0 was called "Chalkboard," because at one point, I thought the header looked like a chalkboard. Obviously, it doesn't anymore.
On to OSNews: Again, these codenames are mine and mine only, they are neither "official," nor even known the rest of the staff, as it was only as I was developing code that I used the codenames. The now defunct OSNews Meta Blog is actually Small Axe, so it was in a folder called "Small Axe." We renamed it "meta blog" literally days before making it live.
The OSNews Staff Blog used to be called ftblogroller, and I actually still have the very first working version on my company's intranet test server. The funny thing is, I chronicled it long ago on firsttube.com. That was the engine of the OSNews Staff Blog. It also powers the OSGalaxy site, although there I refer to it as "Galaxy," I never actually got around to packaging it.
Jobs.OSNews, an experiment that everyone liked but nobody used, was called Meadow, only because it was green.
OSNews v4 had a few codenames on my computer. "NEW" was one of them, as was "TCO," which was an acronym for "three column OSNews." The one that eventually earned the title version 4 was Blueprint, because I threw everything away and literally started from scratch. Even the queries that fetch data were rewritten to be most efficient.
Two projects in the words: "Timber" is the codename of a module that does OSNews native polling. Why Timber? A poll takes a tally, tally like tally ho, like timber ho!. I didn't say they made sense or were funny, I just said I used them.
Another project that has had several lives already is the iPhone optimized OSNews site. I have gone through several versions of this code as well. Recently, I tossed aside "iui-osnews" and "knox" to really work on project "McBragg." Commander McBragg was the general in the Underdog cartoons. I seemed to remember him going on several safaris, so I stole his name for my code. McBragg's javascript framework and CSS is not finished yet, but the underlying PHP appears to be sound, so I expect to finish that within the next few weeks.
As you can see, having codenames can help a develper understand what code he's looking at. It would not help me at all to see a folder called "firsttube.com-20060722" because I wouldn't know what version of firsttube.com or whether the code was even used on the live site. But certainly, if I saw a subfolder in my osnews directory called "mcbragg," I'd know it has relevent code. I think there's something to be said for categorizing your code that way, plus, it's kinda cool to have codenames. Yeah, I said it.
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Tags: Meta
Here it is: firsttube.com, once again, entirely redesigned. Unlike previous redesigns, this one is interface only, there are no backend modifications.
Enjoy.
Comments (1) |
1305 view(s)
I am very excited about how portable Small Axe, the engine that powers firsttube.com, has become. I am going to be upgrading the site in the next few weeks. You won't see a ton of new stuff, but it will be much more powerful and configurable for me.
One place I have made some changes is in the RSS and Atom feeds. Although I advertise my feeds at feeburner, our source feeds are at firsttube.com/feed and firsttube.com/feed/atom. They have received some stylesheet love and are much more readable by the human eye.
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I was recently issued a challenge: backup a blogsome blog and the content of a Slashdot journal and merge them into a single database. I foolishly accepted this challenge, knowing that Blogsome is based on Wordpress. Come to find out that Blogsome doesn't allow you to backup or export their Wordpress content. Also, Slashdot doesn't provide you a way to export or backup your journal. The prize was sweet: a brand new, fairly expensive, unlocked mobile phone.
If you want to make a mirror of your blogsome blog, you can use a single very powerful command to generate a snapshot of it from any Linux machine or Windows with Cygwin installed:
wget -k -m -r http://url
But this will only create a static HTML mirror of your website. It won't allow you manipulate content or put it into another database. That leaves only one way to do it - request the entire site page by page, and parse each page individually. RSS is not reliable here, as most people have it set to only 15 or so items and parsing an enormous page make make PHP or your server run out of memory or alloted script execution time.
It's a multi-step process, to be certain. It was actually painful to go through the process. Requesting over and over, debugging the script line by line. It takes several steps to get things right. But, eventually, I did it. I was able to export a Blogsome blog in its entirety - every entry, all the categories, all the comments with emails and websites ...everything.
