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 like all sites face spanners these days, suggest you use wysiwig captcha on all guestbook entries. Just a fact of life.

Did you develop this site software ? If so please let us know weve a few ideas on co-operation.

Kindest

Kubs

Nude Girls are Cool

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.  

So you're going to Australia? I'm envious. My brother did the whole outback trek thing. Apologies for not visiting recently, it's been crazy at work. Pointyheads and dickheads and IE7 need I say more? But I really love all the social touches you've added. You still should consider spending money on a good UI designer :) but you've done a GREAT job.

Hope you'll remember me when you get to a million members. I was number 9! >PPPPPPPP  Not only that but I had to put up with all the buggy pre-releases. That should be worth at least 1000 points, don't you think?

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

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. 

Here's how it works... Let's say that you are into uhm, 'music'. When you create your member profile (from 'My Account' on the menu), list it as an interest. You may list other interests also, separated by commas.

These will automatically become website forums if they aren't already. Now go to the Forum list. There's now a music forum (if it wasn't there already).

So tomorrow if Bob comes along and is into music, there is a greater chance that he will sign up and that you will meet and perhaps discuss this common interest, all because he found that there's a 'music' forum on the site. Maybe you don't have anything to write about music today. That's OK. Maybe Bob does...

Maybe I do.

This website has existed in one form or another since 1999, mostly as a static web page or two. It has been visited by thousands of curious web travellers who have stumbled across a link somewhere and has provided a place for me to share my life with friends and family. In early 2006 I decided to make the site interactive.

What you see is the result of that effort. It has been reborn as a meeting place and community website.

First the ground rules:

1. Anything depicting sex with either animals or children will not be tolerated.

2. Hacking/cracking or otherwise abusing the site software in nefarious ways is forbidden.

3. We also will not tolerate commercial spam and postings created only to promote other sites. 

Any of these activities will result in your ejection from this community.

Register here! Membership is easy and totally free!

All of your personal profile details are optional, with the exception that you must have a username and password in order for us to identify you. You also must supply a valid email address to register. Email addresses are not used by us for any marketing purposes, and are never shown to other site users. 

One membership option is to choose 'invisibility' where you may lurk around the site and check out some of the features available to registered members but without showing up on the Members page. Please be aware that should you choose this option, it only protects your member profile from public viewing. Active participation in weblogs, chat rooms, forums, etc. will tend to expose the fact that you exist.

Membership allows you to actively participate in and create weblogs, chat rooms, forums, photo albums, create news feeds, and much more.

Avatars may be useful for some site activities, such as profiles and article comments. You may choose from something in our avatar collection or select your own. In order to be used as an avatar, it must be a common image format (JPEG, GIF, or PNG) and 100 or pixels or less in either dimension. Upload it in the image uploader and from there, select the individual image for viewing. If the image fits the size constraints, you will be shown 'Use as avatar' as one of the image options.

If you've got any questions, bug reports, whatever, feel free to ask. I'm Mike.

This is a community site. If you don't like the content, make some of your own.

Mac's Music appears to be a legitimate business enterprise in the UK. Since I'm getting a lot of search hits for it, it's probably best not to use that site (macsmusic.com) for the gateway to my adult website. So I've shuffled things a bit. macsmusic.com now leads you here. If you're feeling a bit on the randy side, and don't want one of my really raunchy URL's showing, you'll want to visit x.macsmusic.com, which is another world entirely. 

The RSS feed aggregator is mostly functional now. Registered members can import their own feeds, or you can browse those news/weblog sources which others have made available. 

Located here.

Enjoy.

You've probably wondered if software development has stopped on this website. OK maybe you haven't. In any event, it hasn't. But most of the visible features have been stabilizing, so the bigger changes are mostly going on behind the curtain.

The CSS subsystem has gone through the most radical change in the last week or two. That's the part which controls the overall look of the site - fonts, colors, etc. Most of the old-timers know that you can access this site from a few different URL's and each one provides a different flavored experience. That hasn't changed. What has changed is that now the style sheets are truly cascading. You can access some of these different flavors right here right now. There's a new 'Theme' link on the menu. Try it. Granted my theme selection isn't all that great, but this too will change - just like everything else. 

The other big headache I've been fighting is drop shadows. If you are viewing this site with firefox, you may notice that most of the pictures have a little shadow behind them - making them stand out from the page. You've no idea what a can of worms was involved in doing this.

There are lots of ways of doing drop shadows using CSS. Most of the websites you see out there which use drop shadows are doing it with CSS. But there's a catch. The CSS to create a drop shadow relies on a  CSS property called 'float' to make the shadow stick to the image and not go wandering away. Float is evil. It has all kinds of side effects which aren't very nice. Images jump their surrounding divisions. But the nastiest side effect is that it doesn't work if your image is centered on the page. Most of my article images are centered. 

