Four Island

This post is the first day of VisitorGrid Week. For more information, read the post linked to right there.

A few weeks ago, I was cleaning my room up, preparing for the move back to America. I looked up on top of my bookshelf and found a big stack of papers I had completely forgotten about. They were old papers, stories and drawings I had created years and years ago. One that I found I particularly felt I had to share with you:

I drew that picture a verrrrry long time ago. Yes, quite a long time ago. That's right, it is a four. In fact, it's the original Fourie.

I had named it Fourie back when I had created it, but I had thought that I had lost it ages ago. But, now it's found again.

The interesting thing is to compare it with the modern Fourie. The original Fourie had a more angular body, while the modern Fourie has a curved one. (Actually, I have a strange way of writing the glyph 4 that other people seem to think is a U, a 9 or an h) Also, the original Fourie had dots for eyes while the modern one has vertical lines.

All in all, I'm happy to have found this old relic again, as well as the rest of the sentimental junk I found in that pile upon my bookshelf.

Ok, that was the LONGEST POLL EVER. Let's be afraid of the Poll Of The Four Months. And the paradox, how can you vote that you don't vote? Very strange, but at least Four Island's back up!

My Opinion - 22 vote(s)! No, even if I think "Yes" - 0 vote(s)! Yes, even if I think "No" - 2 vote(s)! I don't vote - 8 vote(s)!

For once, I've decided to run a weekly (as in, a full week, not once a week) special. Because of the How To Write a Good Blog Post tutorial I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I've decided to create a VisitorGrid.

I laid out the "wants" and the "needs" and then spent about 6 hours filling in the boxes. I filled them all out but two, and I chose 6 of the best ideas to actually implement.

Now, everyday this week (except Saturday, of course), I will be posting a post whose inspiration comes directly from my VisitorGrid. At the end of the week, on Saturday, I'll release my VisitorGrid so you can see the original ideas and the ones I decided not to do.

I hope this'll be a lot of fun!

EDIT: To JAL, Gryphic and Timbo94, I know your websites are down. Sooooorrry about that! I can't fix it tonight, but I'll try ASAP tomorrow! Sorry! I was tweaking :)

Ok, so the first week of Four Island being back up is coming to a close. Tomorrow I'll post my regular weekly poll, so don't worry. I just wanted to say a few things about Four Island.

First of all, that weird thing with the duplicate posts, yes, that was my fault. Don't blame Four Island. When I was manually posting the "I'm back!" post, I accidentally posted it twice, so I removed the second and posted the Lorelle post. But, I forgot to remove the Lorelle post from the pending queue, so Four Island decided to post it again the next day. Sorry about that!

Four Island's source control system has been changed from Subversion to Mercurial. This is because as I can't always be at the server now, I can make use of Mercurial's distributive property by downloading the repository and modifying that off the network, then pushing the changes back to the server later.

The project management system has also been changed from Trac to Redmine, an interesting-looking system that allows you to host all your projects in a SINGLE environment instead of many different ones. I hope it works out well, it was a chore to set up as it runs on Ruby on Rails.

By the way, I've been checking the new quotes queue recently and found quite a lot there. I just want to say, if you're logged in when you submit the quote, it'll go straight to the database without me having to verify it. That way, it's less work for me and your quote shows up instantly.

I know what you're thinking. I'm going to start this post with my "Recently, I....." line that I've completely overused. Well, forget it. I've already written the first line, and it's not "Recently, I....", it's "I know what you're thinking." See? I've outsmarted you. The "Recently, I...." line is in the second paragraph.

Recently, I wrote a post entitled Lorelle Link and Comment Challenge which included a link to a post on Timbo94's blog, Dream Weaver. Timbo94 seems to have a strange habit of including special characters in his blog post titles, which mess up the permalink badly. In fact, when I clicked on the link in my admin panel, it just came up as 404.

Because of this, I decided to change his permalink structure to not include post titles. I discovered Wordpress' page on Permalink Structure Tags, and I was soon messing around, trying to create the ugliest permalink structure I could. In fact, I ended up with the monstrous:

/%category%/%author%/%year%%monthnum%%day%%minute%%second%
        %post_id%/

While that was fun, it made me think. If you're going to have a permalink structure (if you don't, I'll be scared of your blog), make sure it's a good one that you won't want to change sooner or later. Changing your permalink structure can make old backlinks fail, but a bad permalink structure (like special characters in post titles), backlinks will also fail.

In the case of Timbo, he should either have used a different permalink structure to begin with, or simply omitted the special characters from his post titles. And, the latter's probably preferable because, well, fourisland.com/blog/permalink-structure/ is much prettier than, to take the example of Wordpress' default permalink structure, fourisland.com/blog/?p=18 (or whatever this post's ID is).

But, you should also remember, that when picking a permalink structure, if you're going to make it obnoxious like the monstrosity above, make sure you actually like it before setting it in stone.

This post is an attempt to complete Lorelle's Unusual Blog Subjects Blog Challenge.

I'm here to talk about two strange things that I saw recently. One, is the fact that when I logged in to write this post, I had to solve a reCAPTCHA. That's normal. What wasn't normal, however, was the fact that the second word I had to type in wasn't, in fact, a word. It was "3" and then a "one over two" fraction glyph. Now, there normally isn't a fraction key on the keyboard, is there. I just put in "3.5"

The other strange thing is this blog I found out about recently (on Plurk, in fact) called One Red Paperclip. It's the story about this person who takes a single red paperclip and trades it to someone for something of higher value. He then trades that item for one of greater value and so on until he receives a house.

