Some website questions that have been asked recently -

Q: I can't see my profile! Do I have one?

Make sure you're logged in first of all. Next check your profile settings to see if you checked "I'm shy. Please make me invisible". If this is checked your profile will not be seen by anybody - including you. There is also a related checkbox to only show your profile to registered members. If you change any of these and still can't see your profile, logout and back in again.

Q: Where's my new weblog? My postings aren't showing up!

The 'Site Subscriptions' are only updated once an hour, so your weblog will  be visible by everybody an hour after you first create it. To see your posts right now, go to the 'Weblogs' page and make sure you are subscribed to your weblog (which should happen by default). Then click 'Use My Subscriptions'. 

Q: I want to remove a photo or photo album. How?

To remove a photo, visit 'Photos', and navigate to your album. Click on the photo you want to remove. If you are the owner, you'll see 'Edit Photo' in the 'Actions' menu above the photo. Click on that and you'll find a link to remove the photo.

Currently there is no easy way to nuke an entire album. Send me an email with the name of the album and I can get rid of it for you. You might want to check that you aren't using any of the images from that album in articles or profile photos, which could cause undesired results.

It turned out to be difficult to add a background image in the header for somebody's personal weblog. OK, that's not exactly accurate. It's actually pretty easy. The difficulty is with a multi-user site, that means I have to come up with an interface so that everybody can do it - and then tweak all the themes so that they won't show garbage when you visit the pages of folks who haven't made any changes. 

Anyway, I've figured out a way that doesn't cause too much pain. I've also added some different flavors of site header layouts to the theme selections for views and weblogs - so you have a bit more control over them. 

If everything still looks the same to you, that means I did a good job of ensuring compatibility. But now you can create a bit richer website or blog than you could before.  

The header choices are slim at the moment - the choices are 'simple' and 'meatlovers' in a couple of different flavors. Some have the text on the left and the site image in the middle, some reversed. Some show the date, some don't - which might be important to you for global readers. I'll be adding more headers to choose from. Some weblog headers include your name, some don't. The 'meatlovers' indicates it's got the works (or the 'lot' if you're an Aussie).

In order to set a background image on the header (currently only for weblogs, though I'll get it worked out for your shared websites soon) - you trigger it from one of the photos in your photo albums. View said photo, and the 'Actions' menu will let you set the photo to be any of 'profile photo', 'website logo', weblog logo', or 'weblog background'.

Click the appropriate one, and confirm when you get to the next page.

Note that if you currently have a weblog photo, and don't want it anymore (now that you can have a photo background on the header), you need to unset it. Choose any image (even your new background) and follow the steps above to set it as your weblog photo instead of as a background image.

Except that instead of confirming, click the 'Unset' button. This will unset your weblog photo. 

Apologies, I'll make all of this easier. This is just a temporary workaround until I've got a better way to do it. I also need some better preview options. It's all on my 2do list...

Just a quick little website note following the New Year. If you didn't set a birthday in your member profile, you may find that your profile age is now a year older than you really are.

We use the birthday in your profile to keep track so you don't have to update your age every year. We'll add a year automatically when your birthday rolls around. This entry is private incidentally - nobody can see it; and we won't send you a birthday greeting. You probably get enough of those from unscrupulous websites.

But if you don't haven't specified a birthday, your birthday becomes January 1.

Actually this may happen to many of you tomorrow because of differences in timezones. I forget exactly when this process kicks off and what timezone is in effect when it happens. That part can get terribly confusing - and it's still New Year's Eve in some parts of the world.

The point is you might want to check and correct your age if it's wrong and set your birthday so we can keep it right. 

Seems that we've now had a second wave of mail spam on the site. My apologies for these scoundrels. I managed to come up with a way to minimize or eliminate it though.

Go to the 'Edit My Profile' page and you will find a new checkbox that allows you to specify whether or not you will accept mail from folks that aren't your friend. 