Slashdot was the same. It took some tinkering, but eventually, I was able to backup a very lengthy Slashdot journal. Again, in its entirety. I got every post, the date, etc. It was not simple, but it worked well. And I not only got them backed up, I merged them into a single database serving up... Small Axe 0.6 (which was a whole adventure of its own, taking current firsttube.com code and "neutralizing" it). Suffice it to say, when I saw all entries working and served in Small Axe, I had a huge smile. Turns out that the person I was doing this for decided against Small Axe (only because it doesn't yet offer all the bells and whistles Wordpress does, even if it is a beast). But it was irrelevant - the hard part was getting the data properly, and that's done. Migrating to *any* blog database is possible if you have the time, inclination, and skill to write a SQL export/import script.
Here's how it works:
* Cycle through each page of the blogsome blog. On each page, we get the entries, the URL, the postid, and other relevant info. We set a flag on each item to 0.
* As we retreive the items, we correct the path to images, spacing, smilies, etc.
* Then we cycle through each page individually. We have all the URLs already, so we go through each one and parse comments. It's important to know that comment owner comments are marked up differently. As we get the comments, we upodate the flag and let the script run on its own. Our 900+ items took about an hour by meta-refreshing the fully rendered page every 3 seconds.
* As we go through the comments, we strip tags we don't want, we fix emoticons, we fix internal links, spacing, etc. We must expose emails temporarily if we want them to transfer over.
* Finally, we import them all into a central database with an agreed schema.
If you have a Blogsome blog and/or a Slashdot journal you need backed up, I can help you do it. It's not a simple process, but it is very accurate and preserves whatever data is exposed via HTML. So for the right barter, I would be very motivated to help. If I can simplify the process, I may create an open script to do this. But for now, I've got the code.
On a related note, I'll probably release an updated version of Small Axe sometime in the not too distant future, because the amount of changing I've done and all the features I've just implemented are killer. Small Axe is FAR from Wordpress caliber tested, but it's SUPER simple and can do all the basics of a normal blog, including templating, smart per-domain caching, blocking by ip, username, email, or keyword, gravatar support, tons of configuration options, RSS and Atom support, threaded commenting, post locking, post expiring, browser identification, slug-based permalinking, and much more.
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1573 view(s)
I integration the "Link Blog" into the RSS feed a few weeks ago, and now I've integrated it into the front page. Hope you enjoy.
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856 view(s)
I've added a little detection script to the comments that records your user agent and tries to put nice little icons next to your name. The icons should depict your browser and operating system. Hovering over the browser icon will show the entire user agent. This detection script is at a very early stage, so I'm still reviewing user agents to best make it work, and only a few comments on the site even have the info properly stored thus far. If you want to test it, please use this thread.
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1618 view(s)
I left for vacation on June 28, and before doing so, I took a quick glance over firsttube.com and jotted a quick blog post about it. firsttube.com was fully functional and officially dormant for 10 days as of June 28.
Imagine my surprise when on Monday, my wife said, "Hey, your site isn't working!" The index page worked, but none of the other pages.
In short, my webhost, Hostgator decided to implement PHPsuexec. Here's the gist of this awesome program: typically, your web server runs as the "nobody" user on a server, but you login as yourself, say your username is "jdough." You need to use certain tricks, like using .htaccess files and chmodding to get around certain limitations. PHPSuexec makes php run *as you,* removing the need for world writable directories and creating a need for custom php.ini files to replace certain php directives in your .htacess files.
Since my site doesn't use file extensions on most files, I used a directive called DefaultType to make everything PHP. This stopped functioning when Hostgator made the changes on Monday. Instead, every one of the pages that relied upon that value for parsing stopped working and started displaying HTTP error 500.
When I returned into town on Sunday, I opened a high priorityt ticket with Hostgator. An hour later, I called the support line and was told an admin would reply presently. An hour later, I replied to my confirmation email to their email support line. Another hour later, I called again. After 35 minutes on the phone, they finally helped me get the pages running. But images across the site were broken. They were generating parsing errors! They were being interpretted by PHP. Yikes! Another 25 minutes on the phone today resulted in new .htaccess files everywhere. I should tell you that today's phone calls were with two "gators" who were both very friendly and helped me very enthusiastically.
Hostgator did not email me about these changes, even though they have my email address. They did not call me, even though they have my phone number. They did not post anything in my control panel, even though they can. Instead, they posted it in their own support forums and expected me to check it. A major change to the very core of the server behavior and they simply didn't tell me. And as a result, my sites were down for a week plus. So if you tried visiting firsttube.com in that time, I'm sorry for the interruption: the view page, the print page, the comments page, and nearly every other meaningful page failed to parse.
