Stupid spam...
Sorry I've been so quiet; been too busy to talk about why I'm busy. What fun.
Okay, so the oft-discussed ACT 1 website... I fixed the CSS problem I was having.
Quick recap: I've redone the site with a CSS-only layout, but was having a problem getting the line down the center to appear properly. Currently, the effect is done with a 1px border on the opposing table cells. When floating the two content areas (one on the left for pictures, one on the right for the content), the background image didn't extend any further than a non-floated box.
Well! When working on a completely different project (actually, I was working on a proposal for one site, and thinking about a totally different one that never went anywhere), I realized the solution: put the non-floated footer <div> into the same box as the two content areas. This would force the background to go all the way to the footer, thereby maintaining the look of the table-based layout with none of the drawbacks.
I'm quite pleased that I've finally gotten this sorted out (the last sudden "aha, this will do it!" solution didn't work at all, so this was a nice change of pace). Unfortunately, I'm hella busy at work with other web stuff, between the site I was writing the estimate for (which will probably come my way) and a redesign of our company website, so launching the overhauled website won't happen for at least another month or two.
(Very quickly, my blog is becoming me just talking about my other websites. I promise, other stuff is happening to, but this is just the most interesting [unless everyone wants to hear about my clothes shopping spree today... yeah, didn't think so].)
Last time, someone (Cha0s) mentioned that, regardless of the problems the overhauled ACT 1 site has in IE/Mac, I should ignore it. I completely agree, but it's as close as I can (easily and consistently) get to IE/Win, which is still the dominant browser. If it breaks in IE/Mac, it could easily break in IE/Win...
Of course, the counter-point to that argument is the Skating website; IE/Win can't see the ice and the skater scrolls, but the CSS behaves properly in IE/Mac (ironically enough, because IE/Mac doesn't understand the IE-specific tag used to give that browser an alternate style sheet).
Oh Internet Explorer, you're so wacky...
So, for the ACT 1 site, I'm still holding up a bit with the full switch-over, but there's still plenty to do. For example, I'm switching the cast and crew tables on show pages (such as Arms and the Man) from a manually styled "zebra stripe" effect on the rows to a dynamically generated one; I've used this trick on the Unrestricted Awards table. This will make maintenance a lot easier for me, and will shrink the markup even more.
What is a problem, however, is that this is holding me up on implementing other things on the site, as I don't want to re-write templates. For example, I've been wanting to use phplist for a while for them; right now, they have a single person manually sending out emails to an aging mailing list from her personal Yahoo! account. A sub-par situation for everyone involved, and with the web-based system, people would be able to automatically sign themselves up for lists, as well as opt-out of things they don't care about.
I've actually got the stuff installed, I just need to finalize a lot of the stuff, such as customizing settings and, most importantly, altering the look of the site to match the rest of the ACT 1 website (I also have to update to the latest version, but that's not a big deal). Ideally, I'd do this after the CSS overhaul.
So... yeah, that's that. :)
Since this is a followup to a previous post, don't forget to actually read "Other websites I've been working on".
So, anyway, I've had a chance to work on some of the aforementioned websites some more. A few updates:
Capitol Skating Fund — I finally got the transparent ice feature finished. Oooooh, very nice. I also decided to make a lot of the other elements static as well, since it looks damn cool. :)
ACT 1 — Mixed news. On the plus side, I got the damn line to go all the way down on the test site (and the background isn't green). However, I've had less than stellar results with the site in IE/Mac, and have yet to test it in IE/Win. *sigh*
Hopefully, I'll have more stuff to report somewhat soon. What with Arms and the Man being done, though, life is becoming kinda dull. That's more than okay right now. ;)
I've got a couple other web projects going on right now, but neither is far enough along that I can show off what I've done (especially since one hasn't even been designed yet, and all I've done for the other is do up a template; I'm still waiting on copy for it). When those get done, I'll be more than happy to share them as well.
In my recent purge of spam from the blog system, one of the things I've been doing is closing as many posts as I can. This has proven to be extremely effective; I can now go about twelve hours between checks without finding anything (I just checked, and I had just three spam comments on someone's blog entry from 2005).
Pretty exciting (for me, at any rate).
Huzzah, I'm done clearing out all the spam.
Final count: me, 594 comments; insomniac, 71.
I mean... damn.
To help me celebrate, the comments section is now turned back on. Of course, I doubt anyone will say this, as I'm damn near sure that my 7-month break between the last series of postings and this one has pretty much robbed me of any readership. Oh well, maybe someone out there has me in their RSS reader and is rubbing there eyes in shock from seeing my name pop up...
So... I'm still clearing out the spam. Not that I've been doing it constantly since the last time I posted; I've had to sleep, go to work, go to rehearsal, go to the movies, and then I went back to clearing out spam.
As I mentioned last night, I had 15,844 comments. I'm now down to 14,118.
And if you think that is bad... poor Insomniac had 58,000 comments. He's now at 31,000.
...I'm going to be doing this for a few more days, methinks.
So... I basically ignore the whole blog scene for several months, and now I've got 15,844 comments... from what I remember, I left with about 400.
To top it all off, I'm getting server errors when I try to use the oft-mentioned Blacklist. That means I get to delete most of these manually.
Words cannot express my joy.
(comments for this post are turned off just so I don't get even more shit piled on)
Okay, so I didn't post this to announce the new project.
I posted it to announce that a new project exists.
I'm a teasing bitch, aren't I? Mwuhahaha!
<cryptic grin>
In all seriousness, I hope to have it announced by June (although I'll also be doing three shows in a row, so we'll see how well that goes).
I can say this much, though: this will be a major addition to the Empire. If you want any other questions answered, feel free to ask...
If you'll recall, I recently celebrated the liberation of blog.evula.net from the oppressive regime of comment spam. My primary method of elimination was to close up older blogs and posts from comments, which has worked wonders; spam has taken a significant drop since then.
However, the adversary of ping spam was still a very vivid specter on the horizon. It was confined to a single blog (Audiophile's), and while this meant the struggle lacked the intensity of the comment spam battle, it was still rigorous, by which I of course mean mind-numbingly dull and tedious.
Audiophile has 194 entries; I manually closed each and every one of them, unchecking the "Allow pings" box at the same time. With that mighty feat completed (use a loose definition for "mighty". Use a loose definition for "feat," while you're at it), it was a simple matter of running the Blacklist over the pings. I've long since given up adding those URLs to the blacklist proper; it's far easier to just tell it to look for all pings and delete them en masse (as Audiophile and myself were the only two people to ever use pings, there was no danger in deleting anything worthwhile).
With the bastard scourge of Ping Spam obliterated, blog.evula.net is now, officially, 100% free of spam URLs in any way, shape, or form. Even if I fail to check the Blacklist every day, there are a fraction of available topics for bots to use, which means that spam attacks are (a) much smaller, and (b) much more concentrated, making it easier to delete.
(I like this entry's current title much better than my original one of "double-win". Much grander.)
After a massive push at getting on top of the spam situation, I can properly declare blog.evula.net to be utterly and completely free from comment spam.
Not only that, but the rate of spam being introduced to the system has dropped dramatically since I closed up all those old posts. Gee, I wonder if the two events are related at all...
The only spam that remains is on Audiophile's blog, in the form of ping spam. I'm trying to delete it all en masse, but he's been ignoring it completely (I've emailed him about it, but didn't get a response). Oh well. I did change his blog config, though; specifically, I checked the "Email new TrackBack pings?" checkbox, which means his inbox should get inundated whenever his blog does too. :)
It kicks ass, just for the record. I saw a sneak preview on Monday with Molly, and was blown away. The special effects and fight scenes were great, which is a prerequisite for an action movie, but the story was incredible, and Hugo Weaving's performance behind the mask was very well done.