Check the box and save it - and the spam will go away. Unless of course you have added a spammer to your 'My Friends' list.

You don't have to be mutual friends for this feature to work. It will accept mail from anybody whom you have claimed is a friend; regardless of whether they have reciprocated.

The other fine print is that the system admin (me) can still send you mail even if I'm not your friend. But I'm not going to send you spam. If you don't want any mail at all, go to the Features page and turn off the ability to read and/or send mail.  

A warm welcome to all our newest members. Looks like most of you are coming in via OpenID. Great! Please visit and check your profile if you haven't done so already. If you don't have a photo to upload, we've got some stock avatars available on the avatar page.

For website help, please see the Help link on the menu. You can also ask questions here in this forum. Goto Forums and over on the right hand side of each forum listed is a post link for that forum. This particular forum is called 'website'.

Just a quick note - I'll be leaving for Australia very soon (permanently) so please be patient if asking for help. Life is a bit hectic at the moment and my online time may be spotty. Other members may also be able to answer questions. If you're unsure how to do something, check (besides the help pages) the blue arrows. They may contain additional actions when clicked and which should answer a lot of the 'How do I' type of questions.

Enjoy your visit.

PS> If you are able to do so, Firefox is the preferred web browser here and will be much more pleasant to explore with. I've tried to make everything work on IE, but it always seems to popup stupid non-existant errors and generally make everybody's life more difficult.

Got OpenID more or less working on a few of these websites. Macgirvin.com and cr.unchy.com for starters. I'll extend this to other sites as I shake any remaining bugs out. 

The biggest hurdles have been in handling profile data which isn't always available via OpenID. I'm hoping there isn't a big rash of spam since this bypasses our email verification. Just have to wait and see. I don't mind self-signed identities, but they have to resolve to real identities, or they ultimately aren't worth the paper they aren't written on. 

And hardly anybody supplies their birthday in the OpenID world. I don't care so much about the birthday as the age, since this is turning into a legal requirement for social sites; and also relates specifically to the laws (i.e. the DMCA) regarding storage of personal info for youngsters.

I'll have to code around these until these issues make it into OpenID proper. They will. You can't really have a distributed identity service that doesn't map to an identity or that doesn't play along with federal law.   My own company is working on something in this space but of course I can't talk about that. 

Oh yeah - please report any bugs you encounter to the bugs forum. 

It's not fair for me to have all the fun reading the website logs. So I've built a page to let others see some of the amusing searches which have led people to this site.

Just go to the new refer page.  Well OK, here's the fine print... There can be some pretty vulgar stuff in the logs, so your account needs to have a non-zero 'Tolerance' setting in the profile to access it.

And the only way this can happen is if you actually have an account and are logged in. Also I am only including search results, and not links from other sites. Sometimes these links can have names and passwords and session ID's and stuff in them and I don't want to compromise somebody's identity just so y'all can have a quick laugh.

The one that really got me laughing today was:

sheet music star wars on the alto saxaphone free nude

It's crunch time at work so I've neglected to give a website update recently. Here are some things you may have missed if you haven't visited recently...

'Sharing' is now called 'Views'. It's hard to get the 'Share' concept across in thirty words or less. It's a personalized view of a website.

The entire comment interface was revamped to allow for comments on multiple object types. Instead of just weblog and forum articles, you may now also post comments on photos and profiles.

Profile viewing has improved, adding some more community features. It's also been linked with the buddylist stuff.

A lot of this stuff was here already in more obscure forms - I've just exposed it a bit more.  

Improved the name generators. The basic name generator will also do a website lookup and see if the domain is available. I've also added some options so you can lookup names by length - in case you're trying to find a catchy domain name that's less than 8 characters. Good luck... but the tool will show some interesting candidates. I've also added the same suite of options to the stage name generator, which additionally can use a predefined first or last name.

The name generators by default will not show adult terms. You can change your profile tolerance to add these to the mix. The profile tolerance may also be adjusted to include racier random quotes on the page footer.