If I were a business and monetized my site in any way, I would immediately cancel. But to be fair, Hostgator has unparalleled uptime, unmatched availability, awesome tools (cpanel based), a competitive rate, and a friendly support staff. So I decided to give them one more chance. They have burned all the trust they gained with me, and I will not be recommending them to anyone right now, but I am not taking my business elsewhere just yet.
PHPsuexec is a great tool that provides a nice security boost, but do some serious testing before you implement it. It can dramatically alter the way your websites work.
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We are getting ready to go to Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania in the next few hours. We're really psyched to see our families.
When I get back, I'm going to unveil a new mobile interface to firsttube.com built especially for the iPhone based on some work I did for Eugenia for a new project she's working on. It uses script.aculo.us and Prototype and is ajax based. It's pretty smooth.
Check ya'll soon.
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I've written and currently maintain several websites, each of which has a different following and a different size readership. But lately, I've been thinking about a new project I have in mind. Of the big "tech" websites that I visit each day, chiefly amongst them Reddit, Digg, OSNews, and Slashdot, I feel each is flawed in its design.
Digg and Reddit are completely community controlled. While this is a great idea in general, it rarely works out the way intended. Like so many user generated content sites, Digg and Reddit are filled with nonsense comments, inside jokes, and are completely overrun by groupthink. So, on any given day, lately at least, you'll find the same tone: pro-Apple, pro-Ron Paul and Mike Gravel, pro-Atheist, pro-Ubuntu, anti-Republican, anti-Religion, anti-Microsoft, and lately, anti-Israel. And as these topics continue to appear, the opposers leave as new members are encouraged and recruited creating a vicious circle. The groupthink becomes worse and it becomes a community massively stroking itself. I'm not even saying I disagree with those stances, but I don't think there is any point whatsoever to a group of like-minded nimrods modding each other up over and over for comments like "Happy cat says 'Teh intarweb is a sereis(sic) of tubes!'"
OSNews and Slashdot, on the other hand, are both editor controlled sites. And while there is some degree of democracy in both via peer moderation, both are heavily admin influenced and frankly, filtered and ultimately biased, although less so than the above. Both OSNews and Slashdot, as a result, are slower in posting news (Slashdot is much worse at timely news) and offer significantly less content rotation, however, they both feature original content as well.
I think the features introduced in the OSNews beta show where I'd ultimately like to go: community building. K5 was a good example, except it was almost all original content and ended up with too many snobby users who voted things down based on English grammar alone, which is tough when you cater to the internet, which is a world beyond just the US. I'd like to see links and original content, and a community that lets people post their own articles, their own blog/diary/journal/whatever, and group the content in a way that makes sense for presentation. The site will have to focus on two very different goals: persistent and ultimate respect for the user and his contribution, as well as a captain who can keep the site from leaning too far left or right. I don't know how this can be accomplished, but it's clear to me that to achieve this goal, I will almost certainly need to start from scratch.
So I'm in the "plotting" stages of a new project, a new website to incorporate the best of both worlds. I don't have a lot of answers yet, but I'm trying to sketch something up: How can a site let admins filter news without affecting it? How can we allow the community as much control as possible without allowing so much abuse and juvenile junk? How can groupthink be combated in EARLY stages? How can content be rapidly replaced without repeating the same stuff over and over?
On the design side: How can a site be pretty and modern without being heavy? Reddit is awesome and fast, but ugly. Digg is gorgeous but ridiculously slow on page loads. I'd like to land in the middle, with emphasis on lightweight and fast and pretty.
I'm open to the concept of partners on this project as well. I'm really looking for something that isn't run with an iron fist and something that doesn't degenerate into the mess you see in YouTube comments.
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For those of you subscribed via RSS, you're going to find a surprise very shortly. I integrated the "firsttube.com link blog" into the feedburner RSS feed for firsttube.com. If you are using a locally hosted copy of my RSS, you will still get only firsttube.com items. So just to review, here are your options:
firsttube.com main RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/firsttube
firsttube.com blog only: http://feeds.feedburner.com/firsttubedotcom
firsttube.com link blog only: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ftlinks
I highly recommend the main feed - I don't add too many links on a daily basis and I try to be very particular about the ones I do add.
