Four Island

Well, TimTam was badgering me for it (read: agreed when I suggested it in the comment thread of Project FourChat), so I finally implemented it. Peoples and more peoples, you can now edit and delete comments. Of course, only your own. Otherwise people would be evil.

There was just one other thing I was wondering. Should I make it that you can only modify your latest comment on a thread or should you be able to modify any of your comments on each thread? I was thinking that because that way, people couldn't modify the past and ruin the fabric of the space-time continuum and I'm insane so I'll just let you decide, kay?

One other thing was, should I add phpBB's idea of showing the last edited time under each edited comment so people know that it was edited? Just wondering.

OMG That was a short post is sad. It seems like I'm just trying to fill up space! That's not good. Anyway, comment! :)

At the beginning of the month, I posted about my falsities blog, True Falsities. Back then, the implantation for True Falsities was a subfourm of Storybook Time on The Fourm. However, now I've moved my falsities blog and put it up for the interwebz. It's available at false.fourisland.com.

Not only can I write posties, so can you! You're perfectly allowed to register and submit an article for review. Timbo94 has already done so and his post "Heat Kills, Aircon Saves Life" has made the front page. Of course, any new post makes the front page, but I just like saying "made the front page."

You may be wondering why I'm using Wordpress even though I've sworn Wordpress is evil. Well, I'm still using my own handtyped code for my personal blog, so it's okay. Also, you may have noticed that I totally stole Humorix's theme. I know they won't mindy, right? :)

Ok, I admit it. I'm a little too obsessed with Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Don't think so? Then explain why I made a wiki about it.

I made The Sabrina FanWiki as a collaborative resource for Sabrina and her fans. It will contain episode guides, quotes, pictures, characters and more. If you are a Sabrina fan, you're allowed to add content. If you're not a Sabrina fan, you can but I really don't see why you'd be contributing anyway.

I plan to write episode guides for episodes on a weekend daily basis. However, there are a few episodes that I have a problem with (for instance, low voices in at least two of them) and that I'd prefer someone else wrote the guides for. For more information, see the Community Portal.

Oh yes, and just a shout-out to someone in mah Math class who will probably never read this: "Melissa Joan Hart is not a terrible actress!"

Anyway, I hope you enjoy The Sabrina FanWiki and feel free to contribute!

In response to yesterday's post, I think I've already found a solution. You don't want to anonymously comment? You don't have to. Now, if you have a Fourm account, it serves as a Four Island account too.

The Login link in the NavBar goes to the login module in the Fourm. It wasn't too hard integrating except for all of this cookie strangeness. It was pretty difficult with the cookies as phpBB3 seems to store a lot of session data in the database rather than the session files.

Note: Because I had to change the cookie path to get cookies working with the root of the website, you may have to clear your cache and/or delete all of your cookies to be able to log in. It did that to me and it was annoying. Just letting you know.

For those not in the know, in Firefox, to delete your cookies, you open the Tools menu, click "Clear Private Data", check off "Cookies" and click "Clear Private Data Now". Thank you. :)

EDIT: For those other browsers, here's how to delete your cookies:

Internet Explorer

1. Open Internet Explorer and click on the "Tools" menu.
2. In the "Tools" menu, click on "Internet Options".
3. Under the General Tab select the "Delete Cookies" button.
4. Delete cookies by clicking "OK".

Safari

1. Choose Safari > Preferences.
2. Click Security.
3. Click Show Cookies.
4. Click Remove All.

Opera

1. Select Menu > Tools
2. Click Private data
3. Click Delete cookies

Ok. As I mentioned in my yearly goals, few people comment on my site. I've asked around and a big reason is that they don't like commenting anonymously (Timbo94). That is why blogs such as Color Pencils and Dream Weaver get comments and I don't (along with the fact that their content is good), because they use IntenseDebate so their accounts are centralized.

Hoping to please my readers, I decided to try to implement IntenseDebate on my development computer. At first, it went pretty well. I replaced the comments on all commentable pages with the IntenseDebate JavaScript. It looked great and seemed to work.

However, it all went downhill from there. First of all, the main index page shows the number of comments next to each post. I was able to emulate that nicely by hacking some of the special JavaScript included in the Wordpress IntenseDebate plugin. However, while the post at the top of the page said "No Comment" happily, the rest all said "undefined" and the link didn't even point to the right place. Strange.

More importantly, there's the topic of my sidebar widgets. Since I would no longer be in control of the data, I couldn't access it freely. IntenseDebate does provide "Top Commentors" and "Recent Comments" widgets, but there's a catch. First of all, it's more JavaScript. You have to use the HTML it provides, no changey. There is limited CSS customization support, but it didn't help. The widgets looked terrible in my sidebar. Second, Recent Comments showed an excerpt from each comment. That's way too long. Mine only shows the post title, the author and a link. Third, the "Popular Posts" widget would still have to die because part of the fourmula for popularity is the number of comments on the post, which is unaccessible to me due to IntenseDebate.

Lastly, switching to IntenseDebate would involve me losing all comments already posted on Four Island as there is no easy way to import the comments. And we can't have that, right? :)

Because of all of this, I've decided not to go with IntenseDebate. It'd be too much trouble and it'd probably hurt Four Island rather than help it. So, I think I'll try to spruce up my own commenting system. So, I have some questions I'd like to ask you people (please comment, a few anonymous comments won't hurt and you're contributions will help remove the anonymous problem):

1. For the anonymous problem: I can't use the IntenseDebate accounts, but how about OpenID? Is that a plausible direction to go in?
2. Or would it be better for me to simply make it a lot easier to register? No, that probably wouldn't help. Sorry, disregard that suggestion.
3. Ok, perhaps I'm completely lost on the whole "anonymous" problem. Please leave suggestions, thankses!
4. Should I add comment threading like IntenseDebate does? I'm leaning towards the "no" end of the spectrum, but it's up to my readers. Sortof.
5. Any other IntenseDebate features you'd like to see in Four Island?

