It keeps happening. The Four Island Quotes Database is back.

I'm always excited about memorializing stuff. The interactions I have with my friends are a treasure, and I want to remember them and get to enjoy them again and again. I don't really trust third-party services like Discord to stay up forever, or continue to allow me easy access to old conversations. I prefer to own my data whenever possible.

And that's why I semi-rewrote the Quotes DB again (well, I took the standalone Quotes DB I implemented in Rails for Four Island 3 and integrated it into my current website). That's why I made sure to preserve all of the old quotes, even if they involve people I no longer talk to -- my past self considered them important enough to memorialize, so I'll respect that. That's also why I spent hours going through Discord, finding conversations to archive. And when I say that, I mean that there are over a hundred new quotes in the Quotes DB.

It's actually kind of wild -- the last quote from the FI3 era was submitted in January of 2014. Then, almost ten full years pass, and 100 quotes get posted within the span of two days. The first new quote even mentions being raised from the dead. Classic.

Read more...

HAPPY NEW YEAR YAYS! :D It's me, your favorite Internet failspaz, wishing you a grand 'ol year! Hopefully it's a good one--I usually get so attached to the old year that I get angsty on New Year's Day, but it's such a weird day and all! Hopefully I actually remember to backup my server today, unlike last year. Oh god, it feels so odd saying "last year" to refer to 2010 because, well, 2010 was yesterday! OH GRAND SMACKS! Well, anyway, I thought it would be fun to start off what should hopefully be a very good year for Four Island with a bit of an old favorite/godforsaken-horror-from-the-mist: my annual goals!

GOOD LORD, STOP HER!

Wait! Before you scream and run away, just listen! Yes, I know I took my goals last year a bit too seriously and it got a bit out of hand and I eventually just had to say "stuff it" to some of them, but relax. This year's going to be different. This year, I'm going to understand my goals for what they are: guidelines, goals, destinations, not the immutable laws of physics that I was treating them as last year. Anyway, even though I know I failed most of my goals, let's see how I did, shall we? :P

• Increase RSS subscribers to 15 - No. Fail. That said, I didn't actually really do anything to achieve this goal, which is probably why it failed, but I didn't do anything in 2009 and I somehow got up to 10 subscribers then! However, it has stayed at 10 pretty much all year, so I'm going to have to think of some ways to improve my work this year. :P
• Write a post a week - This, here, was the godawful king of horrific annual goals. I took this goal SO SERIOUSLY for more than half a year and then finally decided that I couldn't take it anymore and just blew it off. Thank goodness I did, because I did so many bad things in the name of this goal. Needless to say, it will not be making another appearance this year. :P
• Update the POTW on time - Hmm, not only did I fail this once or twice last year, but I actually ended up disintegrating first the poll post (at the same time as I called off my previous goal) and then the actual poll of the week. Well. Fail. :P
• Don't post random polls - I was actually quite excited at the idea that I may have actually passed this goal, but as I looked back at last year's polls, I did find three that I deem to be pretty random: Sally Cohn (bless her), Gap Senile and Baseball Volition. And now I don't even have the chance to succeed at it this year. :P
• Average around 1 comment per post - Nope. There were 111 comments posted on blog posts last year and 72 if you don't count comments by me (which I don't). I posted 108 times last year which means that once again, this goal has failed. Darn it. Got to write more interesting posts.
• Reach 9000 posts on The Fourm - Yes! Surprisingly (and perhaps attributed to my oft-quoted "annual four month popularity spike"), The Fourm passed 9000 posts pretty early in the year--perhaps some time in February or March (I can't remember and I was sure that I had written a post or something about it on The Fourm but I can't find it now...).
• Write 10 articles on Fouripedia - Not even close. There were in actuality only two new articles posted on Fouripedia last year: Student and Pumpkin. Both articles are actually quite awesome and I invite you to read them if you haven't done so yet. :P
• Write 2 True Falsities a month - This one has a big fat "N. O." stamped on it. True Falsities really flopped around like a dead fish last year. Out of the 24 new stories I promised, I wrote but one, "New Year? Not Yet!" Then, in March, I went on a save-true-falsities kick and pledged to write a True Falsity a day for an entire work week. Once again, I wrote but one: "Happy Birthday Pyro!" Huge fail. I don't really know what's going to happen to True Falsities, to tell the truth. I really think it may be time to archive it. I really think it may be time to actually make that archive. Hmmm...
• Release 2 seasons of Pillowcase - Sadly, no, not even this goal was fulfilled. I did create and publish one successful season back in March which ran until June, but I never got around to making another one. I guess I can't do anything right.