I will be updating the local RSS to redirect to the feedburner feeds within the next few weeks.
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>> A Little About Code Names 2008-03-24 17:17:43
Throughout the internet, you'll find a slew of geeks who refer to their projects by "code name." Realistically, this isn't GI Joe, so there's no real reason to need a code name for your projects, right? I'm here to argue that. Since I'm involved in several web endeavors, there is always a lot of development code on my computers. When I start something like a firsttube.com redesign or something much larger, like an OSNews redesign, it doesn't make sense to have a hundred folders called "osnewsv4" or somesuch littered about. I used to date the folders, but osnewsv4-tuesday doesn't help. And something like osnewsv4-20071017 doesn't help much either.
Now it gets even more complex: what if I build something and then decide to approach it differently? How will I know which folder is the one that contains relevant code? Enter codenames!
When I knew I was going to build a brand spankin' new version of OSNews, I knew it would eventually be called version 4, so it made no sense to start calling the first code off my fingers "v4." As it turns out, there were actually almost 10 versions of "OSNews version 4" before we accepted a codebase. The first ones were much different in both look and feel and code. So, for my own organizational purposes, I use code names. All that matters is which code base eventually gets promoted to the "version 4" title.
So, here a list of the codenames I've used on my projects in the past, going back as far as I can remember:
I used to maintain an open source weblog called Flip, which later become Small Axe. Although Flip 2.0 may have had a codename, I can't remember or find any reference to it. Flip 2.1 was called Lobster. Flip 2.2 was called Shark, although I never released that code, largely because before I finished it, I released Flip 3.0, Turtle. Flip 3.1 was to be called Jackrabbit, but again, I never released it. Flip 4.0 earned the codename Blueberry, but it was merged into the first release of Small Axe. We'll get back to Small Axe in a minute. The nicknames of Flip were entirely random, they meant nothing, except that I wanted the 2.x and 3.x family to be animals, and for 4.x, a complete rewrite, I decided to use fruits. That never materialized.
A large part of why verison of Flip went entirely unreleased is because the app became big and tough to handle. As a result, I stripped out the core of it and released "Flip Lite," which was called "Red Squirrel." There was a running joke in college about a "blue raccoon," so "red squirrel" was a silent tribute. When Flip Lite 2 came about, it was called "Rivet Boy." Here's why I called it "rivet boy".
Small Axe Weblog took over where Flip left off - I really need to get around to updating it, since I've probably worked up to v 0.7 by now! - but the roadmap, along with the codenames, are listed here. They are codenamed after the japanese Iron Chefs and their popular guests.
firsttube.com itself had codenames, some of the time. firsttube.com 3 was "Milky". 3.1 was Crossbow because it was built to be cross-platform. 3.2 was Scoop Face, because it was inspired by Scoop. 3.3 was "Semi-Scoop", much for the same reasons. 3.3.1 was "Flip", because it was the first version to use code from the Flip project. 4.0 was lazily called "Lobster" because it was running Flip 2.1. 5.0 was "Linkfarm", because it was - for the few weeks it lived - a link farm. 6.0 may or may not have actually had a codename when I built it, but it was listed in one directory as, "Wikitube", because it ran phpwiki software. I merged it and my weblog for version 7.0, which, along with 8.0, didn't earn codenames. The recently released firsttube.com 9.0 was called "Chalkboard," because at one point, I thought the header looked like a chalkboard. Obviously, it doesn't anymore.
On to OSNews: Again, these codenames are mine and mine only, they are neither "official," nor even known the rest of the staff, as it was only as I was developing code that I used the codenames. The now defunct OSNews Meta Blog is actually Small Axe, so it was in a folder called "Small Axe." We renamed it "meta blog" literally days before making it live.
The OSNews Staff Blog used to be called ftblogroller, and I actually still have the very first working version on my company's intranet test server. The funny thing is, I chronicled it long ago on firsttube.com. That was the engine of the OSNews Staff Blog. It also powers the OSGalaxy site, although there I refer to it as "Galaxy," I never actually got around to packaging it.
Jobs.OSNews, an experiment that everyone liked but nobody used, was called Meadow, only because it was green.