Highly recommended. I'll try to write a Review at some point, and add it to the Lair (along with a new Rant from Pikeman). Until then, I've still got a show to do. Meh.
Yes, I finally updated the Lair! The new content? Well, just a review of King Kong, but hey, that's a hell of a lot more than has been added in the past six months. :P
Also, the addition that I've been working on for the past few days is finally finished. I'm now an affiliate with MoviePoster.com. As such, I've added a link to every movie review that lets your order a poster of the movie being reviewed. It's an extra (possible) revenue stream for me, but I'm not even going to pretend that it will net me tons of money. Honestly, I just think it rounds out the information on there quite nicely. Also, it lays the groundwork for the information table to add more functionality to pages; this probably makes little to no sense to you now, but once you see what I'll be rolling out on the Lair this year, you'll understand.
For those of you that like to nit-pick, I actually posted this a little after 12AM Tuesday morning; I hit a bit of a technical snag that prevented me from actually posting this on Monday. I just edited the Authored On date. It's only fair, since I had all the new content up on Monday and all...
What I'm working on for Monday's update is proceeding at a nice little clip, although it is taking a bit more time than I initially thought it would (that would be because the site I just affiliated the Lair with doesn't make it easy to rip images off their site). I'm about a third of the way through the movies, then I move on to the music.
As I'm telling Cha0s right now, this will just be a small content update; a review or two, some tweaks to the Reviews (which is what I'm talking about above), maybe some quotes. I talked to Pikeman last night, and he's apparently got a Rant in the works; if he gets it to me by Monday, it'll get added as well.
Not quite a Lair update, but I did update my personal site a bit. Specifically, my list of Xbox games and shows that I've done.
A cheap excuse for an update? You bet! It also gave me a half-decent reason for a blog entry (since I've got nothing else going on in my life right now), which makes 8 posts in a row. Hot diggity damn.
The stuff I was planning to get done didn't, for various reasons. Partly because I opted to play Battlefront 2 with Courtney and Bryan, partly because... actually, no, that's pretty much the reason.
That said, if I have another week to do stuff, I won't be so rushed, can make sure everything actually works, etc., which leads to a much more relaxed Emperor, which is the most important thing (remember, the more relaxed I am, the less probable it is for me to send out the execution squads!).
Also, this is my 7th straight blog entry. I can't remember the last time I was posting this consistently... maybe I'm going for a decent average, and posting en masse for the two solid months I ignored the blog altogether. :)
So I wake up this morning and jump on the computer to check the level of spam (yes, I work on the Empire the moment I wake up; apparently I have nothing better to do). Son of a bitch, there's 2,500+ comments on my blog (as opposed to the 710 I had when I went to bed). Apparently the spam bots had a field day while I was sleeping.
It's sort of funny though, since it was only my blog that was hit, as far as I can tell (so far).
However, it's still pretty frustrating that I have to take care of this all the damn time. I might be switching blog.evula.net over to another system sooner than I thought, just so I can have some free time to work on the Lair...
I just deleted 22 blogs that had 0 entries. Considering the average age of these blogs was an entire year, I figure no one will be terribly surprised if they try logging in and can't. I'll deal with the blogs with only a handful of posts at some other point.
I have successfully vanquished the spam on blog.evula.net. This doesn't mean it is entirely gone; of course there will be the constant barrage that I'll be contesting with, and there are still a few scattered spam posts here and there, but on the whole, most of it is gone. I estimate that I've deleted somewhere around 8,000 comments, and 6,000 pings. I'll be spending some time Saturday killing some more.
Hopefully this weekend will allow me to get some work done on the first evula.com update of 2006. Nothing crazy; just a review or two. The determining factor, though, will be what else I've got planned; Saturday is my 2-month anniversary, and if I can spend time with Molly, I'll opt for that over the Lair.
Something else I want to do with Monday's (possible) update is add a bit of pizzazz to the Reviews. I've had this idea floating around my head for a while, but lacked an internet connection; I have found that it's really difficult to get online to get images and links when you don't have an ISP. And they say technology has advanced... Anyway, the update will provide me with another way to make money off the Reviews. It isn't anything crass; trust me, I don't want to stuff up my website with ads out the wazoo (and I'll never have pop up/unders). I think you'll agree with me when you see what I'm talking about; it'll actually add a bit of functionality to the Reviews, which is the most important thing to me.
Once all this spam stuff and update are behind me, I'd like to start discussing (with pretty much anyone who will listen) some of the things that will change on evula.com in 2006. I brought my laptop with me to the theatre tonight; I've got long stretches of time, so I figured I could get some Lair work done between scenes. I was able to tweak the front page so that it better matched what I had planned, but doing creative coding like that on my laptop is horrible inefficient; I could have done the same thing in half the time on my tower. I think I'll just read a book tomorrow and Saturday (with a review of it coming soon).
I'd like to point out that I've somehow managed to post to this blog for four days straight. This is a terribly impressive marathon for me, but don't expect me to keep doing it; eventually life will dwindle back to it's usual mundane nature, and I'd rather have high-quality posts than mindless drivel.
I'm still clearing out spam; I've been doing this since Sunday, but at least I've made some fairly good progress. I'm down to 2,805 comments in my own blog (from a maximum of 6,000).
Part of the problem is that a lot of the spam is really old; right now, I'm scanning the past 2,000 comments, and only 57 hits came up. Currently, I've narrowed down my spam searching to just my blog, as it is the worst off of the entire system (probably because it's the most linked-to). Once I get several thousand of my own comments out of the way, it'll be easier for me to search-and-destroy the spam on the other blogs.
I've gotten a couple of other blog.evula.net members to de-spam their own blogs for me, which has really helped.
The other thing I've been doing is closing up the comments for not only my old posts, but other people's, too. Have no fear, those-who-actively-use-their-blogs; I'm not modifying your posts. I'm talking about blogs that have 4 entries, but those are a couple of years old. Once all this crap is finished, I'll be emailing people and deleting the innactive blogs. I've already got the green light to trash a couple of old ones, but for right now, I'm just closing them up (so they can't get worse) and manually harvesting the older spam URLs.
Once all this is taken care of, I'll be (a) investegating an alternative to MT 2.64 (either the latest version of MT, which will cost money, or the free alternative of WordPress), and (b) starting to post more about my actual life and plans for the Empire.
I'm still sorting through literally tons of spam (don't hurt your brain trying to figure out how digital information could have physical weight), but I did get the comments feature working again. I reserve the right to turn it back off again, though, if spam starts slipping through as I'm trying to clear out everything.
There's a lot of spam on blog.evula.net. So much so that it is difficult to get it all. I'm slowly churning through everything, adding new addresses as I come upon them, but it's slow going (I already accidently deleted a comment from Leah about rent; I didn't realize it until I saw squibix.net on the list of sites to add). I've already gone from 6000 comments to 4790.
For those of you with blog.evula.net accounts, just hose down your blog with the de-spammer, and it'll take a bit of the workload off me.
CafePress just announced black t-shirts are available for its' members to use. Hot diggity damn. I was planning on switching from CafePress for this very reason, although that might still happen; the alternative site I found has a lot more variety in the products (a lot more colors than five), without some of the sillier stuff that CafePress has (not a bad thing, though).
Of course, "soon" is a relative phrase; I still don't have internet at home, and won't until I'm not spending $940 a month in collective rent (I'm not kidding; that's how much I'm spending right now). However, as soon as I'm online, I'll be working on the new files.
