Four Island

Okay, I know True Falsities has been dead since May. But I'm reviving it! True Falsities was once a fun and popular place where we all created weird stories that parodied ourselves and the metaphysical island we all live on and that was great. And yayish.

If I was asked why I thought True Falsities died, I would say because of the slowdown. At some point, I don't know when, True Falsities started loading VERRRRRRRRRRRRRYYYYYYY SLOWLYYYYYYY. Which made it impossible to use because it would be so annoying. Like, a lot. Well guess what! I've fixed it! Turns out IntenseDebate was the cause of the slowdown. I really don't know why, and now it's a bit annoying not having IntenseDebate on True Falsities because now I don't know if anyone's going to want to comment, but hey! As long as TF is back up :)

So, to celebrate to (hopeful) revival of True Falsities, I wrote a True Falsity! I actually had the idea months ago and only finished it today. It's called Drifty Revealed. I hope you people flock back to True Falsities now! :)

Layout Judgement Week is over, welcome new layout! Layout 7 is here to stay.... for a while.... until I get bored again.... :)

Though nobody made a single comment on my post (IM SO HURT!!!!!!!!!) I gathered from that that you liked it. Plus, I found a few bugs that had made their way into production and squashed them! :)

You may have noticed the short downtime that just occured: that was me, I had rewitten my ubiquitous admin panel and needed to make a few database changes. But now it's up again!

Like oh em gee! Time for the mandatory layout nostalgia that always comes with a new layout! This time, it's about length of existence! I was talking to Drifty the other day and was randomly measuring the lengths of the layouts. And I'm astonished to find out that Layout 3, unlike I had led everyone to believe, is not the longest lasting layout.

Let's measure them in two categories: major layouts and minor layouts. Major layouts being 1, 3, 4, 6 and the rest, minor being those plus their derivatives like 6.1. For this experiment, I will be considering Layout 2 a minor layout of Layout 1 as there really was no major change there. Layout 4 in The New Four Island is considered 4.5. Layout 2 doesn't have any definitive date as there was no blog post about it so it is measured with Layout 1.

Let's start with minor layouts. Layouts 1 & 2 together lasted 72 days. Seems long, but wait. My long worshipped Layout 3 lasted for 150 days! Very long. Layout 4 (my favorite layout) first existed for 13 days before being rudely interrupted by the disgraceful Layout 5, which lasted only 8 days. Layout 4 then picked up again with another 20 days, bringing Layout 4's total existence to 33 days.

Then the New Four Island arrived, and so did Layout 4.5, which lasted four an astounding 165 days. So far, 4.5 is the winner. But wait! Next came Layout 6, which lasted a measly 39 days, soon followed by Layout 6.1, which only lasted 34. But then, the sun was blocked out by the massive layout to follow. Layout 6.2, our most recent layout, lasted for a huge 184 days. Layout 6.2 is the winner for minor layouts!

Here we go with major layouts! Layout 1, as stated previously, lasted 72 days. Nothing much to boast about. Layout 3 then lasted 150 days, bringing it to the lead. Wait, what's that? It's Layout 4! Layout 4 lasted an amazing 198 days before leaving. However, the undoubtedly longest living major layout ever on Four Island (so far) was Layout 6, with a massive 257 days of life.

YAY that was fun. Isn't Four Island history fun? Well, nostalgic me thinks so. :) Anyway, I hope you enjoy the new layout of Four Island!

Hiya all! I'm sure you've noticed something rather different about Four Island, I made a new layout! No, it's not the long awaited three-column layout that Bluemonkey prophesied while standing in the Sahara Desert, surrounded by raging sand-winds, one day. No, it's simply Layout 7, a pretty unique Four Island look as it has several things different between it and the previous 4 major layouts. (I don't generally count Hatkirby CDI, Layout 2 or Layout 5 as major layouts, really.)