OSNews v4 had a few codenames on my computer. "NEW" was one of them, as was "TCO," which was an acronym for "three column OSNews." The one that eventually earned the title version 4 was Blueprint, because I threw everything away and literally started from scratch. Even the queries that fetch data were rewritten to be most efficient.
Two projects in the words: "Timber" is the codename of a module that does OSNews native polling. Why Timber? A poll takes a tally, tally like tally ho, like timber ho!. I didn't say they made sense or were funny, I just said I used them.
Another project that has had several lives already is the iPhone optimized OSNews site. I have gone through several versions of this code as well. Recently, I tossed aside "iui-osnews" and "knox" to really work on project "McBragg." Commander McBragg was the general in the Underdog cartoons. I seemed to remember him going on several safaris, so I stole his name for my code. McBragg's javascript framework and CSS is not finished yet, but the underlying PHP appears to be sound, so I expect to finish that within the next few weeks. As you can see, having codenames can help a develper understand what code he's looking at. It would not help me at all to see a folder called "firsttube.com-20060722" because I wouldn't know what version of firsttube.com or whether the code was even used on the live site. But certainly, if I saw a subfolder in my osnews directory called "mcbragg," I'd know it has relevent code. I think there's something to be said for categorizing your code that way, plus, it's kinda cool to have codenames. Yeah, I said it.
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2556 view(s)
>> firsttube.com revision 9 2008-03-06 14:36:47
Tags: Meta
Here it is: firsttube.com, once again, entirely redesigned. Unlike previous redesigns, this one is interface only, there are no backend modifications. Enjoy.
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1305 view(s)
>> Changes to firsttube.com 2007-08-24 10:09:11
I am very excited about how portable Small Axe, the engine that powers firsttube.com, has become. I am going to be upgrading the site in the next few weeks. You won't see a ton of new stuff, but it will be much more powerful and configurable for me. One place I have made some changes is in the RSS and Atom feeds. Although I advertise my feeds at feeburner, our source feeds are at firsttube.com/feed and firsttube.com/feed/atom. They have received some stylesheet love and are much more readable by the human eye.
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2068 view(s)
>> Export Blogsome, Export Slashdot Journal 2007-08-22 16:55:07
I was recently issued a challenge: backup a blogsome blog and the content of a Slashdot journal and merge them into a single database. I foolishly accepted this challenge, knowing that Blogsome is based on Wordpress. Come to find out that Blogsome doesn't allow you to backup or export their Wordpress content. Also, Slashdot doesn't provide you a way to export or backup your journal. The prize was sweet: a brand new, fairly expensive, unlocked mobile phone. If you want to make a mirror of your blogsome blog, you can use a single very powerful command to generate a snapshot of it from any Linux machine or Windows with Cygwin installed:
wget -k -m -r http://url
But this will only create a static HTML mirror of your website. It won't allow you manipulate content or put it into another database. That leaves only one way to do it - request the entire site page by page, and parse each page individually. RSS is not reliable here, as most people have it set to only 15 or so items and parsing an enormous page make make PHP or your server run out of memory or alloted script execution time.
It's a multi-step process, to be certain. It was actually painful to go through the process. Requesting over and over, debugging the script line by line. It takes several steps to get things right. But, eventually, I did it. I was able to export a Blogsome blog in its entirety - every entry, all the categories, all the comments with emails and websites ...everything.
Slashdot was the same. It took some tinkering, but eventually, I was able to backup a very lengthy Slashdot journal. Again, in its entirety. I got every post, the date, etc. It was not simple, but it worked well. And I not only got them backed up, I merged them into a single database serving up... Small Axe 0.6 (which was a whole adventure of its own, taking current firsttube.com code and "neutralizing" it). Suffice it to say, when I saw all entries working and served in Small Axe, I had a huge smile. Turns out that the person I was doing this for decided against Small Axe (only because it doesn't yet offer all the bells and whistles Wordpress does, even if it is a beast). But it was irrelevant - the hard part was getting the data properly, and that's done. Migrating to *any* blog database is possible if you have the time, inclination, and skill to write a SQL export/import script.
Here's how it works:
* Cycle through each page of the blogsome blog. On each page, we get the entries, the URL, the postid, and other relevant info. We set a flag on each item to 0.
