Four Island

Wow, the results of this poll were really very useful to me. At least you all agreed that nobody else would post on True Falsities.

Yes, it's time to archive it - 2 vote(s)! No! Keep posting and others will follow! - 0 vote(s)! Pretty much, but you still have to post - 2 vote(s)! Indifferent - 2 vote(s)!

Incidentally, I recently failed one of my annual goals by posting to True Falsities only once last month rather than twice. I did have a post called "It Is Abstract" planned, but I never finished it. So, basically, I have no idea where to go with True Falsities.

Anyway, Four Island 3.0! If anyone has any splaztastic ideas for it, do tell! :P

Lol, it's nice how much faith everyone has in me :P

Yes. You fail at life. - 8 vote(s)! No! PRODUCTIVITY IS EVERYTHING, HATKIRBY, DON'T GIVE UP!!!!!!!!!! - 0 vote(s)! I don't even know who you are. - 1 vote(s)! I am ignorant/apathetic/indifferent - 0 vote(s)!

Now, this week's poll is one of those ones that I actually care about the results for. True Falsities has been dying ever since guest posts started declining in May. My posting twice a month will not save True Falsities, in my opinion. So now I ask you, the readers of Four Island, to please vote on whether you want to keep True Falsities, or retire it to The Four Island Archive (currently unreleased). Please vote!

Anyway, remember some two years ago when I announced that my server couldn't email Hotmail accounts? Well, I do believe I've finally fixed that. By relaying my email through my ISP's email server. Incidentally, that's the solution I suggested two years ago that I was too lazy to implement until Tuesday.... :P

Lastly, I would like to announce a fix. For the longest time, Four Island has been having Unicode troubles that I've attributed to other sources and I've had to removed Unicode from quotes and comments before and it's been very annoying. On Wednesday, I finally discovered that the source of the Unicode mangling was my homegrown BBCode parser that we've been using since December 10th 2008. The bug has been fixed and Unicode should now look normal. You know what that means!!!! I can finally use the interrobang everywhere!!!! :D

However, I would like to ask a question to those interested in the development of Four Island 3.0. Do you think I should drop my homegrown BBCode system and switch to something else such as Markdown, or whitelisted HTML with a shortcode system? There would have to be a way to either maintain backwards compatibility or to convert all of the old system to the new system, though.

The other day, I was contemplating creating a second blog, you know, for personal use. Because I've noticed that blogs like The S Site, Color Pencils, Dream Weaver, Randomness and Bubble Blog are about the owners, unlike Four Island, which is more about the actual website and its projects.

So, I was wondering, should I create a second blog to be my personal blog? Or should they be the same blog, here at fourisland.com? I mean, both options have advantages. If I integrate them, then Four Island will still be my blog and there'll be more posting. If I create a second blog, I'll be able to seperate a website's updates blog from my own personal blog, which could be good, but it would be harder to have a centralized location I call my own website. Yes.

Anyway, I ask you people, what do you think I should do? And yes, OMG STARLA WROTE A POST. :)

Mm. Feels pretty stupid once you think about it. I mean, really. My whole thing on "pick something when you're not as informed and stick with it forever, constantly ignoring the fact that there are better solutions" is annoying.

The thing I'm going to rant about is <!DOCTYPE>. I learned HTML at a young age, young enough to think that whatever I read must be right and nothing would sway me from that, even if the author did change her mind in the next book. I thought that not using <!DOCTYPE> was a good thing, a declaration of independence, the right thing to do. Not using it also makes writing webpages 10 seconds easier.

And don't even go there with that last comment. I'm hardly a perfectionist, maybe I'm passionate in some fields such as computing and mumble, but I don't have to be perfect all the time.

Anyway, back to <!DOCTYPE>. To this day, I still do not see any merits in using the loggy tag other than to ease W3C's validator. My theory is that the tag explicitly tells the client browser what DTD to use so it can render the document exactly as I wanted it to be rendered. BEEP. Slow down there, we've got CSS resets for that. So, why use <!DOCTYPE>? I'd be much obliged if someone told me.

See? I'm ready to get off of my high pedestal. I started by admitting IE wasn't the best and now I'm trying to set this whole <!DOCTYPE> thing right.