Wow, look at that! A whole year of failure for me! Mix that in with my inability to do anything for the holidays on Four Island and we've got a loser! :P Out of my 9 goals last year, I passed 1. Yeah. Not so very good. This year's going to be better. 2011 is going to be a shining year of glory for Four Island, aye? :P Let's enumerate those goals:

• Write at least four posts a month. It may seem like a low number, but remember, previous years' months were padded out with poll posts. This year, I mean real, solid posts. Also remember that this is a guideline. I may post more, and I hope I post more. If I don't meet my goal one month, well, that's just too bad. Nothing to exploit loopholes over. :P
• COMMENT! For the third year in a row, I'm going for an average of one (1) comment per post. Every year, I've gotten closer to achieving this goal and if I write nice, substantial posts, well, I could actually get people interested and wanting to comment! I mean, look at Annetenna! Nearly a year later, and people are still commenting on it. Aww, how sweet. :P
• Exploit the annual spike of popularity for The Fourm! The Fourm currently has about 12,000 posts. Let's see if we can bump that up to a smooth 15,000 by the end of this year. We can do it! POPULARITY SPIKE! :P
• Continue with Pillowcase. I expect to have released (and completed) at least one season of Pillowcase by the end of the year. Let's do this.
• Get programming! When was the last time I released something? I want to release at least two things (that I actually programmed) by the end of the year. It could be a website, or another version of something already released, but it has to be something I actually programmed, which means that last year's Randomlog wouldn't have counted. Last year's Skype chatlog script wouldn't have counted either because it wasn't really a thing I released--it was just an informational and helpful blog post. Do some real work! You're awesome! Aaah!

Okay, that was getting a bit odd (I think I may still be a little tired from last night--I always write my New Years post on New Year's Day), but I certainly believe that these goals can be achieved (though I will probably be a little weirded out by the green calendars this year--they remind me of 2007 :P). This year's going to be great. Once again, I hope last year was great for you and I hope that this year will be better. Let's do this.

Oh freaking God! So, there was a bit of unnecessary stress tonight. You may not have noticed it (especially if you live in Australia), but Four Island was down for a few hours today. But, no, it wasn't a usual outage involving a virus or a total creator failure. No, this one was pretty scary and most of you probably didn't even notice.

It started while I was in my house, surfing Four Island. Obviously, because Four Island is hosted in-house, I have to use a custom DNS server to be able to type in "fourisland.com" and related sites and actually get where I want to go. So, therefore, I was completely oblivious to the fact that Four Island was down until I received a call from my cousin, telling me that all attempts to access Four Island resulted in a parked site. You know, one of those annoying, stupid sites frequently used by domain squatters that almost always look exactly like this:

Yeah, Four Island had one of those. With the same annoying girl smiling in that cocky way. HOW DARE YOU SMILE! YOU STOLE MY WEBSITE! Anyway, after walking through the problem with him, me thinking that he misspelled the domain somehow, we realized that something else was happening because he wasn't doing anything wrong. As I was sheltered inside my house, protected by the magical DNS server, I couldn't see the problem, so I tried using the data service on my iPhone and I finally saw it. EVIL. PARKED. SITE.

WTF?

I dug deep into the problem, relaying as I researched things for my cousin to try to access (as I didn't want to cut too deeply into my data service) and every subdomain was also parked. Even my Tumblr was blocked! Caption'd, which is also hosted on Tumblr, was not blocked, however. Interesting.

There was only one thing that could've happened:

I lost fourisland.com.