While I was busy packing up everything, the Blacklist got stuffed again (apparently, it has a maximum number; a very lame feature that I plan on taking up with the author when I'm not busy). I removed some of the less-obvious entries (stuff like 0019302), so I'm de-spamming everything now. My own number of comments has dropped from 1700 to 950. Huzzah.
However, I'm going to be taking a break so that I can pack some more. Those of you with blogs here, despam and take care of some of the work for me. :)
Believe me, I never thought I'd say that. :)
No Lair update today because I've been working on a new website. This isn't an Empire site, it's a site for a pro-bono client of ours, ACT 1.
Those that pay close attention will recognize them as the theatre company that I do most of my shows with. Three guesses as to how they became a client! :)
I'm really happy with how the website has turned out. Visually, it's far better looking than anyone else's in town, and is more attractive than most of the sites I saw when I did research on other theatre sites. I've also been able to turn the site into a working archive of their history; there are numerous rotating images that showcase their past shows (as well as pimp their current productions), in addition to pretty comprehensive listings of every show (well, every show that I could get the program for; more will come post-release) that list every actor and crew member, as well as featuring a few shots for the play.
The only thing I'm not too pleased about is the fact that it is unfortunately a table-based layout; I'd prefer that it was strictly CSS-based (like the Lair and this blog are), but I have absolutely no idea what the typical user of the site is, so I had to play it safe. Oh well, it's a fairly minor issue in the long run anyway.
I'd love to show you the site, but since it's still under construction, I'm not going to give out the dev URL. I might be convinced to give out the URL via iChat, but no promises. ;)
I will, however, link to their current site (unattractive though it may be). act1online.com is the domain. I'm hoping that the site will get switched over by Friday; the domain still has to resolve to the site host, and I've got a list of things that have to be done first. I'll post when it's done.
For those that are keeping track, that makes six websites that I either own or manage (four Empire sites, work website, and soon ACT 1).
Deleted Spam: 2,847
Deleted Pings: 366
Fresh URLs: 43
Whee. It only took me sacrificing a Saturday... actually, that's not true, but it did take me about 4 and a half hours to clear out everything. Factor in the time I took to eat a late breakfast/lunch and get sucked into a damn sappy movie on TV (Someone Like You, if you must know), and it pretty much killed my Saturday.
Thankfully, with gas prices being what they are, I wasn't planning on going out much this weekend anyway.
This week's update is on a more personal level than a normal Lair update. Specifically, all the updating is to the blog and my personal site (which, amusingly enough, still has the old site layout).
The changes to the blog are actually fairly minor. I changed up the Links section so that it has links to the aforementioned personal site, my last.fm (formerly AudioScrobbler) account, and my MySpace profile. I shifted the Empire links to below the Search box, and changed the link back to blog.evula.net.
There were a few updates around my personal site; specifically, to my Xbox and DVD collections, as well as finally adding my notes on The Normal Heart to the Theatre page. However, the major addition to the site was the inclusion of the Pics page. There are 35 pictures altogether, broken into three different categories, and all with a short commentary by me. The Photoshopped Pictures section is my favorite, for obvious reasons, but still, it's cool to see them all in one place. I'm sure I'm missing some (I can think of a couple of PS'ed pics that aren't up there yet), and I'll be adding them as I get them.
If you're wondering why there wasn't more content added to the Lair today, bite me, my schedule was seriously screwed up by my car. :)
So, I only have two things this time around: one Rant by SuperNova, and one Review by yours truly. MacWorld was a bit of a bust when it came to getting stuff done; my plane rides were incredibly short (and when you take out the time that I couldn't use my laptop, it only gives me about an hour total that I could do anything).
However, I have started working on setting up a database to start driving some of the Lair sections... believe me, once I get them actually working (that's the sticking point right now), it'll be awesome. :)
Anyway, as I mentioned in the title of this entry, today's Lair update will start to set the schedule I'd like for everything to go on. The first Monday of the month, I'd like to have an update that adds new Rant and Review content (meaning that, hopefully, I'll have some to add). Then, about two weeks after that, I'll have an update that adds new Quotes, Jokes, and Junk to the site.
I'm not entirely sure of how feasible this schedule is... I know I've got tons of Quotes and Jokes to add, but the other content is fairly hard to come by. However, I'm sure that everything will come together... right? :\
Wow, I'm not entirely sure of what I did, but I fixed the blacklist. All I did was delete and readd a few entries (basically "*.spamdomain.com"), and all of a sudden I could check for spam again.
I'm turning the Blacklist back on, and will be mass de-spamming over the course of the day.
Wooooo!
Okay, so not only was the Blacklist broken in the sense that I couldn't check everything, but it also was causing people to be unable to comment to any of the blogs. That sucks.
As a result, I've turned off the Blacklist. This means that there's about zilch protection for the blogs, which also sucks, although slightly less than not having anyone be able to post does.
I'm going to try to fix it as soon as I can, but I make no promises as to when the hell that will be.
*sigh* This is so what I want to come home to from a nice vacation.</sarcasm>
Just a tiny little Lair update, but I can't feel too bad; I've got tons of other stuff I need to get done before I leave tomorrow morning, so I'm just happy I got any of it done. :)
Anyway, the first thing you'll probably notice is the slightly redesigned front page. Now all the stuff is horizontal, similar to how it was laid out before the redesign. It's all done with tables, which is bad and yadda yadda yadda, but I don't care; CSS was failing miserably at laying everything out the way I wanted it. I'll try to tweak it a bit more, with the eventual goal being that I ditch the tables entirely, but for now, they're there. *sigh*
Also, I added a new Rant by Pikeman. It's quite good; the fact that I call this a tiny update in no way reflects upon his always-enjoyable Rants. :)
Since I'll be leaving for MacWorld on Saturday, I'm aiming to update the Lair on Friday. Right now, I've got a redone front page, more in line with the old index (3x2 horizontal listing of recent Rants and Reviews, with Jokes and Store Spotlight under that), as well as a new Rant from Pikeman. I'm hoping that I'll get a Review or two nailed out this week; if I can, it'll get added as well.
I'm going to be spending a total of 6 hours in the air, plus another 3 hours on the ground between flights, and then however long it takes to get from Pikeman's place to Danny's. Over the course of all that time, I should get a substantial amount of work done. My primary focus during all this will be to finish converting the Joke Archive, as well as to add a fair number of jokes (I'm thinking of adding 50, just to make it an even 600). To break up the monotony of all that, I'll probably write a Review or two; the new Foo Fighters and Garbage albums have been getting a lot of play in my CD player, and I'll be loading them onto my laptop to take with me.
When I get back, I hope to actually get back into a steady pattern of updating the Lair again. I've got a shitload of saved up Jokes and Quotes that I'd like to start adding to the site on a regular basis; I'm thinking that I could add 20 new Jokes and 10 new Quotes on a bi-weekly basis, with additional content getting added whenever I have it.
Something else that I'd like to do, because I apparently like to punish myself, is to start converting some of the sections to be database-driven. Specifically, I'll start with the Quote Archive. I've got some great ideas bouncing around my head that I'm sure you guys will love, as well as a cool Empire addition that is closely related to it. But I've already said too much... <cryptic grin>
(wow, this is my fourth blog entry in a row. go me!)
After fixing the Blacklist, the first order of business was to clean out all the spam that accumulated over the weekend.
Total number of URLs added to the list: 4
Number of comments deleted: 658
Number of pings deleted: 123
The real problem was actually just a single URL, which represented 639 of the comments and all of the pings.