The biggest difference is probably that it just looks so different from the other layouts. The other layouts had a banner, a navbar, and content down the middle. This one is more, full screen. The banner is at the very top, the sidebar-ish thing is at the very left, and the content is floating in the middle of the remaining space with the navbar sitting contentfully above it. It's not another centered layout, ladies and gentlemen. :) Plus, the glaglaglada of "Recent Comments", "Recent Fourm Posts", "Recent Whatevers" that have annoyed people in the sidebar have also moved, they now reside in the footer, looking pretty nice, I think. :)

Also, because I'm now using more space for the site, The Fourm doesn't replace the sidebar. It's still right there, looking happeh in it's surroundings, eating a lot of cheese. And Fouripedia is like, totally gone. For now. Maybe.

For some reason, whenever I write a new layout, I always end up doing a TON of work around Four Island. Here's something I'm very happy about: I rewrote a lot of the Quotes module, so now it looks a TON prettier and it works a lot better now. Plus, I've added AJAX so you can vote on quotes and flag quotes without leaving the page! Speaking of AJAX, yes, I took it too far! Now you can do a ton of stuff without leaving the page such as voting on the Poll Of The Week, commenting on anything and voting on blog posts! YAY AJAX! You can see the rest of the changes I made at source control.

And as I bet some people (whisper) will notice, Four Island no longer uses HTML. It now uses XHTML! It was gasps very annoying gasps going through my templates gasps and lowercasing all of the gasps tags. Lol :)

I hope you people like Layout 7, and that's what Layout Judgement Week is. I sort of did Layout Judgement Week for Layout 6 too, but I didn't tell anyone about it which is why it sort of omg failed.

Layout Judgement Week is the first week following the release of a new layout. During this time, I'd love it if you could traverse my site and see if you like the new layout. If you do, please comment on this post and tell me so! If there are any changes you would like me to make, just tell me! If you don't like it, after the week has completed, I'll revert to Layout 6, but I like this layout, so I hope you do too. :)

Okay. I have big news. INSTADISC IS BACK. Well, it's coming back. After a half year hiatus while I felt sorry for myself (and worked on FourPuzzle which I never posted about), I finally thought of something. A way for InstaDisc to work.

I seem to recall InstaDisc dying because it's Push notification only worked for a VERY small number of people (a.k.a. just me) and without Push, InstaDisc was pretty much a highly convoluted RSS replacement. However, my work on FourChat, the Yaplet replacement that never really surfaced, led me to realize an alternative to server push.

REVERSE AJAX.

Okay, it's not actually Reverse AJAX as I'm not using JavaScript, it's Comet. But I like calling it Reverse AJAX. Anyway, Comet is the way! I have been rewriting the InstaDisc Central Server in C++ and Comet seems to work perfectly. Yayfulness.

So, you may be wondering, when will InstaDisc be completed? Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I am actually already nearly done with Central. There are only 3 API functions that I haven't yet implemented and after that, there's just the testing period.

The bad news is, along with Comet, the InstaDisc specification has changed. A lot. Because of this, the Client will have to be majorly rewritten. I'm thinking of scraping the original code and staring over in C++. So that will probably take a while. Plus, the Update Servers will also have to be rewritten, but that's not much of a problem as they're small.

So, InstaDisc is back. YAY.

Oh, and by the way, Ohats Is So Dead.

I haven't posted in a while, and I was feeling rather insane, so I wrote a list of ten people you don't want to receive a call from. In order from worst to best. Best being relative, because you don't want a call from them. Obviously. :) Anyway, it's a comedy. Weird. :)

1. Samara Morgan
2. Ellie Layton
3. Your mother's ex-husband's son who thinks you're hot
4. The washing machine repair guy
5. Your toaster
6. Charlie the Unicorn
7. GlassCo, the leading company of making glasses of water
8. Skype Test Call
9. Mary Poppins
10. Your ex-boyfriend who's now going out with your sister

Whew, that felt good. I'm way too formal on my blog, I have to let go sometimes with random posts like this. :)