Does anyone remember what yesterday was? Hm? The third anniversary of Four Island. But, hey, didn't I say earlier that Four Island actually existed for a week prior to September 22nd, but under a different name? Well, if you go back and read the actual post, you'll see what September 22nd is really celebrating. That's the day that I registered fourisland.com.

Yeah, that's right. Somehow, the domain lapsed and went back into the pool.

I seriously freaked out then. I was running around the house, screaming that my domain had been stolen, but simultaneously wondering out loud "WHY WOULD SOMEONE BE WAITING TO STEAL FOURISLAND.COM WHEN IT LAPSED? WHO CARES ABOUT ME??!!?!?!" Well, after I calmed down a bit and did some more research with Yahoo, my registrar, I finally discovered that the credit card on file used to automatically renew Four Island had expired some time between last year and yesterday. Yeah. And apparently, it's standard procedure at Yahoo! to park the site a few days upon lapse before putting the domain back into the pool. Oh yeah, and completely canceling accounts while forgetting to send any emails whatsoever that may have notified me of this. Thanks, Yahoo, you've been a big help.

Anyway, after some credit card action, Four Island was back under my control! Horray! I set up the nameservers and within 72 hours, Four Island should be back up for everyone. Yay! And just like that, the day I lost Four Island passed like any other. :P

Domain Name.......... fourisland.com
  Creation Date........ 2007-09-22
  Registration Date.... 2007-09-22
  Expiry Date.......... 2011-09-22

Guess what today is! You may know already, because there's a background picture and everything. Anyway, it's the third anniversary of the registration of fourisland.com, and, obviously, Four Island itself! You can relive the whole experience by reading this badly written post. :P You'll notice that that's not the first post--yeah, Four Island existed for a week before it was called Four Island.

You'll also notice something else--something that happened today. Yes, I've finally removed The Poll Of The Week. Yeah, Smiley, it's gone. :P For those of you who don't know, the Poll Of The Week was created from an idea by Smiley a little less than three years ago (the Thursday after Four Island was created) and it hasn't really proved to be the greatest thing for Four Island. I generally don't come up with the smartest polls and often just use it as a place to make humorous poll options and to use the word "Indifferent". Also, the whole "poll post" thing, while now abolished, was a pain.

Anyway, it's gone now, though you can still see the old polls in the Polls section of Four Island. I will probably move the Polls section to Four Island Other, or maybe to that Four Island Archive thing I mentioned once. Anyway, this post is becoming very painful for me to finish as it's 11:18 at night and I have to go to the bathroom. So, let me leave off this post on a random, big lettered note:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY FOURIE :P

I love you all, and though it's a bit of a shame that today was an uneventful day for the third YEAR IN A ROW I--!!!!! explodes ...I know, I'm tired, and I should really go now. FOUR ISLAND ROXXORZ! runs away

Really, it's not that new, except that now, it's actually a semi-normal blog. What on earth am I talking about? I'm talking about reform. For a very long time, my blog has been dictated by the oppressive Poll Post, and more recently, a law requiring one non-poll post per week. That's isn't really normal. If you look at anyone else's blog you will see that they probably post whenever and that it's extremely unlikely that they'll have something The Poll Post.

Okay, I realize I'm not explaining things well, so let's jump right into the new plan:

• The weekly poll post will be abolished. While more inconvenient, if you want to see the results of the previous week's poll, you now have to use the Poll pages. Hopefully a better way to do this will arise as close to no one actually cares about the results of the Poll Of The Week.
• Caption'd, due to the new lack of a home, will be moved to its own blog.
• The annual goal requiring me to post once a week will also be abolished.

I think that this is a great idea and I'm really excited to be able to now have a more normal blog. Let's see how this is more beneficial:

• My blog can now be filled with real content more of the time, rather than annoying posts that appear every week, usually late at night when I'm tired and only just remembered to do them, which results in bad posts that don't really contain anything of value. That's poll posts AND Friday-night goal posts
• The freedom of posting whenever I want should promote the will to post frequently. I mean, now, I can! :P
• Caption'd now has its own site dedicated to it rather than being stuffed into a weekly post on another blog, which was just horrible. Caption'd can now have it's own schedule too: in fact, the new Caption'd schedule is a post every Wednesday and Saturday (instead of twice on Saturday).