And I'd like to go on record as saying that mass-deleting that much spam all at one time is not fun. The system can only reliably handle 100 "delete-and-rebuild" functions at a time I've found, so I have to search-and-destroy all that stuff in bunches of 100. It took 15 passes, averaging about 40 seconds each time, but I finally got it all.
What an excellent way to spend the Fourth of July!</sarcasm>
The Blacklist is a little screwed up right now. It still protects against existing blacklisted sites, but it would seem that you can't add anything to it. That sucks.
I'll be working on it tonight and tomorrow. I'm 99.99% sure it'll be up and running properly by the time I go to MacWorld (and if it isn't fixed by then, it won't be touched for another week).
I'm going to be doing a small update to the site in the next few days (hopefully early next week). It'll just cover minor stuff, like replacing all the PNG files with JPGs (which will have the dual purpose of reducing a bit of load).
I'm also going to redo the front page. The more I see it, the less and less pleased I am with it as it currently stands. :\ I think I'll go back to my previous layout of having the six most recent Rants and Reviews spread out horizontally; with the much shorter descriptions (which are now the first 33 words of the article, rather than the totally arbitrary amount it used to be), it doesn't work too well to have them all vertical. This also means I'll probably switch back to a two-column listing of jokes.
Depending on how much time I have, I might add some more content to the site (hopefully I'll have time to write a review of something).
For future updates, something that I want to do is rate all the content on the site (though it only really only be seen on a few pages, like the Jokes and Rants). Everything would get rated either G, PG, PG-13, or R. There would be two things that would change depending on the content rating:
Though the content rating sounds like it could be a pain in the ass, it really won't be hard; the system will assume something is G-rated unless it is told otherwise, so I won't have to worry about getting every page, just the more profane stuff (and that only generally happens in Rants and Reviews, both of which have preliminary $content_rating values in place).
I'd also like to expand purchasing options on the Review pages. Nothing crazy, like having a thousand different merchants, but possibly supporting other people than Amazon.com. Dunno, what other stores do you think I should sign up with? I've thought about maybe TowerRecords.com and/or Overstock.com. It all depends on their respective affiliate programs, I suppose. Down the road, after I unleash one of my in-development <cryptic grin>s, I'd like for users to specify which vendor (out of a list) they use, and then have the site automatically generate the purchasing links based on that data. However, like I said, that's a ways down the road.
Another thing I'd like to do is have a "pros and cons" area at the end of each Review that would just sum up, surprise surprise, the pros and cons of whatever is being rated. I still need to fool around with the formatting with it, though, before I start implementing it.
Anyway, I'm just tossing out some ideas for ways to improve what I've got so far. If you've got any ideas, don't hesitate to post them; sure, the Lair is my site, but I'm doing it for my kick-ass users, so speak up and help make the Lair even better. :)
It's finally here: the redesigned Lair. Faster. Stronger. Better.
Go ahead, take a look around. The first thing you'll notice is that there's no longer any border around everything; there's an image at the top to let you know where you are (among other things; more on that later), the standard sidebar navigation on the left, and everything in the middle.
The next thing you might notice is the right column. Yes, ads have managed to sneak their way onto evula.com. It sucks, I know, but I'd like to eventually start making less negative money on the site. Right now, I'm going to stick with plain text ads, as they are the least obtrusive, and there's no chance for obnoxious Flash or animated banners. Keep in mind that, no matter what, I will *NOT* have pop-up or pop-under ads; not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Hates them we do.
Something that *is* cool about the Google ads, though, is the fact that they are pseudo-intelligent when it comes to their size; lengthy pages have more ads on them than short pages. I also had to cheat a bit to make the ads "fit" on each page when it comes to the color scheme; it's not perfect, but I don't have a lot of control over it. Trust me, it's much better than the options they had.
The Reviews are the section that have the most dramatic change. Each Review (as well as the Rants and gaming articles) has a Review Information table off to the right of the content. This has everything you could need about the Review itself; the author, the date posted, the rating, purchasing information, etc. I'm pleased as punch about how it's turned out, and I'm planning on using that table for other features down the road; anything else on that will have to be summed up with a
In addition to the visual change, there's a lot going on under the hood that you might not even notice. For example, it is now a lot easier to get around evula.com, using a nifty little feature called accesskey values. Each of the content headings (Games, Humor, Opinions) is numbered, starting with 1 for Games (if you hover over the link, you'll see what number it is pop up). In Safari, you can activate these by hitting control and the number (ie: Games is control-1). To get to the top of whatever section you're at, you can always hit control-9. Hit control-0 to get to the Lair's front page.
Also filed in the "happening under the hood" folder is the fact that the Lair now uses 100% valid XHTML and CSS. If you have serious trust issues, there are links at the bottom of the left navigation area that will validate wherever you are. The nice thing about the valid code is that it lets me shrink the markup significantly, letting pages download faster. I also structured the Lair a lot better so that search engines can get what they need quickly and easily.
The Contact Info page also got a major overhaul; now everything is run off of a single PHP include. When I mean everything, I also mean the Rants and Reviews; if I change a person's information in that one file, it changes everywhere. This is quite an improvement over the old system, and more importantly, it makes life easier for me. :)
From here on out, I'm going to start getting a lot better about date-stamping everything that goes up on the Lair. As a result, all of the Rants and Reviews have a "date added" value in their Information tables. This will be true for the jokes, as well.
I sort of went hog wild with adding meta and link tags; a quick peek at the source code will show what I mean. Some of the stuff may not even matter, but at the same time, the vast majority of it is generated automatically by whatever page you access, so it doesn't matter! :)
Some of the stuff that is new today is just your average, run-of-the-mill new content. For starters, there are three new Reviews (Hitchhiker's Guide, Republic Commando, and UT2k4) and one new Rant (George Lucas Rant). The bulk of the new content, however, is in the Quote Archive; it went from 288 quotes to 600, more than doubling the content there. Hot damn. :)
Now, it isn't perfect. For starters, I couldn't get the damn random text script that powers the Store Spotlight section to work in the two minutes I had, so right now it's just showcasing a single product (what pisses me off about that is I went ahead with all the trouble of recreating the fifty images that are swapped out). Same with the Random Quote feature that I used to have on the front page, although that is also a style sheet issue as well.
One of the things I had hoped to have finished was a varying ICRA rating meta tag that changed depending on what page you are on. It doesn't matter very much for most pages, but it would have come into play on stuff like the Rants (which is why there is a rating for each) and, later down the road, the jokes in the Joke Archive. Oh well, one of the things I learned from my failure with getting it working will come in handy when I redo it; I just didn't have time to take care of it for today.
Something else that people may notice: there are plenty of references to the Forums, in the form of links to the Update Log (on the front page) and prominent "discuss this whatever" links for Rants and Reviews, even though the Forums have been dead for half a year. They are still there because, eventually, the Forums will be recreated and I didn't want to disassemble parts of the layout just to put it back together down the road.
I'll have another update in a couple of weeks, where I'll be fixing some of the smaller, nagging issues, as well as adding any more new content that comes my way. I'll also be updating sections as I convert them.
If you see any issues (broken links, funky formatting, whatever), be sure to let me know (either reply here, or email me, or catch me on iChat) so that I can get it taken care of. Likewise, If you have any suggestions, run it by me; I might like it, or I might already have something in mind, but it never hurts to try.