Profiles have started to take on a bit of a 'myspace' appearance, though it's questionable how far down this path I'm willing to take it.  They will use your view/(share) theme and avatars so you can tailor the look a bit. I've also added article and comment counts in a few places so you can see at a glance who is a contributor (all three or four of them) and who ain't.

Oh, and I'll mention the music player also. I've got a bit more work before you can upload your own playlist, but that will be coming shortly. I've populated a few cool web radio channels for your listening pleasure.  

I will now return you to your regularly scheduled program.  

It's interesting watching the dichotomy of the membership numbers and the traffic numbers.

We're now solidly dishing out a million hits a month and getting searches for everything from toilet paper to Che Guevara.

It's pretty fascinating. A million of anything is a lot. (Unless it's money, in which case it really isn't very much at all).

Since I'm working full time again, I've had to come up with ways of reducing the daily maintenance load of this and all my other websites. It turns out that dealing with wave after wave of comment spam is the most time-consuming chore. Since this is a moderated website, none of it ever gets through. But somebody (like me) has to look at each message that gets past the kiddie script filters and then the floodgate analyzer (the first lines of defense) and click to discard it. I'm sick of it.

This is all so the site can allow anonymous comments, but that isn't what the site is all about - and it's a very disproportionate maintenance task for such a low priority feature that gets used maybe three times a year legitimately and about sixty thousand times a year by spammers. So effective immediately, anonymous comments are gone. Site members can still comment on articles. It is only those that come from nowhere and belong to nobody (and are addressed to nobody and say nothing) that are being restricted. 

The avatar selector library was brought into the modern age last week. This is all part of the re-organization of image collections, since this is nothing more than a special case image collection. Once the special cases are dealt with, I'll start to migrate the rest of the photo albums. Anybody creating an album today will be dealing completely with the new interface - the old one is only there to serve up old pages.  Your photo albums can now have guest comments. Well, if you read the last paragraph, more appropriately would be 'member comments'. Eventually you'll be able to do anything with a picture that you can do with an article.

The ability to create newfeeds is now rate limited because of some unpleasant experiences I had working with a sister site to this one.  Anybody can have a couple of personal feeds. If you want more, you need to get more points (by being a useful and contributing member of the community).

I think it's interesting to observe how much 'software development' is actual technical engineering vs. how much of it is 'social engineering', implementing rules and policies, weeding out anti-social elements, rewarding 'good behaviour', etc. As time goes on I'm doing a lot less of the former and a lot more of the latter.

The 'Matchmaker' friend finder has now been installed. This allows members to find other compatible members for anything from drinking buddies or band members to marriage. The basic premise is a cooperating search, where you match your profile against what other members are searching for. 

An important piece of this application is the addition of several new profile fields. If you want to be found by somebody, it will be a whole lot easier if they can figure out what you are looking for.

The default is 'Not Looking' for anybody of any age for any reason. If you want to be found, you should probably change this. (My Profile from the 'Tools' menu). Until a few people do this, the result set will likely be limited. You might also consider providing your sex and age, as these might be important to somebody trying to find you.

You don't have to be looking for romance. You can choose to be found by people of either sex for any level of interaction you desire.

Oh yeah, to make things sweeter, there's now a 'point system' for folks that contribute to the site in various ways. Contribute, get more points. I'm still figuring out the reward part of the equation, but there are very likely to be desirable rewards for top contributors. One important point reward that's in place today is that contributors get top billing in the Matchmaker. 

Applicable contributions include writing articles and comments, voting on things, and inviting new folks. To make the Matchmaker thing work, it would help to have some more members. If you use the Invite link from the Tools menu, you can help us get a critical mass of matchmaker members, earn points -  and you don't even have to write anything.

Hint, hint. 

The other day I started on an 'Events' page to provide reminders of birthdays and important events and stuff. I figure it would be a very useful addition to the site. I'll have a demo online perhaps in a few days, as time permits.