Well, that's really it. My website just got a little bit more sane. :P Oh, the link to the new Caption'd website. Its in the sidebar, but here it is too: Caption'd. Anyway, I'm really excited about this new system and I can't wait to do a whole lot of free posting. :)

Okay--remember The Grand Upgrade back in January? When I was updating all of those outdated pieces of software on my server? Well, I did forget to mention one fairly obvious outdated piece of software that is used perhaps more often that any of the others listed. Well, maybe I didn't forget to mention per se seeing as I didn't update it that day. Well, yesterday I finally did.

If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm talking about The Fourm. Yes, The Fourm is a freakishly old piece of software, as it used to run on an original copy of phpBB 3.0. That's nearly three years old. whistles Yes, I know, it's commonly believed that The Fourm ran on phpBB 3.0.2, but I vaguely remember, two years ago, trying to upgrade The Fourm to 3.0.2 and encountering some difficulty that required me to revert the changes (even though The Fourm still ended up saying 3.0.2), which is probably the reason that I have been too afraid to upgrade The Fourm since as it left me the impression that I had hacked The Fourm too badly to upgrade it. That, and the fact that 3.0.1 and 3.0.2 were released after the launch of The Fourm, is what leads me to believe that our friend The Fourm was actually previously running on an original copy of phpBB 3.0.

Anyway, yesterday, I set myself up at my computer and worked at upgrading The Fourm to the newest version available. I ran it through once on the testing copy on my laptop, learned from my mistakes and wrote down a checklist and eventually did the real thing. And good golly gosh, it worked. The Fourm is sparkly clean and brand new. :D 355 bugs fixed, 54 new features, 88 general changes made and 4 security holes patched. Once again, whistles

One of the things that I am especially excited about for The Fourm is the new ability to use reCAPTCHAs on registration forms rather than the home-brand one included with phpBB. I have had a real problem with spam registrations in the past on The Fourm and it has led me to disable user registration several times. I last opened it up again some time in late July and by the time that I upgraded phpBB yesterday, I had to delete 375 freaking spam registrations. Whut. I know.

Anyway, while the spam registrations weren't too much of a problem since most of them couldn't be activated due to The Hotmail Bug, which has spread to a lot of other email providers, it's a good thing I've plugged that hole with a reCAPTCHA because I have finally fixed The Hotmail Bug! Incidentally, I suggested the solution that I used nearly two years ago and I once again ignored myself. :P Yes, I know I claimed to have fixed it, but I really don't know why I would have said that because when I looked at my server yesterday, the fix was clearly not there. Perhaps The Grand Upgrade, which happened a day after that post was posted, messed with it somehow. I dunno. :P Anyway, it's great that Four Island can now actually email people and though this opens the spam activation problem up, that problem is neatly solved with phpBB3's new reCAPTCHA module. :)

The third awesome thing which ties into the first: my server has been broken out of it's jail! I mentioned the restrictions placed on my server before and never really explained what they were, but it's not necessary anymore because they're gone! And you know what that means: reCAPTCHAs (AND PINGBACKS :D) actually work now! I had previously removed reCAPTCHAs from Four Island anonymous commenting due to the fact that they never worked and prevented people from commenting, but I have now added them back! Also, if my server hadn't been freed, reCAPTCHAs wouldn't have worked on The Fourm either, so I'm glad that this had happened just in time. :P

Anyway, so The Fourm now has no spam registrations, Four Island has less spam and I can finally receive email notifications from The Fourm again. Hoo-ray. However, there's one last thing I want to mention: WE NEED TO REVIVE THE FOURM!

Click the link. Read. Learn. Act. Because I've typed too much in this post already and it's nearly half past 11. Goodnight. :P

As most of you may know, I am filled with a contempt for Facebook that is a lot of contempt. Why yes. Dot dot dot. Anyway, though I have not yet posted my reasons for quitting Facebook on Four Island, I will make sure that I do so before I completely quit. Yes, I'm only going to gradually phase out of Facebook because a lot of people still use Facebook for a ton of various things and while it's going to be difficult convincing my friends to use these alternatives that exist, it will hopefully be possible.

