Four Island

Gryphic's had her say, but now it's my turn. And I fully defend the word "color" and it's proper spelling.

Pretty much my biggest argument is the pronunciation. Color is pronounced color, not coloure. Thus, it should be spelled color and not colour. Another thing. Contrary to what Gryphic has ranted about, the letter U is actually an ugly letter, at least it is in my view. Why should it be placed into a word that creates such beauty and design?

NOTE: This is simply a rant. Please do not take this post entirely seriously.

Oh, and by the way, I would just like to point out that the Golden Compass is not The Golden Compass. The book is called Northern Lights and the device is called an alethiometer. Normally I'm on the American's side of things as I'm American, but there isn't a single instance of a golden compass in that book. So there.

Okay, don't run away. I just want to share some of my favorite websites with you.

• The Daily WTF - This website provides a daily resource of computer humor. Note the name WTF. I do not endorse profanity, you should know that by now. I would just like to inform you that WTF stands for Worse Than Failure.
• CSS Tricks - OK, I admit it. I'm a CSS junkie. I love what you can do with CSS. So I just had to find a good website with daily CSS goodness, so here we are.
• CrunchBang - I do not use CrunchBang Linux, nor do I think I ever will. However, this is the blog of an open source developer so it's often full of the type of stuff I enjoy. Code.
• XKCD - A good webcomic. I love this comic. I love the style of drawing, I love the computer humor, I love pretty much everything except for the inappropriate references and the profanity.
• Web Resources Depot - A good resource for all of your web resource needs. I only just found this site recently and it's already joined the ranks of the sites with their RSS feeds on my Bookmarks Toolbar.

Well, that's all I can think of right now. These are all of my absolutely favorite sites (except for Four Island, of course). I have all of their RSS feeds in my Bookmarks Toolbar where I can access them when I want to. I hope you've gained something from this random post!

I'm happy to say that I think I've successfully integrated Fouripedia and The Fourm with Four Island. Fouripedia is now running on the old page-system I wrote a while ago and The Fourm has been compressed to stay the same size as the rest of the site, which looks much more aesthetically pleasing.

The most important accomplishment, however, is the moving of everything to the fourisland.com domain. The Wiki used to be located at wiki.fourisland.com and The Fourm used to be located at fourm.fourisland.com so I would never be able to fully integrate Four Island, because one of the security points of cookies is that they don't work cross-domain. Soon I will move over the Quotes DB and then the domain-moving step of construction will be over.

I would like to ask, however, what you readers think of the Rightbar (The HatNav and the HatBar). Does it look good? If not, how should it look? Please tell me as I want Four Island to look as best as it can.

You should know that I use Ubuntu Linux. Recently, however, I upgraded from 7.10 (Gutsy) to 8.04 (Hardy), which, among other things, replaced Firefox 2 with Firefox 3b5. Of course, I though this to be a good thing because the newest version of any piece of software is normally the best. But I'm not so sure now.

My time with 3b5 started out OK, but this state didn't last long. Soon, Firefox was committing suicide at random times such as in the middle of typing up a very long Fourm post, or simply pressing more than 3 keys on the keyboard at a time. Naturally, these abrupt terminations were very annoying, especially as sometimes, Firefox refused to re-open and I had to restart the computer to get it to start again.

Another problem I had was the gradual slowdown of Firefox. Nearly everyday I had to restart my computer (and I'm talking about a hard shutdown, just finger on the button, nothing to do with the OS) to get Firefox working at a reasonable speed again. These problems started getting very annoying, so I decided I wouldn't take it any more and installed Firefox 2.

Firefox 2 has been working fine for me. With the exception of Firebug, which for some reason won't install, so if I need Firebug I need to use Firefox 3b5's buggy version of Firebug. That can get a little annoying, but for now, it seems as if everything's back to normal. I hope.

So remember, peoples, just because something's newer doesn't mean it's better. Especially if it has the word "Beta" in it.

For the record, I'd just like to say that if I had the choice, I'd do away with Firefox and use Internet Explorer.