It's somewhat ironic that I got so occupied putting together the framework for the birthday reminder project that I neglected to remember my father's birthday that day. 

It's been a while since I updated the changelog. Here goes...

Added several general purpose reference tools to the 'tools' menu. Besides the world's most comprehensive chord chart and the conversion tables, you've now got a calculator and dictionary/thesaurus, etc. The dictionary is coming to you from dict.org. I tried to put a good dictionary online here, but the space requirements turned out to be phenomenal.

Added uploaded avatars to the list of things which could be censored. This hopefully will keep me out of legal trouble if somebody tries to upload a kiddie porn avatar. Registration forms now require an age. This is yet another legal compliance issue. Not sure that the law has taken effect yet, but if it does, I will need to know members' ages retroactively. You can still register invisible if you don't want anybody knowing your age (or anything else about you).

Added a few pages to send links and registration stuff to friends. Added email notification that you've got mail here; because otherwise you might not know to check it.

I changed a few hundred other little things as well, but they're escaping me at the moment.     

The theme for the latest batch of changes is 'online presence'. 

Online presence added - this is a little AJAX app to let you see who is online at any given time. I don't currently have a method to implement "I'm away", but it does remove you from being actively online after about half an hour of inactivity (I'll be tweaking this in the future to more accurately reflect what's going on). You will fall off the list if you leave the website or logout. 

I'm also adding 'guests' to the online presence instead of just registered members. I solved a lingering problem about how to identify guests individually instead of having 27 people showing up under the name 'guest'. The reason this is important is because solving it allows guests to enter the chat room (which is yet another AJAX app).

Oh yeah - the chat rooms... Now that I've been digging into some of the more esoteric ways of querying the database, I also solved another nagging issue, which is how to tell how many people there are in a given chatroom at any given time.

So now perhaps the chat rooms will get some use, perhaps not. We'll see... 

--

Next on the todo list for upcoming feature enhancements is going to be a way to share  and possibly merge your subscription lists. This way you can easily configure your view of the website to contain (for example) all of the music related stuff, plus your own weblog, and everything that your best friend has subscribed to. This is light-years beyond anything you'll find at social sites like 'myspace' and might be more accurately described as 'ourspace'. That's the plan anyway. The devil is in the details. And as you may know already from watching this site evolve (at least for those of you who have watched the site evolve),  you're likely to discover some even more interesting ways of using this ability which haven't even been thought of yet.

The 'categories' menu had to be split in two. One section for forums, and another for news. This follows the general site philosophy that categories are individualized and personal namespaces. OK, it also fixes a little bug which wouldn't display mixed category results precisely because of this general site philosophy.

The menu likewise multiplied and now contains a 'Tools' section for some of the stuff that was starting to clutter the main menu.

Seems like I'm always googling 'unit convertor' to find something to convert quanities of one thing into another. Problem is that I never bookmark the good ones and so half the time I end up on a mortgage convertor or some other weird thing which doesn't have the units I'm looking for. 

So I solved that problem. 

I also felt that a guitar chord dictionary would be a useful web tool. Mine isn't as pretty as some of the others out there, but it is reasonably complete. You want a hundred different ways to play an E chord?  Go here. What's this got to do with social software? Absolutely nothing... unless of course you're a guitar player who sometimes needs to figure out where there's an E7b13b11 somewhere around the eighth fret when you're using an open tuning.

All those changes I didn't do last week? Now I did them. If you go to the news, forums or weblogs pages you can subscribe to stuff. Once you've subscribed to stuff, go to 'My Profile' and you can turn on your subscriptions.

Once you do this, you can create your own world within this website. You will only see those information sources which you have chosen to see.

Oh, yeah... as a side effect there are now private forums - which you can restrict to anybody you choose, providing that it's your forum.

If you wish to access an information channel you aren't subscribed to, you can still do it through the forum, weblog, or news menu items. Just click on the name. If it's private you won't be able to click on it. 