Well, one of the cool things that I wanted to do isn't working properly, but since it is jut a "behind the scenes" sort of thing that no one would actually see, it's no big deal and I'm not going to spend anymore time trying to fix it before Monday. Everything else is turning out as I'm expecting, more or less, so I'm still happy. :)
Right now, I've got 19 directories finished (with 17 remaining), as well as the recoded front page. I'm not sure if the new front page will work; I've tested it on a few different machines, and it changes a bit more than I would like. However, there's no way in hell that I'm going to take the time to recode it *again*, so I'll just change it after the fact if enough people think I should. It also doesn't have the current "Random Quote" thing since I was having trouble getting it to display properly, but it'll make a return once I sort out the issue with the code.
I finished assigning all the dates to everything for the Rants and Reviews, which was a mind-numbing task. Now all I have to do is add the new Rants and Reviews (3 total, I believe) and dump in the ton of new quotes into the Quote Archive. When I say "ton," I'm not exaggerating: the source file I made of all of the quotes has 1,165 lines in it (5,635 words, 32,871 characters). Granted, this is before styling and whatnot (ie: adding <q> and <cite> tags), and while I won't be adding every single quote, that's still a lot of quotes; for those that are curious, there are currently 288 quotes in there.
Alrighty, enough typing, now it's time to get more stuff done. :)
Yeah, you heard right. Me. Lair. Updating.
No, not today. Not tomorrow, either, though I was hoping to. Right now, the plan is to update the Lair on Monday (the 6th). The only reason I'm not updating sooner is that (a) I realized I had several more things left to do, and (b) to try to get them all done in the short amount of time I had until tomorrow would have put an insane amount of stress on me (refer back to my previous decision to stop having the Empire dictate my life).
So, instead of stressing out and rushing thru everything (and thereby possibly screwing stuff up quite badly), I'm going to take the extra few days so I can work on it Saturday (since I'll be seeing a show [with cute girls, hot damn] on Friday, and I have load-in on Sunday [with different cute girls]). Good times.
As per my previous entry, I've done some thinking, and this is what I've come up with.
...as I mentioned to Gfono in a recent email, I've still got some plans knocking around my head. Give me a day or two and I'll have a clearer sense of what is what, and I'll post a big long entry to my blog about it. :)
Thanks again for all your support.
I'm really, really close to giving up on the entire Empire right now. I'm really fucking tired of all the headaches that I'm getting from it, especially considering how much money I make off it (I'll give you a hint: it's a negative number).
Anyone that would like to list reasons I shouldn't let the Forums remain dead is welcome to try.
For those of you that may have noticed, there's a bit more spam around blog.evula.net than normal. That's because, for whatever reason, I can't access the De-spam feature of the Blacklist. I'm not the only one to have that problem (I've read about it on the support forums for MT-Blacklist). I hope to fix the problem tonight, at which point I'll be back to busting all the spam on everyone's blogs. Whee.
For those that don't know, I'm in the middle of redesigning the Lair. It's a pain in the ass project, to be sure, and has taken quite a bit longer than I was wanting it to. However, I am making progress.
I currently have 15 directories fully converted and verified that they are valid: About, Cheat Codes, Copyrights, Games, General, Misc., Escape Velocity, Humor, Opinions, Junk, Reviews, WarCraft 3, Quote Archive, EV Bible, and the Link Archive.
The main thing that has been eating up my time on this is sorting out all of the different styles for everything. A lot of my old code is, quite frankly, crap, meaning that I have to rethink a lot of it. For example, let's take the "Alien vs. Predator" line from the existing Reviews page (modified slightly for this page):
<LI><A CLASS="review" HREF="movies/avp.html">Alien vs. Predator</a> <span class="new_updated-green">NEW</span>
<BR> <span class="bracket-gray"><</span> <span class="gray">by <span class="review-stats">EVula</span> | Rating:</span> <span class="review-stats">9.1</span> <span class="bracket-gray">></span>
At least it uses <span> tags, I say; some of the parts of the Lair still have <font> tags. *shudder* Anyway, it's extremely cluttered, and has a ton of redundant tags. Here's what it has become (again, modified slightly for this page):
<li><a href="movies/avp.php">Alien vs. Predator</a> <span class="new_updated">NEW</span>
<p>by <em>EVula</em> | Rating: <em>9.1</em></p></li>
The first bit of code had 331 characters; the second has 141. That's less than half the size, and it looks exactly the same (though I did remove the < and > that exist currently, that's the only change). While it may not seem like a whole lot of code, on page with 31 instances (like the Movies page), it can start to add up.
Ultimately, though, I think that I'm going to end up slacking off when it comes to updating the entire site right now. When I put up everything, nothing will look like the current version of the Lair, but if I don't get much further along, I'm going to just quickly convert stuff over for the new style, rather than going, line by line, finessing every bit of code. Specifically, I'm guessing that the Survival Guide won't be validated until the middle of the year. :)
Eventually, this blog, the Store, and my personal site will all get recoded to match the rest of the Lair (right now the Store and personal site at least have the same look and feel; this blog, on the other hand...). However, I'm probably not going to worry about that until after I publically update the Lair for two reasons:
Once I'm done with the Lair update, I'll be able to turn my attention towards other sections of the Empire. I did up a To Do list for 2005, and I'm going to be making some major changes to evula.org later this year, as well as a few things here and there on evula.net. Maybe something even bigger is on the horizon... <cryptic grin>
This is just too damn funny. I got an email titled "MAIL SYSTEM ERROR - RETURNED MAIL":
Dear user evula@evula.com,We have received reports that your e-mail account was used to send a huge amount of spam messages during the recent week.
Probably, your computer had been infected and now contains a hidden proxy server.Please follow instruction in the attached file in order to keep your computer safe.
Sincerely yours,
evula.com technical support team.
Now, aside from the smug smile I have on my face that is the result of having a Mac and not needing to worry about the aforementioned hidden proxy server (or the .zip file that was attached to the email), the "evula.com technical support team" part is going to have me laughing for the rest of the week. Good job, spammers! :)
So I'm just a little bored here at work, so I decided to validate my entire blog. Well, not the whole thing; I only went back to the Adventures in CSS entry; I decided to stop there because (a) I'm not that bored and (b) that's when I first started really caring about valid code, so it seems to be a good place to stop. Maybe I'll patch everything else up at some point down the road, but for right now, it's good enough for me.
I suppose that, once I get a bit further along with the Lair conversion (a lengthy entry about that is forthcoming), I'm going to want to put up some sort of teaser about what everything will look like. Is there anything in particular that you want to know about it?
Because of the hard work from andcarne and his brother David, the Forums are now back. All of the deleted users have been restored, though there are a few glitches in the system; all of their email addresses are just plain wrong. If you email me about it, I'll fix it so that you can recover your account.
Also, all deleted accounts lost all their PMs and user data (signature, preferences); that's a small loss, though, when you consider the fact that you at least have all your posts. :)
Another glitch that we'll need to get through is the complete and total lack of proper permissions for certain boards. Those of you missing your mod spots should mention as much in your emails.
Edit: If you're having trouble logging in, delete your old cookies for the Forums. That should clear up any issues.
That is all.
Edit: So does his brother, David.
Well, all my plans for getting the Forums up by the end of the year have gone in the crapper (either because of frantic schedules on my part or a complete lack of energy, in no small part because of the schedules). I can guarantee, however, that the forums will be back up in 2005. ;)
Hope you all have a good New Years. Me, I'm off to a couple of parties. Yehaw!
Well, I ended up just deleting the account that had now close to 80 megs of stuff in there. I tried accessing it, but kept getting an error, so I had no other choice. I immediately recreated the account with a new password, so if the email account is still active, I should be hearing about it soon. :)
In related news, all evula.org accounts now have a 10 megabyte limit, rather than the unlimited (read: 100 megabytes) that everyone had before. As long as this doesn't happen another 10 times all at once, everything should be fine.
