Four Island

The time of happiness is over, let the drear begin.

In two days, some time in the afternoon, Four Island will go down. This is expected. However, this isn't some short lived downtime, Four Island is expected to be down for around two weeks.

The reason for this is, I am moving back to America, back to New York. I don't expect to have internet access for about a week or two until after I get there, so, in the mean while, think.

Today is the last time I will see any of the great friends I've made while in Australia, and a final chance to say goodbye to them. It is very likely that I will never see them again, though it is also likely that they will continue to go on the Fourm. Never destroy the link between close friends, because it hurts. Badly.

I will miss living in this wonderful country with these wonderful people and I hope they miss me in return. Though I miss America as well, life won't quite be the same when I move back.

So let me take the chance to say one more goodbye to all of the people I've met here and to all of the people I've bonded with:

Goodbye.

Hatkirby

I will miss you all oh so very much.

I used to have these RSS feeds up on my Bookmarks Toolbar. Every five minutes or so, I'd scan through them, checking to see if there were any new updates. Most of the time, there weren't.

This became very tiring. I spent quite a lot of time everyday just checking my RSS feeds. Wasn't there an easier way to do this?

And then I found Google Reader. It's amazing. You can subscribe to feeds, categorize them, view short summaries, the works. I've sorted my feeds into "A-List", "Friend's Blogs" (which ironically includes Four Island), "Comments" (comment feeds), "Linux" and "Other".

Now, you may be asking, how does this increase productivity? What am I getting out of Google Reader? It may seem like I'm only getting a little more productivity because now all of my feeds are in one place. But, no, there's more.

Soon enough, I found the Google Reader Watcher Firefox plugin. It sits in your status bar, checking Google Reader every five minutes (this is adjustable). If it finds any new feeds, it announces this fact and puts a number in your status bar (the number of new feed items). When you hover over this number, it shows you the feeds the new items come from. All you have to do is click on the number and you get swished off to Google Reader.

So there you are. No more constant checking of RSS feeds. Now, you're instantly (or, at least, within 5 minutes) notified of any new items in your feed list. And, I've noticed my productivity go much higher because of all the time I've gained by not checking RSS feeds every five minutes. Now, the plugin does that for me.

I'm back with a short, question post. This time my question is so: What's the difference between a thing like tumblr and a microblogging service like Twitter? I only ask because they seem so similar.

Well, you know the drill. If you know the answer, please leave a comment on this post.

Also, no one has replied to my previous question. If you would like to (and please do so), you can see it at Slashdot...?

And in other news, we just hit 10000 hits yesterday! YAY! Four Island's growing so quickly! Thanks again to all of the people who care to come on Four Island to read posts, comment and use the Fourm.

I dreamed up a new Four Island project a couple of days ago called InstaDisc. It's amazing, I think. I'm going insane over it, I need to do it.

Basically, it's a way to find out about things on the internet like new posts on a blog, new comments on a blog, new posts on a fourm, in a quick and easy manner.

For more information, please visit its project site. Please especially visit the description of the conception of the idea, and most importantly, the Specification.

Please feel free to comment here about InstaDisc. In fact, I encourage you to. Please, do. I'm really excited about InstaDisc and I want to know what other people think about it. For instance, if you have any ideas on how I could improve the specification, please comment. If you want any features in InstaDisc, comment and add a ticket. Please give me feedback as I'm, as stated previously, very excited about this project.

And please, dear goodness, don't let me procrastinate.

I don't think I've ever made clear where I am on the OS war point of view. However, unlike most in the blogging world, I don't make sport of trashing Microsoft. Microsoft's a good company. It makes Windows XP. I like Windows XP. (I hate Windows Vista, but that's another story) No. The company I've decided to hate is not Microsoft, but Apple.

For one thing, Apple is cheap. It sells you an expensive computer that looks stylish but can't do anything good. Then, take the example of the MacBook Air. It's tiny, but you can't remove the battery. You have to get it "fixed". Yes, they call it fixed. Hear that? It's your fault. Apple accuses you unfairly.

Then we have the iPod, senselessly tied to iTunes. The iPod Nano Nike thing. If the battery runs out, well, too bad for you. You need to get a new one. Safari. Besides being a bad browser, it's HTML parsing engine is WebKit, which is actually a thinly disguised version of KHTML, the parsing engine KDE uses. So, Apple steals as well.

I can't really get started on how much I dislike Apple. BOOOOO APPLE IS BAD BOOOOO. expects to be on the receiving end of some flame wars soon

Also, also unlike most in the blogging world, I prefer IE to Firefox. This is mainly due to the fact I grew up with IE, but might also be related to the fact that now that I have to use Firefox (as I use Linux), it crashes about every 5 minutes. That's inconvenient, to say the least.

Sometimes, I get a little bored with standard blogging. Like, post a post. Post a post. On and on. Let's try something new.

And the deblatog was born! (Word coined by yours truly) A Deblatog is cross-blog argument in which many blogs can join in and argue senselessly about a set topic.

For instance, say I start a deblatog about "Pie". I ruthlessly argue that Pumpkin Pie is a delicious way to enjoy pumpkin. Then, someone else (say.... Gryphic), posts a post on her blog with her side of the argument. While she does that, she makes sure to Pingback the original deblatog post.