However, you must admit that I am right about Wordpress. I know I made the correct decision not to go with Wordpress for my blog. I can use it for other websites, just not for Four Island. I am also right about Apple. They're still evil and they always will be. So there.

Yes, this is a reference to TimTam's I Was Sleepy. It made me think. How may of us blog people like to make random, drastic changes to their websites without thinking of the consequences and hating it later? Or is it just me?

Speaking of randomly induced drastic changes, I almost decided to release a layout #7 for Four Island, so soon after the 6th layout was released, but in the end, I decided to use the theme for the TGS webs----oops! Wasn't supposed to say that yet. Oh well, I'm going to be posting about it soon enough anyway. :)

So, how many of you out there do this? Random drastic changes? Not even just your blog! I once changed my username on the Fourm to "Starla", quickly realized that it went against my statement of anonymity (though everyone knows my name anyway) and changed it back to "hatkirby". (I actually also then changed it to "StarlaXY". It was meant to be "StarlaXYZ", but I seemed to have missed the "Z" and was too lazy to fix it)

Omigosh, I just realized, I just made another stupid question post. Oh, don't groan! I love it when people contribute! COMMENTS! GIVE ME COMMENTS! AND PINGBACKS! :)

So, anyways, here's the link to the last question post: Say What?

Ok. I'm going to admit it without caring about the abuse I will get from various people for not admitting it earlier (I'm looking at you, TimTam). I like Firefox more than Internet Explorer. There, I said it.

I don't really know why I didn't say it before, I guess it's just part of the "pride" package that comes with not using Wordpress for your blog. :)

The reason I'm bringing this up is because IE is being SO ANNOYING. Any viewers out there use IE? Yes? You're lying. If you were, you couldn't read this post. For some reason, IE is hiding the text of all of my posts, horribly disfiguring The Fourm and generally being mean to Four Island.

Does anyone know why this could be? It's not just IE 6, 7 is doing it too. I've tried using the IE 7 script (the one that makes IE into a standards-compliant browser) but it doesn't work for me. So, if anyone has any ideas, I'm open! I guess this is a question post, then.

The standard seems to be to link to the last question post in all question posts, so I'll try to do that here. I think the last one was Tag Clash, but I may be wrong. :)

And yes, this post's title is a clear indication that I've been watching too much Hannah Montana. :)

GAH! Not another question post! This one was inspired by a recent post, Silly Spam Bots!, when trying to decide on the tags it should be categorized under.

So, this time, I would like to know: Which posts of mine fall under the tag "random" and under the tag "articles"?

Recently, I (oh POOP!) have been using the "random" tag quite a lot simply because I haven't been able to think of another tag to use. Please look over some recent posts and comment whether or not you think that the tag(s) used for them were appropriate, or if not, what tags you'd rather have.

Anyways, if you haven't seen it, last question post was Recently, I..... Remember, feel free to comment your answers! Please?

SIDENOTE: Oh dear, this post is listed as Draft #23.

Look, it's another stupid question post! YA----huh?

Anyway, as noted in a recent's post, I start way too many posts with the phrase "Recently, I....". And look, it's even made it into today's post title! GAH!

So, basically, what I'm asking for is, does anyone know of some more phrases I can use here instead of a sentence beginning with "Recently, I...."? Yes, I know, I am the laziest, but that phrase has taken over my mind! No! Get out of there! That's Fourie's house! Ouch! Don't touch me there!

Well, that's today's question post! Remember, if you haven't seen it, the last one was Twitter != tumblr. Thank you, and good 12 o'clock.

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 have a short question post here: What is Slashdot? More importantly, what's so good about it? People apparently flock to it like flies to a supernova, but I can't see what's so good about it. If anyone could elaborate, I'd be much gratified.

There's my short question post. I may have more of these in the future. If you know the answer, comment. If you don't have an account, post on the Fourm or email me.

About that. On the new Four Island, I'm writing a moderation module that allows you to comment even if you aren't logged in, but if you aren't, the comment has to pass through moderation.

Speaking of the new Four Island, I have an update on it's production. Sorry, it defiantly won't be out until at least Friday. I finished the Wiki yesterday, but today I have some work I need to do, and even if I do the entire Admin Panel tomorrow, I won't be able to release it until the next day. Sorry about that.

Also, while I'm asking questions, here's a second one: When the poop is the Internet Archive going to archive me?