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I've got enough website news to warrant its own post I think. I'll talk about this stuff first so the post will sink to the bottom. Well the big news is aphelionsites.net, my former webdomain expired, as planned. Not too big of a deal since I don't use it much. What this means is some hotlinked images might not show up. I tried to look through my history and correct these errors, but some may still exist. The DGS site was the only website still using the domain, so that's been moved to http://www.darkmercury.net/dgs. If you can't or don't want to remember that you can find the link in my featured section. While I was messing with that I also embedded the quakecon video into the related DGS and DarkMercury pages, so it can be watched without downloading the whole thing. Next up is the "Categories" selection at the top left of the site. You can click there or on the category image to a page showing all my website categories. From there, click on any you want to read about.. say Flying posts.. and voila! You're now seeing only Flying related website entries. That's pretty neat. A simple feature but long missing. And the Friends page update...Every time I post I say it's the last time I'm gonna change it. It's kind of ended up full circle. The old versions showed only one post, but you got to see what was going on in all my friend's lives at a glance. If someone posted multiple times quickly, I wouldn't see any but the latest post. I was overjoyed to prove the concept of creating a Livejournal emulation from just RSS links, but that led to a lot of posts from one or two people at the top and everyone else lost at the bottom. I changed it to unlimited posts for 24 hours (so I wont miss any) and after that it just shows your latest entry. All sorted by date of post and I think I like it this way. It's kinda come back to where it was before. I also chopped the time off the post, leaving just the date. It looks cleaner. Anyways I'll see how I like it this way. I still have my LJ style proof of concept at http://www.darkmercury.net/friendsunlimited.php. News Page opens links in a new window by default now...I removed the comment word bubbles that I was experimenting with this morning. I think that's it.
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Friends 2.0I promise this will be the end since there isn't much else I can do to the friends page. But I finally achieved what I set out to do in 2005 when I created the friends page. Starting from a set of rss links, the friends page achieves what Livejournal does by listing posts made by your friends in the order in which they were posted. LJ accomplishes this by storing posts on its server which it can read in order, but it's a bit of a feat to do it from nothing but a few rss links. I give you unlimited entries up until a week. If you haven't posted in more than a week, your last entry is truncated at the bottom in purple. It's all displayed in order by post date and it's awesome. The page works through with the basic logic: Define friends array with rss links, names, homepage For each friend in the array, find all the posts in the last week -> each post is added to separate "posts" array Sort that array of posts by date Print the sorted array of posts
Sorting the array was the big problem solved today. Starting with the initial friends array in version 1.5 really did make this possible after all. It's easy to add/remove friends and the script handles everything! Of course there is a lot of error handling there too since RSS feeds are very flexible. Since you've probably already read about everything already I'll stop posting about it now. If anyone cares to to see the different versions of the site as it evolved:
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I've tried to stay with a weekly update similar to Rick's, but with my long posts these days I've exhausted a lot of the tech posts I've had in mind. Less than a month until aphelionsites.net expires, so I've got to get all the sites moved over. Obviously this is my new blog site, the dgs is backed up here at /dgs/ and my flight instructor wiki got moved over to ksuflightteam.net/cfi. The index page of merkur.aphelionsites.net now redirects to this site. Instead of making entries, I find it an acceptable alternative to work and improve different features of this site. Some updates are small, such as new icons for the apple and flying posts. Another little update inspired by my longer entries is clicking "comments" at the bottom takes you down the page directly to comments posted and the entry form. Little cosmetic changes are nice and all, but where's the beef? Well for the major update made last week, click features at the top of the page. What you'll see is the original idea behind having a features page. Before it was just a few links w/entry titles. I didn't like this for many reasons. It was way too plain with no creativity. The only good thing about it, I could edit the entries and switch it from "weblog" to "featured" and it would automatically move itself over. Problem is when you went back through the history of the weblog, those posts were now missing. It interrupted the history and now has a much better integration with the site. The idea is, if you were coming to the website for the first time, and wanted to know what it's all about, you go to "Featured". The second big update I did today, and involves the "Friends" page. From version 1.3 to 1.4.1, the friends page can now detect how long it's been since you posted via RSS. Now the friends page will color code people based on how long it's been since you posted. If it's been longer than 2 weeks, your name turns purple and the entry is hidden. There shouldn't be any time where I go longer than 2 weeks without checking it, so it's not like I'm not seeing your post, but I can only look at that guitar you're planning on buying for so long. Jo suggested a grey color if it's been longer than a year, which sadly, I may need. You get a light blue color if you posted today, dark blue up to two weeks after that, and purple for longer. Red means RSS error. Your site could be down or the script timed out, etc... I like it organized by name, but someday might change it to order of entry. RSS is tricky to program around, because it's very flexible. For example, Livejournal doesn't require you to title your post so that field is sometimes missing. I use the title as a link to the post on its home site. So I have to have a backup idea which is to use the link itself as the title. The content:encoded tag which I discovered on schultz's site gives me problems too. Which do I use? Content:encoded or description? What if there is no date? What should the script output? What color does it use? All these things have to be thought of and still make the script small and fast. I'm pretty proud of the script. It uses magpie RSS to actually grab the entries, but the output and design is all mine. I don't think any other people actually use the page, but who knows. So now all that's left to do is make entries....but that seems to be getting done too!
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It's about time for an overhaul of my blog site. I've had this domain for a few months since this is an update I've wanted to do for a while, but just like my actual posts I tend to put it off. I do feel bad since I enjoy writing on this site, so I've spent the last week making updates to make this site more enjoyable. So what's new at DarkMercury.net and why should you care?
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