* As we retreive the items, we correct the path to images, spacing, smilies, etc.
* Then we cycle through each page individually. We have all the URLs already, so we go through each one and parse comments. It's important to know that comment owner comments are marked up differently. As we get the comments, we upodate the flag and let the script run on its own. Our 900+ items took about an hour by meta-refreshing the fully rendered page every 3 seconds.
* As we go through the comments, we strip tags we don't want, we fix emoticons, we fix internal links, spacing, etc. We must expose emails temporarily if we want them to transfer over.
* Finally, we import them all into a central database with an agreed schema.
If you have a Blogsome blog and/or a Slashdot journal you need backed up, I can help you do it. It's not a simple process, but it is very accurate and preserves whatever data is exposed via HTML. So for the right barter, I would be very motivated to help. If I can simplify the process, I may create an open script to do this. But for now, I've got the code.
On a related note, I'll probably release an updated version of Small Axe sometime in the not too distant future, because the amount of changing I've done and all the features I've just implemented are killer. Small Axe is FAR from Wordpress caliber tested, but it's SUPER simple and can do all the basics of a normal blog, including templating, smart per-domain caching, blocking by ip, username, email, or keyword, gravatar support, tons of configuration options, RSS and Atom support, threaded commenting, post locking, post expiring, browser identification, slug-based permalinking, and much more.
Comments (2) |
1573 view(s)
>> Featured Link Integration 2007-08-17 16:40:49
I integration the "Link Blog" into the RSS feed a few weeks ago, and now I've integrated it into the front page. Hope you enjoy.
Comments (0) |
856 view(s)
>> Meta: New Feature 2007-07-14 09:47:38
I've added a little detection script to the comments that records your user agent and tries to put nice little icons next to your name. The icons should depict your browser and operating system. Hovering over the browser icon will show the entire user agent. This detection script is at a very early stage, so I'm still reviewing user agents to best make it work, and only a few comments on the site even have the info properly stored thus far. If you want to test it, please use this thread.
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>> PHPsuexec and My Adventure With Hostgator 2007-07-11 10:47:40
I left for vacation on June 28, and before doing so, I took a quick glance over firsttube.com and jotted a quick blog post about it. firsttube.com was fully functional and officially dormant for 10 days as of June 28. Imagine my surprise when on Monday, my wife said, "Hey, your site isn't working!" The index page worked, but none of the other pages.
In short, my webhost, Hostgator decided to implement PHPsuexec. Here's the gist of this awesome program: typically, your web server runs as the "nobody" user on a server, but you login as yourself, say your username is "jdough." You need to use certain tricks, like using .htaccess files and chmodding to get around certain limitations. PHPSuexec makes php run *as you,* removing the need for world writable directories and creating a need for custom php.ini files to replace certain php directives in your .htacess files.
Since my site doesn't use file extensions on most files, I used a directive called DefaultType to make everything PHP. This stopped functioning when Hostgator made the changes on Monday. Instead, every one of the pages that relied upon that value for parsing stopped working and started displaying HTTP error 500.
When I returned into town on Sunday, I opened a high priorityt ticket with Hostgator. An hour later, I called the support line and was told an admin would reply presently. An hour later, I replied to my confirmation email to their email support line. Another hour later, I called again. After 35 minutes on the phone, they finally helped me get the pages running. But images across the site were broken. They were generating parsing errors! They were being interpretted by PHP. Yikes! Another 25 minutes on the phone today resulted in new .htaccess files everywhere. I should tell you that today's phone calls were with two "gators" who were both very friendly and helped me very enthusiastically.
Hostgator did not email me about these changes, even though they have my email address. They did not call me, even though they have my phone number. They did not post anything in my control panel, even though they can. Instead, they posted it in their own support forums and expected me to check it. A major change to the very core of the server behavior and they simply didn't tell me. And as a result, my sites were down for a week plus. So if you tried visiting firsttube.com in that time, I'm sorry for the interruption: the view page, the print page, the comments page, and nearly every other meaningful page failed to parse.
If I were a business and monetized my site in any way, I would immediately cancel. But to be fair, Hostgator has unparalleled uptime, unmatched availability, awesome tools (cpanel based), a competitive rate, and a friendly support staff. So I decided to give them one more chance. They have burned all the trust they gained with me, and I will not be recommending them to anyone right now, but I am not taking my business elsewhere just yet.