You may notice that this post says "Phase 2". That is because I have already been doing Phase 1 for quite a while: stop logging into Facebook. I haven't logged into the Facebook Website (though I still log into Facebook Chat via Pidgin) for quite some time now; the only exceptions being when people specifically tell me to go look at something. So I think Phase 1 has been a success.

Phase 2 starts today. As of August 6th 2010, I have disabled email notifications on Facebook messages. That means that if you send me a Facebook message (instead of doing the proper thing and just emailing me), I will not know about it, I will not read it and I will certainly not respond to it. Sorry if this sounds a bit mean, but I am very tired of receiving emails from Facebook notifying me of messages that I have to go back to Facebook to reply to and not being able to have my entire email archive IN my email account and having the nice pretty email threads that GMail does.

I will probably not implement Phase 3 for a month or so, just so people can get used to Phase 2. While Phase 2 isn't really too difficult to do as most people have normal email accounts (in fact, you need to have one to get a Facebook account), Phase 3 is a bit more dangerous because it assesses the laziness of my friends. YOU CAN DO IT, FRIENDS! BE STRONG! :P

So, remember, the next time you want to send me an asynchronous long message, what do you do? Email it to me. Because if you Facebook Message it to me, it would be equivalent to writing a letter and then burning it. Because I may never, in fact, see it.

EDIT: Oh yeah, you may have noticed: I changed the font on Four Island for Layout 7. It's a webfont called Delicious (with a fallback of Verdana) that I think looks quite beautiful and just the right size. This is a pleasant change from Lucida Grande (with a fallback of Arial) which, though I LOVE Lucida Grande in the desktop environment, I think made Four Island rather ugly and difficult to read. Hopefully this works well! :D

Yes, the public has spoken. I have gone quite insane. Look see:

Randomlog. Awesome idea or Starla's gone insane again? OMG THIS IS SO AWESOMELY RANDOM I LUV RANDOM YAY INSANE LOL YAY - 2 vote(s)! whut. You're already insane. You're more than that! Do something! - 5 vote(s)! What's Randomlog? - 1 vote(s)! Indifferent - 1 vote(s)!

So, Randomlog has been dissolved. I know, I think I went temporarily insane last week. However, I have a replacement life for it. Don't think it's legacy is dead! Because... something!

I have been trying for A VERA LONG TIME to get it through my THICK head that THIS IS MY PERSONAL WEBSITE. OMG. I CAN POST. WHAT I WANT. ON IT. AAAH. I've keep telling myself that I can post freely here, and yet, it never happens. However, I think that is going to finally change. Now that Randomlog has been dissolved, I need another place to pour that random creativity into. Where should that be? Right here, right? No, I won't be posting Pink Panthers here because I know they are heavily despised. No, come back! :P

Now, Randomlog, as seen above and from the results of this week's poll that have already come it, was not a very popular place. I blame Pink Panther. :P However, I really liked both the Caption'd thing and the My Life Is Happy segment (which I never actually explained), so what I've decided is that I'll post a Caption'd along with every week's poll results and I'll just post My Life Is Happy pieces, as well as other randomly fun stuff, directly to my blog. Won't this be fun?

Because four Caption'd images have already been exhibited, I won't be cheap and spend four weeks showing images that have already been seen. I'll post those four images today PLUS a new one, and every week from now, I'll post one. Doesn't that sound great? prays

What I Like About... Starch

Gleefully Descrated

What I Like About... Tina

Robes

And here's the new one!

Tina's Creation

Yay! Anyway, my final topic in this extremely long poll post is that I really didn't like what I did last week with combining a poll post with a real post. It just produces too many problems. Therefore, while last week will not count as breaking my annual goal, I will no longer be posting ONLY on Saturday. I have to post at least one more time during that week.