You have no idea how much work went into this. I've convinced MySQL to do some very unnatural things that shouldn't be possible, and in fact weren't possible a year ago. I've spent a lot of time testing and debugging but it's entirely possible I may have missed or overlooked something. Please let me know via the 'bugs' forum if you run across some really weird badness or really bad weirdness - whatever.

If you don't use your own private subscriptions, you will be using the website default subscription list. This has some unique characteristics.

• It is refreshed only once a day
• On refresh, it will pick up any new weblogs and forums which are world-readable
• It will also pick up any news sources which the site admin has tagged as interesting.

There are a few side effects to these rules.

• If you create a new weblog or forum, it won't be picked up as a site subscription until tomorrow.
• If you create a private forum, it won't ever be picked up as a website subscription.
• There are a gazillion news sources, and the site admin (me) is not going to tag all of them as interesting. You'll have to subscribe to your favorite feeds on your own.

There's also a way around all the side effects. If you enable 'Auto subscribe' on the 'My Profile' page, your personal subscription list will be updated whenever you login - with any new weblogs and forums which you are able to access. You can also manually subscribe to any news feed with imported content. If you have a hard time with 'imported content' and what that means, don't worry about it right now. If it's somebody else's feed and the subscribe checkbox isn't grey, you can subscribe to it. If the box is grey, you can't.

If you can't subscribe to it, you can create your own copy of the feed and import some articles, and then you can subscribe to it.

Oh - and I finally fixed the bug that sometimes left your name lingering in a chat room after you left it.

Nope, nothing changed this week.

In particular, I didn't re-architect the entire backend to eliminate a bunch of table types that were remarkably similiar. And this change of course had nothing to do with implementing a wide range of new functionality that won't be showing up on this site in the future.

Oh yeah, and I certainly didn't change the entire article interface to deal with persistent UUID's instead of article numbers. And even if I had, this of course would have nothing to do with any of that new functionality which I already mentioned won't be showing up.

Another of the things which I didn't do was provide an option to skip all of the imported news so you could see the site just as it used to look. And I also didn't give you the option on the members page to see everything ever written by any particular member.

Nope.

However, I would caution you to enjoy for now, but not get too attached to some of these new features which of course didn't get added. The reason has to do with some of that new functionality I mentioned back towards the beginning. It's entirely possible that you may discover better ways of doing the same kinds of things in the future, and so some things might vanish as a result.  

I've now got newsfeed imports turned on. This differs from the normal way of viewing external news feeds in that you can import some or all of the articles into your personal view of this site.

With this, you can build up a page of daily updates from anything that interests you. 

Currently you can't read comments from or make comments on external articles unless you go back to the original site. This is where feed technology is still in chaos, but it's starting to settle down now that atom-thread is going to RFC.

The other thing missing from news articles right now is categories. This is likely to show up in a few days.

The immediate effect is that I've preloaded a few interesting feeds. This should spice up the front page a little. 

Oh yeah - I also whipped up a preview mode for comments.

And a hundred other little tweaks that you'll probably never know about because if all goes well they should just work and you won't have any reason to care. 

Feeds: Cleaned up the atom feeds and added support for feed-thread, which is now Proposed Standard. 

News aggregator: Added voting and censorship to public feeds. 'My Sources' is now truly private, so you can get a daily feed from Hustler magazine if you want and not worry about somebody censoring it. It's your feed - nobody else can see it. 

Rate My Photo: I got bored looking at the same top two or three pictures flip back and forth on the front page over the last couple of weeks. Now everybody has a chance at the front page. You can also vote on the picture you see on the front page by clicking on it.

Security: More XSS madness. Third party attacks, image execution, high-bit filtering in ASCII mode, that kind of thing. 

Account: Cleaned up the account page a bit, and let you specify a weblog photo just like an avatar.

Weblogs: Weblogs now have a theme selector, so you can pretty much personalize them without any HTML/CSS. Maybe it's time for a theme contest...