PHPsuexec is a great tool that provides a nice security boost, but do some serious testing before you implement it. It can dramatically alter the way your websites work.
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>> Vacation! 2007-06-28 13:31:52
We are getting ready to go to Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania in the next few hours. We're really psyched to see our families. When I get back, I'm going to unveil a new mobile interface to firsttube.com built especially for the iPhone based on some work I did for Eugenia for a new project she's working on. It uses script.aculo.us and Prototype and is ajax based. It's pretty smooth.
Check ya'll soon.
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>> I'm Planning a New Project 2007-06-15 10:45:57
I've written and currently maintain several websites, each of which has a different following and a different size readership. But lately, I've been thinking about a new project I have in mind. Of the big "tech" websites that I visit each day, chiefly amongst them Reddit, Digg, OSNews, and Slashdot, I feel each is flawed in its design. Digg and Reddit are completely community controlled. While this is a great idea in general, it rarely works out the way intended. Like so many user generated content sites, Digg and Reddit are filled with nonsense comments, inside jokes, and are completely overrun by groupthink. So, on any given day, lately at least, you'll find the same tone: pro-Apple, pro-Ron Paul and Mike Gravel, pro-Atheist, pro-Ubuntu, anti-Republican, anti-Religion, anti-Microsoft, and lately, anti-Israel. And as these topics continue to appear, the opposers leave as new members are encouraged and recruited creating a vicious circle. The groupthink becomes worse and it becomes a community massively stroking itself. I'm not even saying I disagree with those stances, but I don't think there is any point whatsoever to a group of like-minded nimrods modding each other up over and over for comments like "Happy cat says 'Teh intarweb is a sereis(sic) of tubes!'"
OSNews and Slashdot, on the other hand, are both editor controlled sites. And while there is some degree of democracy in both via peer moderation, both are heavily admin influenced and frankly, filtered and ultimately biased, although less so than the above. Both OSNews and Slashdot, as a result, are slower in posting news (Slashdot is much worse at timely news) and offer significantly less content rotation, however, they both feature original content as well.
I think the features introduced in the OSNews beta show where I'd ultimately like to go: community building. K5 was a good example, except it was almost all original content and ended up with too many snobby users who voted things down based on English grammar alone, which is tough when you cater to the internet, which is a world beyond just the US. I'd like to see links and original content, and a community that lets people post their own articles, their own blog/diary/journal/whatever, and group the content in a way that makes sense for presentation. The site will have to focus on two very different goals: persistent and ultimate respect for the user and his contribution, as well as a captain who can keep the site from leaning too far left or right. I don't know how this can be accomplished, but it's clear to me that to achieve this goal, I will almost certainly need to start from scratch.
So I'm in the "plotting" stages of a new project, a new website to incorporate the best of both worlds. I don't have a lot of answers yet, but I'm trying to sketch something up: How can a site let admins filter news without affecting it? How can we allow the community as much control as possible without allowing so much abuse and juvenile junk? How can groupthink be combated in EARLY stages? How can content be rapidly replaced without repeating the same stuff over and over?
On the design side: How can a site be pretty and modern without being heavy? Reddit is awesome and fast, but ugly. Digg is gorgeous but ridiculously slow on page loads. I'd like to land in the middle, with emphasis on lightweight and fast and pretty.
I'm open to the concept of partners on this project as well. I'm really looking for something that isn't run with an iron fist and something that doesn't degenerate into the mess you see in YouTube comments.
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>> firsttube.com RSS integration 2007-06-01 18:28:06
For those of you subscribed via RSS, you're going to find a surprise very shortly. I integrated the "firsttube.com link blog" into the feedburner RSS feed for firsttube.com. If you are using a locally hosted copy of my RSS, you will still get only firsttube.com items. So just to review, here are your options:firsttube.com main RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/firsttube
firsttube.com blog only: http://feeds.feedburner.com/firsttubedotcom
firsttube.com link blog only: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ftlinks
I highly recommend the main feed - I don't add too many links on a daily basis and I try to be very particular about the ones I do add.
I will be updating the local RSS to redirect to the feedburner feeds within the next few weeks.
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