EDIT: Btw, I found out what was wrong with the POTW. When I did the Facebook poll, I must've pressed submit like three times because there were three records from that poll in the table, so everything got offset and ick. I deleted the naughty records and realigned the others, so the POTW should be healthy again. :)

Just a quick notice about Endlenge: Two weeks ago, when Endlenge started, I said that I was going to rapidly release puzzles until May 30th, and then I'd release them on either a weekly or a bi-weekly schedule. First of all, I already broke then schedule: I didn't stop rapidly releasing puzzles until June 7th. Second, I think I will go with the bi-weekly schedule because it involves there being more puzzles.

You may be thinking, FJDLSFSD!?!?! And I'm sorry, I keep using the word "bi-weekly" without knowing what it means. When I say that I'm going to release Endlenge puzzles bi-weekly, I really mean that I'm going to release them twice a week. Sorry about that. :) Anyway, have fun with Endlenge!

Peoples and other peoples, I present to you, Endlenge! Endlenge is yet another new website project idea thing I had. I know, I can hear the groans already, but trust me, this one is fun enough that I'll be able to keep up with it. And hey, isn't True Falsities doing well enough?

To quote the Endlenge page, "Endlenge is a puzzling website. As in, it's full of puzzles, not that it's so confusing it'll make your head explode. Endlenge is a game. You start at the beginning, with the first puzzle. Complete it, and you will find a password that allows you to unlock the next level. You would then click the link in the top right corner to go to the next puzzle and unlock it with your newly found password. And so on."

Since Endlenge has just started and I'm in the craze of a new project (remember when Pillowcase started and I had created 40 comics in about 3 days?), I'm going to be rapidly producing puzzles until the end of this weekend, after which Endlenge will update on a weekly basis (Saturdays at 6 AM EST). At some point, I may change the schedule so it updates bi-weekly, but I'm just starting out.

Anyway, try Endlenge out people! Please? It'll be fun! And, oh, to the people that completed all the puzzles up to yesterday, I have created three more already, so yay. :)

Like YAY! Four Island's finally back! Sorry about the extended downtime, I'm sorry! But at least we're back up!

Wow, this post was incredibly short. So, to make it longer, I'll explain why it was down for so long. Since we moved, we had to get a new account at our ISP, which had a different username. Since it was new, I had to re-open port 80, but we kept logging into the ISP's website with the old account, which didn't work. Oops! :)

Anyway, YAY IT'S BACK LIKE KAYAYZIE WOMBAT! ....kay

Ozzyfrog: and he didn't mention a rock
Drifty: Apparently TimTam is dependant on his rock
Ozzyfrog: lol
Ozzyfrog: why the phone number?
Drifty: Anyway, Pyro wants TimTam's phone number
Ozzyfrog: How will that help?
Drifty: Pyro is telling Smiley all about the rock story
Ozzyfrog: what is the rock story?
Drifty: That TimTam has a rock that we need to give back to him...
Drifty: and he will melt if he doesnt get it

....hai? :)

* Girl Without Slipper is listening to Should've Said No by Taylor Swift

I'm sorry to announce that because I am moving, Four Island will go down some time tomorrow. It is unknown when it will come back up, but I hope it will be soon. :)

Now, even I feel this sounds waaaaaay too familiar. However, last year's downtime fiasco should not be repeated, as I am only moving two blocks, rather than two hemispheres. :)

Also, I mention this because I am sure someone will think of it, THIS IS NOT AN APRIL FOOLS DAY JOKE. I'm sorry I forgot to announce it until today, but IT IS NOT A JOKE. Four Island WILL go down tomorrow. Thank you for your time. :) :(

Like OMG YAY! There's a new Four Island blog! Hosted by Four Island! For a Four Islander! That goes on Four Island! You get the point!

This time, it's called "Bubble Blog" and it's Sammi9494's! This post is really short, but anyway, go visit Bubble Blog!