That is a pretty strange idea, I thought. But apparently, apart from getting a house, he also because Mayor for a day, had a giant red paperclip constructed right outside his house, received $500, got the Key to the town, became Honorary Lifelong Citizenship and had a local holiday created to honor his paperclip quest. Goodness, that's one big prize! And all for one measly little paperclip. 8D

NOTE: I am sorry about the double posting thing. I don't know what's wrong, and I'm going to check it out as soon as possible. Thank you.

I've been reading a blog recently called Lorelle on Wordpress. It's a blog about blogging, and it's UBER GOOD. I don't know why, but it's like a jinxed book. I can't get off of it, there's so much good content on it.

Even if you do not have a Wordpress blog (like me), I'd still suggest Lorelle on Wordpress. Not everything posted there is strictly Wordpress related (like the title of this post, for example). A lot of it is just blogging in general.

And that brings me to the second point of this post. Dually inspired by Lorelle's "Blog Challenge" series (a type of post challenging you to post something belonging to some criteria on your blog--besides being fun, it gives you post ideas) and the comment thread of Dream Weaver's Entry 2 - "Are all Angels bad?", I've created a challenge of my own. But, since I don't want to copy Lorelle completely, I've decided I won't do a blog challenge. No, I'll do a comment challenge.

I want you to find a post on some blog (not on your own blog!) with some content that you can really reply to. Write a very long comment on it, like the ones on the DW post. Make sure you fill out the "Post Comment" form with your website's address in it, because when you write your comment, you need to comment on this post with the URL to the blog post you commented on and the username you are going as. Then, if your comment strikes me as particularly well thought-out and long, I'll post a link to your blog on my blog.

This challenge expires in exactly one month. I think it'll be interesting to see who actually cares enough about getting their blog linked to to actually manage to complete this challenge within the time limit. After the 30 days are up, I will take a day to judge, and then I'll post the results the day after. And comments posts exactly 30 days after this post will be rendered invalid.

Sorry about the excitement, I'm just so happy to be back up again!!!!! It's taken a lot of hard work (read: begging), but we're finally up again! I hope you people still like Four Island, even with our killer downtime. However, there shouldn't be many more of those as now, Four Island lives on it's own dedicated server!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In other news, I was recently in the database putting the links to the hosted sites into the main HatNav when I noticed Color Pencils' assigned AID, "lonely". I thought it was pretty funny at the time, but then I remembered that Gryphic's blog used to be called "Lonely Ramblements". Funny story, but Gryphic's blog has changed it's names several times (most of them jokes, mind, I really do hope she was kidding with "Three Island" :) ), and the result has been the lovely name you see today. (Gryphic, I know you'll change your blog's name to something hideous after you see this)

Anyway, I am so happy to be back and to be able to run my website again with all of it's fun perks. This is Hatkirby, and my closing statement is:

 * Hatkirby is listening to Running by No Doubt

It's good to be back.

EDIT: Oops, sorry, I'm back. I wanted to mention that while I did post a hidden post (Yay me!), I did disable my pending post queue for the during Four Island's downtime. The Entrecard post accidentally slipped through. Anyway, I have re-enabled the pending queue so you can get your daily Four Island fix again! (TimTam, I'm looking at you :) )

....cries.... This shouldn't have been a solitary occasion.... cries

However, we are all still happy on this day, even though we aren't together. Happy Anniversary, Four Island.

I love this site.

EDIT: Four Island actually was registered on September 22nd, even though the first post, We're up! says "December 31st 2006", that is due to the fact that I did not add dates to my blogging software until October 15th. All of the posts before and including Mailchat say "December 31st 2006" though they were all really various times in late September and early October 2007.

Also, I'd like to say how proud I am of Four Island. It's grown a lot since I created it, and I'm happy to say that there are people who regularly go on it.

EDIT: And I'm so happy for all you Four Island-addicts. I really miss you.

Nothing to see here, move along.

I've recently started using Entrecard. Entrecard is a service that helps you to advertise your blog in an easy, fun way. And let me tell you, when I say easy, I mean easy.

To advertise your blog, all you have to do is find another blog who also uses Entrecard, click on their "widget", thus "dropping your card". Then, both you and the person upon whose widget you just dropped your card get an Entrecard Credit (ec). These ecs can be spent upon buying advertising on other sites, buying real things from the shop and much more.

And really, it's fast. I signed up for Entrecard, put the widget upon my site, and five hours later five people had already dropped their cards.

There's a good tutorial about using Entrecard productively on CK Marketing called How to use Entrecard to Grow your Blog, and let me tell you, it's really useful. Go read it. Nao.

One more thing before this post is over. If you want a whole ton of drops, you can sign up for U Drop / I Follow. It's an interesting service where you get a drop everyday and a link on a webpage that recieves tons of hits everyday. I you want tons of EntreCards, joining this would be a good idea.

Okay, okay, one last thing. If you decide to sign up with Entrecard, you can post your site's address here, if you like, and I'll drop you a card. 8D