You can get around this limitation of float by enclosing the image (and its shadow) in a table. I experimented with doing this. Yay. The CSS drop shadows all work. Boo. The images are no longer in the center of the page. Why not? Tables have their own positional elements. If you enclose a table in a div that's centered, the table won't be. You need to center the table on its own. My solution to make the site look normal again was then to add tables to everything and then center all the tables. But not all the images are supposed to be centered. You can put smiley faces in the text. Let's ignore the fact that drop shadows don't look right on the smiley faces because they don't have square corners. The big problem is that if all the tables with images are centered, the smileys will end up on the wrong place on the page. That is unless I parse the article, find out where all the images are and then find out which ones are centered and which ones aren't.

This is a lot of work just to make a shadow.

The way I've been doing shadows which aren't affected by position and layout is to run all the images through a script which creates the shadows on the fly. The shadow isn't part of the HTML page, it's part of the picture. This works great for preserving the layout.

But the problem here is the corners. If all the images were on a white background, or the same color background, it would be fine. But they aren't. So the shadows look unnatural unless I make the corners transparent. What's wrong with doing this? Nothing really. Except if the picture is a JPEG. JPEG's don't do transparency. GIF's do. GIF's are great for simple logos, but they are limited to 256 colors. 255 if you count the transparent pixels. They aren't very good for photographs. Ahh, but nowadays we also have PNG. PNG is good for photographs, and it has transparency. Cool. I have a solution. Right?

Nope. Microsoft's browser doesn't handle transparent PNG's easily (I ranted about this a week or two ago in my weblog). That's why you currently won't see the cool drop shadows if you are using IE.

The other problem with PNG images is that they're huge compared to JPEGs. Ten times as big. Granted, they don't lose pixels either, but that's the price you pay for lossless compression. Big files. So my cute little drop shadows make the page take twice or three times as long to load.

Is there any way around that? Why yes. CSS drop shadows.

I've got a vicious circle going on now. There's no good way to have drop shadows which just work all the time on any page background and any browser and any image layout. It's just not possible.

I've been banging my head about this for a couple of months now. I finally went back to dynamic shadows and to heck with IE. It's all wasted effort. Or it will be. Drop shadows are supposed to be a property of CSS itself. You should be able to specify it just like a border. The only problem is that even though this has been defined by the W3C, no browsers have yet implemented it. None.

But someday they will. And when they do, all of the work I've done to make pretty shadows will have been wasted. So to take a cue from J Barksdale - "Rule #2. Don't play with dead snakes."

This snake is dead. It's about time I stopped playing with it. So for today, you'll have cute shadows in Firefox. But the pages will load more slowly than if you use IE. In IE the pages won't look as nice. And that's the way it's going to be until everybody implements CSS shadow properties. Or, if I finally get tired of the whole mess and just dump the shadows completely.   

You now have the ability to become a site member without revealing your membership to the outside world. Setting the "I'm shy. Make me invisible" button on account creation or through your profile (the 'My Account' menu item) will hide your profile details from public viewing, yet still make you a fully qualified member with access to all of the site member features.

Please note that regardless of your invisibility setting, active participation in chatrooms, forums, or weblogs will tend to reveal the fact that you exist.

The RSS feed logic has been extended to mirror the forum interface.

The following constructs are now possible:

feed

                    - This provides a top-level feed. All forums, all weblogs.

feed/forum/forsale         

                    - Provide feed for the 'forsale' forum.

feed/category/forsale    

                    - This is different. It provides a feed of any post from any forum (not including weblogs) which is tagged with the category 'forsale'.

feed/mike

                    - Provides a feed of an individual weblog. In this case, my own (I'm mike). No forum posts are included.

feed/mike/software

                     - Provides a weblog feed (my weblog) of any posts tagged with category 'software'.

Any feed URL may have /text added onto the end to provide a visible feed in text/plain format. 

I've created a room or forum called 'website' that I'll use for documentation and/or questions about this website and corresponding software. 

This is a preview release of the Note-A-Day Weblog, version 3. It is my own software package. My name is mike.  The capabilities and features of this site have been rapidly changing. You won't see many of these capabilities and features unless you register for an account. (Membership has its privileges.)

In both the recently added 'forum' section and also in the chat rooms,  you have the ability to create private conversations that can only be viewed by people who know how to find them. These forums/rooms are not listed anywhere. They are created by starting the forum/room name with a period. For instance .myhiddenroom would be hidden. To access these and view the topics therein, you would have to enter the forum/room name in the URL bar. Public conversations can be found from the menu (assuming you are logged in).  

Syntax is:

  http://whatever-site.com/forum/name

replace 'name' with the name of the (secret) forum you wish to access. 

The same thing works for chat

  http://whatever-site.com/chat/name

Notice that I did not put the specific site-name. This particular site can be found under a few different names and may be different depending on how you got here. The contents are mostly the same. Each site has a slightly different look. You might wish to compare xntrik.com and baddcafe.com as examples of how this works.

Update: July 11, 2006

Hidden forums are no longer supported since we now have access controlled forums, which are better.