Website Archives

Now you can comment on the current vote. Many thanks to ED for the suggestion - we've listened and updated to add the functionality. There is now a place to comment when you make a vote - you can either do this from the Vote Home Page or when your vote is registered (e.g. through the email link). Get into a discussion on why you voted the way you did. Let others know your thoughts.

Also, per the suggestion have started a page for links to sites that I find interesting or that have been helpful to me when I've been researching stuff.

Great to get suggestions - if you want to make suggestions, either use the contact page to get a message to me or if you're feeling bold, post to the forum on website design

Slowly catching up with my backlog of things to post. One of which is the latest Bumpkin Quiz that Mr O set a few weeks ago (Mr O currently being in Vegas at the Motor Speedway watching the NASCAR without me unfortunately, but hoping for a good race and good luck in the gambling).

Try the quiz (filter on quiz 6 if you just want to see the latest questions).

Alas the "stupid things to try" blogs are no more. Initially I thought there would be a lot of material here, but not enough has come to pass, so I've merged the entries into the "Open Forum" blogs. Makes more sense to keep the major categories to a minimum.

Home James and don't spare the horses. Whinney, Tally-Ho and all that. If anyone's taken the interest, I've spent my evenings last week re-designing the individual home pages to make the site look a little more interesting.

This is actually all part of the master plan. When I set out on the EastBayRag road, the first priority was to create content. No point having the best looking website in the world if there's no reason for anyone to look at. The next step was to make the site more attractive.

Well, failing to add any content of value whatsoever, I decided to move on to phase 2 anyway, so you should expect to see little improvements pop up in different parts of the site to make it more aesthetically pleasing.

Yet another change to the website. We've lightened the background color and gone with an icon theme for the menu across the top, then moved the detailed menu to the bottom whilst removing the big footer. There's also a wavy line graphic at the back of the menus to add a bit of artistic flare.

Just decided the old header and footer was a bit old school and took up too much space. So I changed it.

There's still a bit of work to be done here. I need to figure out what I want the logos to look like and add them in. The ones that are there now are only intended to be temporary. I will probably also do something so that when you mouse over the icons, they either change or the background changes.

Other changes in this batch include removing the “blog bar” at the side of the blogs as this was redundant except for the search box which I've now put on all of the blog pages instead. Everything else on the blog bar is repeated in the detailed menu, so there's not really a need for it.

Got round to doing a bit of tidying up. Rather than writing a blog article each time I post photos onto the site (so that a link is provided in the weekly email), I've edited the way the photos are posted so the weekly mail will automatically pick up a section and provide links to photos if a new category is added.

I'd had a few comments that there was too much on the ExPerryMental page so most people missed the most interesting thing being the ability to enter text and have it move round the screen. I've still kept the full page (on the link just provided), but have created an ExPerryMental Home Page that can be used to access either the full page or:

• Bounce that just has the logo floating round the screen and the ability to play music.
• Chequers that just allows you to have the background show different patterns and colors.
• Text Play (the most popular) that just has the text placement and rotation functions.

Finally, a few changes to the home page and the creation of a genesis page all of which is described in the EBR Business Plan Revealed blog article.

Well, this weekend's last frantic creativity has been to setup a web front end to my mail server. Rather than simply downloading one of the hundreds of free ones, I decided to write my own. Why? I have no idea at all! It just seemed like a good idea at the time so I did it.

After pulling a very frustrating all nighter to get this up and running, it's now there. It's a little bit more complicated than you think, especially when you want to deal with attachments. You need to build up a Mulit-purpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) message. So I've read many articles on yet another standard to abide by.

Interesting thing is that the php tools I'm using didn't seem to work out of the box as I thought. There's a function called imap_mail_compose that you use to build up your email (construct it right to conform to the standards), but it doesn't actually tell you how to send the bloody thing once you'd created it. Through trial and error, I managed to get it to work by deconstructing it and putting the header in one bit and the body in another bit of the imap_mail function that actually sends it.

During this endeavor I had problems with my "mulit." No, not a bad haircut spelled badly, but the word "mulit" spelled badly. I needed to set a header type to "TYPEMULTIPART" and screwed up. But that did allow me to find out that you can create your own header records, so I include a turtlehead status with all of mine rather than using something inane like "importance" or "sensitivity."

So why call it Turtlehead Mailer? Well, that's because it's not a technology break through, more of a technology poke through, and it allows me to spread more crap across the cyber world. So look out - if your screen turns brown, you may have been hit by a turtlehead mail.

As we get close to Christmas, I'm not going to be taking on any major development projects, but there is time to clean up some things. As an example, I've enhanced the main vote page so that the legend centers (which it has to for this week's vote as the options are rather lengthy) on the graph.

One of the main things I've been waiting to do, but needed more data is to make the archives a little better to view. There are now three ways to look at the blog archives:
Browse by titleBrowse 10 listings at a time

Browse the full list

Who can forget classics like Cheeseburger Murders or Mr O's Invasion of the Trevors? Well, most people probably which is why I've created this means of taking a look back at what was.

I've also provided the same archiving access to the historic votes. In addition here, you can view the vote as a single entry and it will display the graph of the vote results.

Wow! In my continuing effort to produce stuff that nobody will use, I've created some exceedingly useless pages in the Fun Stuff section. I've titled this new epic ASCII Fun as it kind of plays on the ASCII character set.

Basically, you get to type into a field and instead of entering letters, it enters the corresponding ASCII code of the letter you typed. And - it changes the color of the page to a color derived from the ASCII code.

You may well ask why? And as soon as you figure it out, let me know, because I haven't got a bloody clue. I was messing around with something else and needed to find the ASCII keys to use the left and right arrows to move through database records and I kind of ended up creating these pages.

The one positive thing is that I've used this new knowledge to create a manual slideshow, so, if you want to view a slideshow and determine the speed for each picture you can either by clicking on a “next” or “previous” button or by using the left and right arrows.

In the meantime, amuse yourself with the ASCII Fun

For anyone who's interested, the upgrade of all the server software has been completed. During the last three weeks I've been testing newer versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP on the development box. A couple of minor changes were required to some of the code. (I had a work around for how the post function dealt with quotes ["] when submitting from fields that seems to have been addressed so the work around has been partially removed).

For anyone who's not interested, why did you bother reading the previous paragraph?