For those that are curious, there are 136 evula.org email accounts.
Sorry that I've been MIA around the web here lately; Hellcab is now done, which means I can have my life back! What this means for you (in the order of priority):
I've got the new layout 95% done. I need to do some tweaking before I start flowing everything into it. I also need to do some PHP tests. But before that, I need to test out some content management software that the host has provided; if I can use it to power the Rants, Reviews, and Joke Archive, it would allow me to focus even more on content generation (writing and the like) than website maitenance, which is something I'd very much like to have happen. Ultimately, it could mean many more Lair updates, with more new content.
Something that will also happen next year around the Empire: evula.org will get an overhaul, of a sorts. Dunno if I'll open it back up, but I'm going to be trimming the fat, deleting dead & deadbeat accounts, as well as overhauling the banners and navigation tables (both tied into a new Imperial service). I'm not going to say much else about that, since a lot of it is tied to what work I get done for the big Lair overhaul (both in techniques and in backend software used).
Some of you may have gotten an email from the evula.org Mailer Daemon saying that your mailbox is more than 90% full. Don't worry! It isn't a problem with just you. The entire evula.org mail server is at near-full capacity; there's one person in particular that needs to clear out the 70+ megs he has in his email.
To make sure you are keeping your mail off the server, though, here's what you can do:
If you use Mail, check to make sure it is set up to delete the messages off of the server when it gets it. In Mail, go to Preferences -> Accounts and select the evula.org account, then go to the Advanced tab, then make sure the "Remove copy from server after receiving a message" checkbox is checked.
For Outlook Express, go to the Tools menu to Accounts and select your account, then click on the Options tab and make sure that "Leave a copy of each message on the server" is unchecked.
Hopefully the problem will be solved soon. By the end of the year, I'll be instituting an actual limit on the mailboxes; when I set up all the accounts, a limit wasn't even possible, so all users were given an unlimited allotment when the feature became available. Just one more thing to do around the Empire...
Edit: Issue resolved, here is the related blog entry. Comments on this topic are now closed.
Just a wrap-up of everything pertaining to the Forums:
The only thing I can suggest doing is keep checking back here at my blog for news about the Forums. If my fix works (as far as restoring the deleted accounts), I'll be keeping the forums down for a little while longer so that, when I open the forums back up, you shouldn't notice much of anything being out of place.
There will still be a bit of work as far as restoring everyone's permissions (user groups they belonged to, boards they moderated, etc), but all in all, it should be relatively painless for the user. A pain in the ass for me, but for the user it should be fine. :)
"Is it all worth the time and effort that I put into it?"
That is the question I'm currently wrestling with.
I'll let you know when I have an answer.
As many of you may know, I'm going to redesign the Lair next year. I've already started working on some of the work; specifically, I've begun working on the redesigned (visually and technically) sidebar.
It will look very different from how it does currently, with a slick and clean look that will work well with everything else. From a technical standpoint, I'm finally going to have the effect that I tried to have on the site earlier, but ran into issues; those issues are alleviated when doing it in CSS, thankfully.
But the big surprise is that the sidebar, as it stands right now, is roughly half the size that the current sidebar.txt. The current sidebar is 6,461 bytes, while the new one is 3,386 bytes. Ultimately, this 4k difference won't have a super-huge impact on the user, but it does cut down the amount of data being transferred on a daily basis just a bit; in the grand scheme of things, it eases a fair amount of stress from the server (4k here and 4k there really adds up over a few thousand hits).
I feel I should note that Jon Pearse helped me out very much with the sidebar, practically coding the damn thing for me (though I'm styling his code quite a bit, the main markup isn't being modified very much).
Once the sidebar is done, I'll still have several other things to work on:
Those are just the things I can work on now. Once the Lair is closed for the year, I'll be able to start going through all of the content on the site, giving it a complete overhaul. Here's a list of some of the things I'll be checking (more for my benefit than yours):
That will, of course, be on top of the process of applying the new layout code to each and every single page by hand. Why am I going to do it by hand, when doing so is such an inefficient and slow process (not to mention painful)? Firstly, because I'm a bit of a control freak, and don't trust a program to do everything perfectly. I love BBEdit's search & replace, but I don't trust it to catch every single instance.
The second (and more important) reason is to make sure that I learn these new rules and follow them to the letter. I know HTML as well as I do for one reason alone: I had to drag myself through massive amounts of code in very long, mind-numbing projects. As a result, I know it like the back of my hand. If I do the same thing again, I'll be re-educating myself in a way that will make sure that it sticks.
The third reason is because I'm a glutton for punishment, it would seem. ;)
Gah, what a way to spend my first waking minutes on a holiday. Apparently, a spam bot hit blog.evula.net hard while I was asleep. After running through MT-Blacklist over and over, I ended up removing 946 items of spam. Yeesh. My own blog had about 50 spam comments, though several other people had a lot too (didn't keep track of those, though).
Alrighty, it's time for another Lair update. First up is the new content: a Review of Rammstein's "Reise Reise" album, by Prince GFono.
As for the title of this post... take a look around the Lair and you'll see a few tweaks here and there. For those with a good browser (ie: not IE, preferably Safari), you'll notice some cool drop-shadow effects on the headers (and elsewhere, including the rollover effect). I like the look of this, and will be getting used more next year.
A few other small changes: the Diablo 2, StarCraft, WarCraft 3, and Fallout sections all have title images that match their color schemes, rather than the default green. On the new Lair, things will be styled much better than they have in the past... I won't go into the details any more than that. ;)
The only other change on the site is to my personal site. It now has the same layout that the Store has, which is, in essence, just the regular layout, but all white. In keeping with the whole "taste of things to come" thing I've got going with this post, I can honestly say that, with the new Lair, my personal site (as well as the store, and my own blog) will all share the same layout as the rest of the site.
And here's what I'm really excited about: I finally came up with a new layout for the Lair. I was trying to get to sleep last night, and about 15 minutes after going to bed, it came to me. The last time I had an idea randomly pop into my head, it was the Noir logo. To make a long story short, it will be very cool, and as near as I can tell, should be quite doable in strictly CSS. This should make pp very happy. ;)
The last update of the year for the Lair will be December 13. This will give me plenty of time to do everything that I need to get done (both on the site and in real life) so that I have a lot done for 2005. Yehaw.
What this means for you all, aside from no updates for a few weeks, is that I won't be posting anything that gets submitted to me. I've purposefully pushed back the date a week so that a KOTOR2 review is a possibility (it comes out on the 6th). If you want to write a Review or Rant or anything else, get it to me by December 12 (not the 13th itself) if you want to see it on the site this year.
What this means for me is that I need to bust my butt to get all my half-done content completed. That includes a handful of reviews, a major update to one of the sections that is very under construction (even if I don't get all the content done, I'll upload it incomplete just to get the restructured site up), and touch up a few things here and there, before the major update. The oft-mentioned new Lair section probably won't go up until next year, due to the sheer size of it all; but at the same time, we might get a lot done and release at least some of it.
Of course, the Forums will still remain and you'll be able to post on them just fine; at this point, this will just be an update to the Lair. And since the old content won't be going anywhere, don't worry; I'm just keeping everyone in the loop with what is going on. :)
I'm going to be tweaking the layout of evula.com at some point early next year, which means I'm going to start working on it fairly soon. Because of this, I need to know if there's anything you especially like or dislike about the organization and/or layout of the Lair.