Then, someone else (say.... Timbo94) decides that Apple Pie is much better than Pumpkin Pie and writes a post about it. He then Pingbacks Gryphic's post, but not my original.<!--more-->

All of a sudden, Smiley appears and decides that we're all wrong and pie is disgusting. He Pingbacks Timbo94's post, not Gryphic's or mine.

Smiley's posted some interesting arguments, so I decide to write what I think about them on my blog again. I'll Pingback his post, but not Timbo94's, Gryphic's or my original.

Where this is going is that you can start out at my original deblatog post, read my side of the argument, and then click on the Pingback to go to the second side of the argument. It's a chain, and it allows other bloggers to post on something when they can't think of anything else to blog.

After reading that, you have to decide this. Either, I have an awful ton of spare-time, or I just couldn't think of anything else to post.

The only other random point I should put here is that, if my obsession with Pingbacks isn't obvious yet, I don't know how much better to put it.

I. Like. Pingbacks.

Wh.... who voted no? No, just kidding, it's ok. I'd rather have honesty than fabricated beliefs designed to only make me happy. I'm happy someone voted No. It proves that their telling the truth. Whoever that is, you've just earned one point.

Yes - 12 vote(s)! No - 2 vote(s)! Huh? - 0 vote(s)! Indifferent - 4 vote(s)!

Yes, this week's poll is very random. Remember, if you don't like random polls, I only put them up because I'm currently lacking a Poll idea. If you have any ideas, please post them to the Poll of the Week fourm on The Fourm.

I'd also like to tell you people that I think I finally know what Gryphic means in Welcome to My Life when she says:

My friends have no idea.

Gryphic

They don't, and I could never tell them. I only need to say that I've had a horrible week this week. I've explained it further here.

If I do go on Yaplet or The Fourm today, I might be very annoyed, or simply depressed. I'd be annoyed because FIREFOX IS A BEEPING BEEPHOLE, and if you people argue against that statement, even if you think it's false, all you'd be doing is annoying me more. You may think you know Firefox, but you haven't had it crash EVERY FREAKING 10 MINUTES while typing a LONG post! The slowdown's even worse that.

I'd be depressed for, well, read the think in the link above. I'm sorry, people, for what I've done, and I'm especially sorry to Gryphic, for yelling at you yesterday, and Pyro, for asking you to watch the tape. I've just had a very bad week. I hope you can forgive me.

I'm posting this because I often find myself sitting at my computer thinking either, "There's nothing to do, I think I'll just write a blog post." or "There are a whole ton of things I should be doing now but I just can't be bothered. I think I'll do a blog post." and end up sitting, staring at my Admin Panel for minutes on end, trying to think up a good idea for a blog post.

If this happens to you too, why not try out this out?<!--more-->

1. First things first. Open up that Admin Panel, get to your Blog-Post-Writing-Station. If you don't even bother going to your panel, you won't have the motivation to write a post.
2. Don't try to write the post's title first. I've made that mistake many a time, and it's much easier writing a title after there's some content for you to title.
3. Think, what is my blog about? Why do people want to read my blog? What can I offer them that no one else can? People come to your blog because they want something. What is it? Laughter? Debates? Tutorials? Build on that.
4. Does your blog have a theme? Or is it just random nonsense? If your blog is random nonsense it's a little harder to find something to post about, but don't worry. The blogger always prevails.
5. What interests you? You're blog is your vent, talk about what you like on it. (However, remember that blogs and the internet in general is not really a place to talk about inappropriate things such as creation of children)
6. Go read your favorite blogs and see what makes them so good. Any content of theirs that you can build upon? (And Pingback them for? 8D)
7. If all else fails, a 101 posting ideas list never fails to amaze. Try it out, you may be surprised of what you haven't thought of yet.
8. From the same place as the 101 posting ideas, we have the Visitor Grid, another great way to come up with ideas for your blog

I hope that I've just fulfilled the reason I posted this in the first place: To write a good post.

This is an age-old PHP argument: Is using $_REQUEST dangerous?

For those not in the know, $REQUEST is a combination of $COOKIE, $POST and $GET. If you try to access $REQUEST['para'], it will first attempt to retrieve $COOKIE['para'], then $POST['para'] and finally $GET['para']. This has led many people to believe that $_REQUEST is very dangerous to use because cookies can be easily edited by the client. However, this is not so.

Cookies can be easily edited by the client, true. But so can query strings ($GET) and the Request Body ($POST). $_REQUEST requires the same amount of XSS-proofing as the others do.

The only problem I see with $REQUEST is that using it doesn't specify whether you are using $COOKIE, $GET or $POST. It would be too ambiguous for me and that's why I leave it be.

Recently, I read an article on ProBlogger about the difference(s) between Twitter and Plurk.

I started using Twitter about a year ago, and stopped a few months ago, because it was boring me. However, when I read that above article, I had to have a try at Plurk.

Plurk is already a whole lot more fun than Twitter. As the article on ProBlogger shows, Plurk runs more like a fourm. You Plurk something, and people can Plurk replies to it which show when you click on the original Plurk. You can also see people you've friended's Plurks on your timeline.

With Twitter, the only way for people to reply to tweets are for them to send you a private tweet that A: Doesn't have any connection to the original tweet, and B: Only you can see it.

Because of this, I've decided I like Plurk. I've been using it recently, and as I've said above, it's fun. Have a look at it. Why not even sign up and give me a plurk? Come on, it'll be fun. Please?