Really, I think my problem with poll posts is that, because I don't post other things that frequently, there's so many of them. With this (hopeful) new posting regime, this shouldn't be a problem anymore. Yay! Let's see how it works out. :)

Okay, guys, last week's poll about a new poll process has completed and the unanimous result was to showcase the poll results along with a normal blog post. So, to try it out, here we are!

Do we need a new weekly poll process? Yeah, don't post the results in a post. - 1 vote(s)! Yeah, post the results along with a normal blog post. - 4 vote(s)! Yeah, something else, please comment! - 0 vote(s)! Nah, it's good the way it is. - 1 vote(s)!

The poll process really does need some revamping, especially seeing as it's one of the oldest parts of Four Island. Before Quotes, before Fouripedia, before the modern day Fourm, there was The Poll Of The Week. And now it's a half-deaf hyena with vocal issues. You get what you get. Anyway, the reason I'm talking about this is because I'm not sure that this is a completely satisfactory solution. My main problem with it is that I'm going to have to mix together two different topics into one blog post. I'm insane about organization and.... yeah. Really, this shouldn't be a problem as some old poll posts were embedded seamlessly into mass posts before, but still. Also, now I have to either: hold off posting main posts for Saturday or update the poll on Saturday but not post the results until later in the week when I update. And does this post count as my weekly required post for my annual goal? It's a bit of a mess, really. What do other websites do with polls? Please comment on this! I know you all hate commenting, but please! :P

Now, for the main content of this post: A few days ago, I went insane again (this is becoming rather standard.... :P) and created a new blog called Randomlog. It's pretty much just weird. So far, there are three different categories of posts on Randomlog:

• Viewer Content: This is what the blog is really about. I've created an email address (randomstuffthatyousendme@gmail.com!) that I want people to email random stuff to. Like, anything. Poems, drawings, quotes, viruses, tissues, whatever. Then, I'll make some content out of it. This'll be fun! :P
• Pink Panther: This is a bit of a throwback from a looooong time ago, but basically, this is a daily post thing in which I play MadLibs, fill out every field with the phrase "Pink Panther" (sometimes I may modify the phrase to fit the word type--Pink Pantherly for adverb, for instance) and then post the result. Not something that you couldn't do, but I did it and you didn't! Oh! :P
• Caption'd - As seen in The Elizabeth Randomnesses, I have a fondness of finding funny pictures and adding captions to them. Yep, that's what this is. :P It updates on odd-numbered days and so far, most of them seem to come from What I Like About You :P

So, well, there's Randomlog! Make sure you send in stuff to randomstuffthatyousendme@gmail.com! Yay! :P

Oh, and just a note, this week's poll on Randomlog is the hundredth poll on Four Island! Wow! :D Note that this doesn't mean that this is the hundredth week that Four Island has been up--we've experienced a few downtimes and I've neglected to update the poll a few times. :P

For a very, very, very long time, native Four Islanders have communicated via a channel known as "Yaplet". However, many scorned Yaplet for it was never available, often slow and, possibly the most annoying (to me, anyway :P), did not allow you to log chats. Yes, as stated earlier, I'm a freak obsessed with chatlogs. :P

Anyway, the other day, I was discussing on The Fourm how we needed to find another place to talk in a room and suddenly, it hit me: start an IRC server! So I did! An hour later, FourNet was born. Yes, it really took an hour to set up the server. What can you expect? I had a bad SSH connection and atheme was stabbing me.

I made a pretty page for FourNet. The FourNet Page! YAY! There's an IRC web-client on that page that you can use if you want to see FourNet without downloading an IRC client, and there's also a page with some cool statistics about random people who frequent #fourisland. :P

It's not just a boring old chatroom, btw. I installed a chat bot! Meet Fourie! Fourie (who was named after the Four Island mascot, obviously) is very odd and has already spawned some pretty hilarious quotes such as:

359 - Intern molesting

361 - I Love TimTam

362 - Leaving

368 - Kicked

369 - Hatkirby's Virginity

Anyway, YAY! FourNet is a fun place and we like messing with Fourie's mind. Come and join our insanity by visiting the FourNet page and.... yay! :D Have fun, random stuff!