Anyway, thanks in advance for helping. I'm just trying to make Four Island a better, more social place. :)

First, HAPPY NEW YEAR YAYS. Ok, I've gotten that out of my system.

Because I seem to get a lot of ideas from other blogs I'm going to write a list of goals for this year. I'd also write which of my 2008 goals worked out, but I didn't actually write a list of goals last year.

• Increase RSS subscribers to at least 10. And have it stay that way for a while. It's annoying to see 8 or 9 subscribers one day and only 2 the next.
• Write some good articles/tutorials that people will find interesting and want to comment on. Currently, the most popular post is, and has been for a long time, The Related Posts Game, which is kind of strange.
• Have, on average, at least one comment on every post. Because I suspect people won't like every post I write, the "average" part comes in. Please, I like comments. And no, comments by me will not count.
• Refrain from posting poll results late.
• Refrain from creating extensively random polls.
• Refrain from doing anything enumerated in yesterday's predictions.

Ok, I hope these goals aren't too extravagant. :) Anyway, I hope that I can accomplish them, and furthermore, that the year 2009 is a good year.

Just as a sidenote, I'd like a draw a little attention to the goal above about comments. The last part (about my comments not counting) is more important than you would think. I tested how last year would've done in this aspect by running this query:

SELECT COUNT( * )
FROM `comments` AS c, updates AS u
WHERE u.pubDate LIKE "2008-%"
AND c.page_id = CONCAT( "updates-", u.id )

It returned 104 as the number of comments posted on 2008's posts. However, when I added AND c.username <> "Hatkirby" to the end (so it wouldn't count my comments), it returned 49. Ouch.

Um.... not really. Just trying out another Nonsense script! Well, I guess it's the teensiest bit relevant because Four Island went down.

Don't blame Linux you peoples! It was actually my fault. Yesterday, frustrated with Debian's.... um.... not-up-to-datedness-with-packages thing, I stupidly added the Ubuntu APT repository to /etc/apt/sources.list.... and tried to sudo apt-get upgrade. Oops.

The upgrade broke halfway done because it tried to install a package that used "Breaks", which Debian's old dpkg couldn't handle. So I was left with a mutant system, half Debian, half Ubuntu, completely unstable. I was afraid that if I turned it off, it'd never turn on again.

Exasperated, I backed up all of the data, downloaded Ubuntu 8.10 Server Edition, installed it and here we are! Four Island is back and better than ever! Ubuntu always used to work for me before I got a dedicated server and it seems to be working fine now.

And yes, I am a lazy person to the extreme. I'm sorry to everyone that I forgot to write the final article of Kirby Week 2008 :(. So instead, I'm just going to redirect you to a previous article.

I wrote an article entitled How To Implement Pingback a while back (in fact, on June 17th 2008, though since I changed time zones it says June 16th) that explains how to implement Pingback on your blog. You should do that because Pingback is a very useful thingy and I'm crazy about it. :)

And to end off, I'm going to include a few more results from that Nonsense script I mentioned:

Tamasys destroyed Color Pencils
W. B. Sarel thinks Wikipinia is thick sticky
The Fourm is taken over by Chofox Hudper
Tamasys wants to have plagurized Smiley
Four Island is parodied by Color Pencils

The last one is disturbing as Gryphic (or Drifty, as she now calls herself) actually has done this. :) However, she's purged all articles on her site before Four Island finished its extended downtime, so I can't link to it. Sorry! :)

No, this isn't about The Fourm. It's about the new website I'm hosting! Everyone, say hello to Pyro's new blog, Randomness! YAAAY!

Everyone, make sure you go check out her new blog because it's like, yay. :)

NOTE: She's using Wordpress 2.7, which, as I guessed, must be pretty good because it's been downloaded quite a few times. :)

Ok. So, I found about Automattic's new commenting system thing, IntenseDebate from CSS-Tricks. The features list made it sound really good, so I tried installing it, and I also got Drifty and Timbo94 to install it on their blogs too.

Well.... it's interesting. I mean, it does have it's good features, which are great, like reputation and threading and generally looking nice. But there is a problem.

It's so slooooooow! I mean, it loads quickly enough, but when I sit down to type in a comment, I'm way ahead of it and the letters are appearing the box one.... by.... one.... very.... slowly and I'm just sitting there, waiting for everything to appear so I can figure out what spelling mistakes I made.

So.... I guess IntenseDebate is pretty good. However, I'd like to argue about it with someone, so we can do that here. :) I've uninstalled IntenseDebate for the time being because I can't really have it perfectly yet until I hack the Wordpress plugin, so we're back to Four Island comments for now!

Or, even better, we can deblatog about it!

Well.... I can see now that Layout 6 has to go. Oh well. I have to stop trying to change. :)

YES!1!1!1!1 - 2 vote(s)! It's, like, ok - 6 vote(s)! No - 10 vote(s)! Indifferent - 0 vote(s)!

So yes, I guess we are once again back at Layout 4. There have been two unsuccessful attempts to move to a new layout. It seems Layout 4 is quite popular. I'll try to resist the urge to change again, kay?

So, you people will start coming back to Four Island now that Layout 6 is gone, right? Right? :)

EDIT: Oh dear, it seems like I'm just being paranoid. People actually do like Layout 6. So, we're back to it. However, Layout 6 still clashes with IE. GAH, have to fix that.