Charlotte-type-Oooh! This week's poll went well. We got the same number of votes as last week, now isn't that strange. I'm pleased to see that most people use Yaplet as it's a valuable resourse to us, and I'm especially pleased that no one voted for option #4. So anyway, here are the results:

Yes - 11 vote(s)! No - 0 vote(s)! I just found out what Yaplet was - 1 vote(s)! I can't even be bothered to click on the link - 0 vote(s)!

I'd also like to mention that I've rewritten the blogging system for Four Island. Now, I can post posts that only get added to a separate table, the 'pending' table, and a daily cronjob will move one of these over to the real table a day. That way, Four Island can have article-style posts occuring more often.

Last but not least, I am going to get rid of MediaWiki and write the Wiki myself. It's just part of the "I only want to use my own code" type of thing.

EDIT: And peoples, sorry about the downtime. Power outage.

Well, we've already switched to the 5th layout. The fourth one didn't seem to last that long. Sorry about that. I'm just ever-trying to make the perfect design for Four Island. I'll probably continue to tweak at this design for a while.

Also, I know the commenting system is still disabled. I'm sorry. I'm just still trying to figure out a way to get around the vandalism on the Projects page because they shouldn't have been able to post anything at all anyway....... Oh poopsicles. An idea just struck. I'll let you know how it goes later.

EDIT: Okay, I was right. This is how the bots were posting comments.

Most bots do not understand disabled form field elements and apparently, the form validation page didn't actually check to see if the person was logged in. The only thing keeping out logged out people was the disabled submit button, but since bots bypass that....

It's been fixed now, so I've re-enabled the commenting system. YAY! Happy commenting! Now, tell me what you think about the new layout!

Congratulations people, we've just recently received our 5000th hit! And hadn't we just passed out 4444th hit 2 days ago? Thank you to all of the people who go onto Four Island every day! It is muchly appreciated!

Note to self: Make blog posts longer.

Happy Mother's Day! I love you mom! Thank you so much for all you've done for me!

In other news, I am working on a SSO implementation for Four Island, which will integrate pretty much everything even further than it already is. I will give you more news when it is available.

OK! Once again, this week I have quite a lot to talk to you peoples about! How about we start with Fouripedia!

Fouripedia is the new Four Island wiki! Yay! We'd like everyon who wants to to help contribute to this wiki! To be able to edit pages on the wiki, you must have an account on the fourm. Sorry about that, but it's just an extra security precaution, mixed with a minor convenience.

This week looks pretty interesting. We've got quite a lot of votes. I like how many people have chosen The Fourm! Thanks to everyone who voted! Unfortunately, this poll didn't included Fouripedia, but that's because it didn't exist yet. Here are the results:

Four Island - 2 vote(s)! The Fourm - 9 vote(s)! The Project Site - 0 vote(s)! Four Island Quotes DB - 0 vote(s)!

Speaking of the Projects site, I'd like to say something. Some people (unregistered, so I don't know how they managed to) have been posting links to porn on the projects page using the commenting system. I've deleted it all, but I've also disabled the commenting system temporarily because of this. I need to find and fix this security hole because we cannot have people hacking into Four Island and advertising porn. So, sorry for the inconvenience and I hope the commenting system is back up soon.

And to end off on a good note, Four Island has recently passed it's 5th milestone! 4444 hits! YAY! The reason this is so amazing is because the last milestone, 1337, happened pretty recently, specifically Valentine's Day!

Some fourm users have reported that the scroll bar or other scrolling functionality has vanished from Four Island. This is true. It is believed that the JavaScript used to generate the snow is somehow messing with users' ability to scroll. The JavaScript will disappear with the end of the party, generally 24 hours after the 4444th hit. However, the exact time of the milestone is not currently known.

Horray peoples! Today's Webcomic Appreciation Day! Let's celebrate by horraying our favorite webcomics in the comments thread for this post!

In other news, the Color war is still raging pretty hard. If you haven't a clue what it is, you may want to read this Color Pencils post. Where is this war? Everywhere! In blog post comment threads, on the Fourm, Yaplet, pretty much everywhere on Four Island! Be sure to get involved, and remember which side is right!

THERE'S NO U IN COLOR!!!!! YAY!