I've got my own list of things to get changed (most of which I'm not going to share, of course :P), but I fully realize that sometimes I just don't catch everything.
For those of you that like to be nit-picky, this is your golden opportunity.
Just to let you know, here are a couple of things that I've got on my list (taken from my personal notes, so please excuse the fact that it may or may not make sense):
* Fix footer tables to WIDTH="100%" so I can have fully 50% HR tags
* Ditch HR on sidebar; replace with border CSS
* Supplementary navigation
* Add <new section>
* Finish <existing section>
* Add <new section>
* Finish <existing section>
* Drop WarCraft 3 (?), at least from the sidebar
* Ditch text markers on sidebar; go back to images (totally?)?
* Implement <forthcoming empire service> into <existing section>
Anything else? Anything specifically that you'd like to see?
Today's Empire update is to the Store. Just in time for the holidays, I've added two types of Christmas ornaments. I also cleaned up a bit, removing the Athletic Jersey, which was cancelled a few months ago.
Several things that are getting worked on by yours truly:
I love the Blacklist. I don't think many blog.evula.net members are getting much spam because I've been checking it at least once a day; the difference between me checking the Blacklist and anyone else checking it is that I see everything on everyone's blogs. When a major spam bot hits several blogs, I can clean it all up quickly and easily.
Currently the Blacklist has 2747 entries, and sadly, it grows each day. For those that are curious, you can find the complete Blacklist here. It's pretty funny to look through there.
The only problem with the Blacklist is that I've accidently deleted a couple of posts here and there. There's also no way of whitelisting URLs or people; as a result, I'm constantly seeing Jshei and nemo pop up on my searches. I also accidently added blog.evula.net itself to the Blacklist (one of my own posts was one of the ones I accidently deleted). It isn't as bad now; like I said, I check about once a day, and so all I have to do is search the last 20 comments and I'll get everything recent. It's only when I haven't checked in a while that I end up with tons of results (and when that happens, it's easy to miss a checkbox that needs to be unchecked).
So, yeah, the Lair update was a day late, but hey, at least it's here. :)
A few new things here and there. There's a new Game Review up by SuperNova, and there's a new WarCraft 3 article by whyme. There are also 10 new jokes in the Joke Archive, but more importantly, there are two new categories in the Joke Archive: Gender and Politics. The Gender jokes are culled primarily from the existing jokes, so there are well over 30 jokes in there, but the Political jokes are a bit lacking, with a whopping 4. I'm working on that, though; I've got a couple of people (on both the right and the left) that are going to start forwarding stuff to me; I'd really like to see it fairly even, so I think this will work out well.
Work on the mysterious new section is coming along well. All of the information is outlined, and all that remains is flowing it in. We might even get done by the end of the year! :)
Sorry, but I didn't get quite as much as I'd hoped to get done yesterday, and I (fairly suddenly) have a production meeting tonight. As a result, I'm just going to take an extra day to get the Lair update together.
Alright, so all I've got this time around is a review I wrote a couple of weeks ago. I also fixed a lot of out-dated HTML code on the Store pages.
However, for those that don't know, I'm doing another play right now. It's the easiest ASM gig I've ever had; there's no set movement, and there are very few props. All I have to do is yell at actors when they're loud backstage and make sure they get on stage on time. That's it. As a result, I'm sitting around backstage a lot, being bored. To remedy this, I've started bringing my laptop with me so I can work on the Lair instead.
So far, I've gotten a fair amount of work done; aside from all the HTML fixing that I did in the Store, I began working on something new (<cryptic grin>), wrote most of a new review, and made a lot of images which will be showing up 'round here fairly soon (another <cryptic grin>). This next weekend, I should get even more done, since I've got Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday performances. I've got a lengthy list of stuff I'd like to do, so I'm trying to kill that list while simultaneously working on the new section (and writing more).
In summary, the good news (that I mentioned on the evula.com front page) is that, while today's update is fairly small, next week's should be fairly substantial (I'm going to try to get some new Jokes up there, too; it's been far too long since I added some). If you have any suggestions, as always, feel free to mention them.
Sorry, but my next show opens this weekend, so I didn't have time to update the site. I should be able to next Monday.
Try not to act surprised that I'm actually updating the Lair; it's almost insulting. ;)
So, the only "big" things this time around are a new Review (that was supposed to get uploaded last time, but I didn't have a final rating on it), and a whole ton of new stuff over on my personal site. For those keeping track, I've since added a few more movies to my DVD collection, and in new additions to the site, I've added pages that list my Xbox game collection (all 4 games! Wow!), the webcomics I read, and a list of theatre shows I've done. The personal site is fast becoming a reference for myself that I just happen to let y'all in on, but hey, so what? :)
In tidy things around the site, I've trimmed the Copyrights page (Blizzard copyrights are now on the same page as everything else, as opposed to on a seperate page), and I've redone the layout on the Contact Info page.
In unrelated news, I also switched the default theme on these forums to Lair Standard, though SubSilver is still available for those that prefer it.
I only added one thing to the Lair today, a rant by Pikeman (about me!), but it's pretty funny, if I do say so myself.
I had a few other things that have been submitted to me, but to be perfectly honest, I'm tired. I've worked my tail off this past week, both at work and for the play I'm doing, and the last thing I've wanted to do is sit in front of the computer and work on stuff in my spare time (as opposed to sitting in front of the computer and work on stuff for my job, which I'm paid quite well to do, and as a result I don't complain [much] about that).
Also, because of the play, I'm going to be taking a few weeks off from updating the Empire. I simply won't have time; the show I'm doing opens this week, and I'll probably be coming home and immediately going to sleep, then getting up and immediately going to work. It's a pain, and leaves little room to live up the title of Emperor for a short while. However, after this week, I should have my evenings to myself (on Monday-Wednesday) for the next two weeks. However, I'm not going to overload myself; the most I'll do during that time is write up a few Reviews or Rants, maybe do a bit of additional work around the Lair, but I won't be updating. Hopefully, this will translate into a large Lair update when I return.
Well, I finally finished setting up the Blacklist for blog.evula.net. You can find all sorts of information about it here.
I'm very excited about this. It kills roughly 95% of the spam that has been infecting these blogs. The best part is that all of you ("you" being blog.evula.net members) can contribute to the blacklist, and when one person adds a spam URL, it is applied to everyone.
For those using the software for the first time, you probably won't find much spam (if any). That's because when I first installed the program, I ran through everyone's blogs, deleting spam left and right and adding the new URLs to the Blacklist. One blog lost several hundred (at least 400) comments because it was hit so badly by spam.
To give you an idea of how effective this software it, is blocked roughly 100 comments in it's first 24 hours of operation. This weekend, it blocked 127 seperate attempts.
I installed an anti-spam plugin for MT to help protect the blogs against spammers... so far, I'm kicking spam's ass. It's great.
Actually, it will qualify for next week's Imperial update. I'm going to have everything worked out by then, and email all the users instructions on how to use the system, even though I'll be making my rounds around blog.evula.net to remove spam on my own.
Sorry, but last week was a hellish week; bad days at work mean that I'm too damn tired to do anything when I get home. As a result, I've got nothing in the Empire that is getting updated today. I feel bad about that, but not too bad; I can't drive myself crazy, after all, since that would be even worse. :)
Honestly, the only reason for today's update is the fact that Alien vs. Predator came out Friday. Sure, I had someone else's Review sitting around too, but it's the AvP review that got me going. :)
Anyway, more stuff around the Empire next week. I'm so far off my schedule for things to do, but I'm still managing to do [I]something[/I] each week, so I'm happy no matter what.
And yes, I realize that I'm posting this on the 17th, not the 16th; I didn't feel like working on it immediatly when I came home. Sue me. :P
So I've got three new Reviews up; two by Flatty, one by me. The big news (if you want to call it that) about this is that there is now a Games section on the Reviews page. Right now, it's just got three there, but you can help to change that! Just write up a sensibly-sized (no "OMGLOGL IT SUX0RZ!" tripe, please) review of a game, and I'll post it when I can. :)
In other news, I'm going to try to do something about all the blog spam. Look for an Imperial Update in a couple of weeks involving the blogs.
Specifically, blog spam sucks.
I've found a couple of MT plugins that should help cut down on the amount of spam we blog.evula.net users get. I'm a little worried about how much work is going to be involved; technically, I've got over 70 (!) blogs on here, and if I have to install the plugins for each... ugh.
Hopefully I'll have the anti-spam stuff up in a couple of weeks, as one of the weekly Empire updates.
I updated the Store today. The biggest update is adding the EV: The Emperor style to the Store. Only 10 items, sure, but I really like it; it's a parody of political stuff that I dislike.
I also added two new types of products: Magnets and Buttons. I'm taking full advantage of the fact that both can be ordered as singles, 10-packs, or 100-packs.
I also updated a few other existing items, but specifics can be found on the Products page.
Enjoy!
I won't be around for the next week or so, since Courtney and I are off to Pikeman's house, and from there, Boston. It'll be fun.
I'm taking my laptop so that I can do a lot of Lair work while in the car... I'm hoping to deliver a hefty update on the 19th or 20th. Wahoo!
So yesterday I had to fix not one but two problems with evula.org.
The first was something that didn't really surprise me: the evula.org server was full. I checked my disk log, and sure enough, several people had way over the 20 meg limit. After hunting down everyone's email address (I still didn't get one guy, but oh well) I sent out an email explaining the situation and gave a list of alternate sites to store big files. I did, however, tell them that if it wasn't fixed by Saturday, I'd be backing up all their files and deleting them from the server. That should get some people into gear. :)
The second problem didn't come up until after I'd sent out the emails about the first one. Apparently, someone at my host changed a few settings around, and now you have to have "@evula.org" at the end of your FTP username to get it to work. Arg! I've already gotten a couple of emails from people who had gotten notices (see problem 1), probably more than a bit pissed that I was telling them to clear stuff out and then finding that they couldn't.
*sigh*
Edit: Forgot to link to relevant topics over on my Forums. For the first problem, click here. For the second problem, click here.
First up: a review of Spider-Man 2, written by yours truly. Hell yeah! Not to be outdone, I've also got a review of Harry Potter 3 written by PinkFluffyBunny.
The bulk of this update, however, has been to the Joke Archive. No new jokes, sorry, but I've made a couple big changes. The first, and most noticeable, is the fact that I've shifted the huge, long list of jokes into three columns, with the categories being listed in four columns. The second, almost equally noticeable change, is the fact that I rated each and every unorganized joke on the main listing page. That was a pain. Since it took so much time, I didn't get around to doing the jokes in the various categories in the Archive, but I do have a long trip coming up, so I can do it then (if everyone thinks the rating is a good idea; if not, I won't).
Anyway, I won't be updating anything next week, because I'll be going to MacWorld Boston. However, I will be bringing my laptop with me on the road, meaning that I'm going to get a lot of work done. I plan on updating the Lair on the 19th with a ton of new stuff.
Funny story: I accidently wrote "Harry Pooter" while typing this the first time. Gotta love typos.
In the first of 21 schedule updates to the Empire, I've gone through the trouble of trimming the fat around my forums. Here's what I've done:
* Combined the "Forum FAQs," "Forum News," "evula.net news," "evula.org news," "Suggestions, Questions, and Complaints," and "Technical Difficulties" boards into the Imperial Lounge.
* Moved the Imperial Lounge into it's own category, "Imperial News & Discussion"
* Made a new Technical Difficulties board, for tech support types of things.
* Combined all the Rants, Reviews, and Stories posts into one board, "Lair Content Discussion"
* Ditched inactive evula.net and evula.org member boards. The stuff is still there, but I've hidden them (11 boards total)
* Ditched the "(Blank) of the Month Award" boards. They were dead, and I don't see them coming back right now. If in the future I decide to have those awards again, the boards will come back.
I would like to point out that in combining the Rant, Review, and Story boards, I had to edit every single topic. For those keeping score, that's 120 topics (plus the "About this board" topic at the top). Ugh.
Well, I had a few spare moments here and there at work today. In that time, I was able to plot out updates all around the Empire for the rest of the year. 26 weeks until the end of the year (as far as Imperial updates are concerned), and only on 5 of those will there be no updates (due to, in order, Macworld, a play I might be doing, and a week off to make sure I get a huge update done).
I'd post the schedule, but then that would ruin all the wonderful surprises...
Just a small cosmetic change, really, but I've updated evula.net. I ditched the frames, as well as the contact page (since it was fairly useless).
Yeah, so it isn't that big of a deal. However, it is one of many updates I'm doing around the place to tidy up the Empire. Right now, I'm working on significant updates for evula.com and the other day, I had a downright smart idea about a new way to handle the evula.org navigation tables (and, who knows, one of these days I might do something with the site...). Of course, I'm also working on a few new things, too, but I don't want to say too much about those...
I'm also trying to hurry to get some of this stuff done before MacWorld. The Empress and I will be in attendance, but aside from a few hours on the computer in the car on the way there, I'm not going to be getting too much work done for about a week.
Oh, and for those keeping track, this is the rather confusing update I was talking about here.
Yeah, so I'm still forgetting to update the damn blog on time. However, I still don't feel too bad about it, since I'm getting quite a bit of work done... expect to see an update to one of the sites in the next few days.
What's funny about this particular update is that I'd been meaning to do so for quite a while, but I never really had the interest in it. However, I was working on something today (one of the big <cryptic grin> type things I'm doing currently) and realized that I had to update the site before I could continue work on what I was working on... that's confusing to anyone but me because of the vagueness, but oh well.
Anyway, I'm averaging about 1 Imperial update a week now, so I think I'll "unveil" one on Monday, and then another the week after that (since I've got two to choose from that are done, more or less, right now).
I updated the Store today, adding 39 items. This brings the total number of items for sale to 291! Yeesh!
Anyway, the thing that prompts this update is the 7 new products that CafePress recently released. Click the link to see what has been added; I'm pretty happy with the new products, though of course I wish that they'd get some black shirts at some point (though I'd be surprised if that happend).
Anyway, hope that suits everyone just fine. I've got another design in the works, and hope to be releasing that one in the next few months. However, now that the Store update is done, it's time to direct my attention to other Imperial matters... look for more updates soon. :)
Yeah, so updating this on a daily basis is hard. I either almost forget, or I have very little to say... as a result, I'm gonna switch over to a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule, with random updates every once and a while if something momentous actually happens.
Many thanks go out to kronoptic@hotmail.com for trying to steal my US West battle.net account. Jackass.
Oh, and this blog is now officially updated daily. Dunno how much longer I can keep that up, but I've updated every single day for more than a week. Go me!
Yeah, that's right, I updated the Store for a second time in less than a week.
Here's what is new:
This update means that the Store now has 252 items in it. Wow.
This is also all of the store stuff that I'll be doing for a while. From here out, I'll be concentrating just on update the Lair (unless inspiration strikes, like it did with the Noir style, in which case all bets are off).
Replies can be posted on my forums