Four Island

Oh dear. About a month after I started developing InstaDisc, I was notified by Bluemonkey that things such as client side RSS readers did exist in this realm. I knew that, but it had elapsed my memory for about a year. Poop.

Now, I wonder, what is to come of InstaDisc? The only real difference I can see between InstaDisc and RSS (other than the fact that InstaDisc seems to be a whole lot more complicated) is that InstaDisc offers Push technology to INSTAntly notify you of your fixes--I mean subscriptions--instantly. However, this only works with clients that are simply behind a modem without a router in between.

So, I ask now, what should I do with InstaDisc? Discontinue it? Continue it? Completely destroy it? Run off and cry? Pass out and cry? It's up to you, readers of Four Island. Well, it's probably actually up to me, but I really like it when you people comment!

I guess, then, that InstaDisc isn't much use. I'm sad. So anyway, I guess you peoples should use Liferea Feed Reader, if on a Linux-based system, otherwise Mozilla Thunderbird is also pretty good.

Well, the new layout is out, and the 4th is gone. I guess we all had fun with it while it lasted.

We've had it for a while and it's nice - 4 vote(s)! It's getting old - 4 vote(s)! Ewww! - 0 vote(s)! Indifferent - 0 vote(s)!

I'm sorry I'm updating this poll on Sunday instead of Saturday. Something came up that, as usual, I was not told about earlier. :)

Speaking of the new layout, the 6th layout is out and, hopefully, complete! It is good and stuffs and yay.... ok, that was surreal. We're already up to the 6th layout? Strange.

Stranger is that we just had the 4th theme, and now we're having the 6th theme. The reason is because the 5th was created after the 4th had been around for a while, but it was pretty much the same thing, but in a notebook style (aligned to the left of the screen). Everyone hated it. It clashed with browsers and other evil stuffs. In the end, I just switched back to layout 4.

Technically, you could call the theme we just had 4.5 because the new Four Island was released during its lifetime, and the New Four Island didn't only clean up the code, it changed the display a little.

Anyway, with Four Island so far from where it started, I'd like to post some screenshots of the older layouts. However, there are no known screenshots of Hatkirby CDI (the pre-Four Island layout) or Layout 1. The only screenshot of Layout 2 (which was pretty similar to 1) I can remember is on one of those domain identifier sites where they tell you a lot of information about the domain, and it's WHOIS info. But I don't even know if that screenshot's still there.

So, because of that, I'd just like to show you Layout 3, the longest living Four Island theme. Coincidentally, I had saved the sources files defining the third layout in a backup, so the following screen shot is a recreation of Layout 3. Here's the screenshot.

Now, with the 4th layout's life time getting closer and closer to the large lifetime of good ol' layout three, I give you, the more prettiful, Layout Six.

Recently, I've (OMG. Seriously, that was a coincidence) been thinking about starting KFM again. I know I've said this many times, but I know some people actually really like it. I think I should re-start, but I'll have to get over the procrastination.

The thing is, I want to showcase KFM here on Four Island and I was thinking of having Wednesday's blog post be a KFM post and Saturday's weekly post include a KFM comic as well. The only problem is that there are already about 70 KFM comics that have been seen on the Internet before (Smackjeeves), so with the above standards, it would take about 35 weeks to get all of the currently existing KFM comics onto this blog.

If you KFM readers are OK with, I guess I could start again. The delay could even be useful, I could be writing new comics while the first season of KFM goes up. I'm sorry about the bad job I've been doing with KFM, but I'm a lazy lazy girl. Sorry about that.

If you still like KFM, and you would love for it to go back up, comment on this post! And remember to send all of your fanmail to fanmail@fourisland.com so Kirby can read it! Fanmail left anywhere else may not be noticed, so make sure it goes to fanmail@fourisland.com!

OK, you may have noticed the new Four Island layout. Yes, I thought you did. I got tired of Layout 4 and decided Four Island needed something new. But I was too hasty with it.

In my haste to put up a new layout, I forgot a few necessary things such as affiliate links and the Quotes subsection links. And Fouripedia isn't integrated correctly. Also, the development site was having difficulties with the automatic posting feature, so I disabled the pending queue, and thus forgot to re-enable it. That's why there wasn't a post yesterday.

I am going to re-enable the posting queue as soon as I finish typing this post. I'll also attempt to fix the many problems people seem to have with the new layout. Once layout 6 has entered a stable phase, I'll announce it like I usually do.

In the mean time, if anyone has any suggestions or problems with the new layout, feel free to comment on this post or reply to TimTam's Fourm topic, New Layout in Fourscore Improvement. I welcome any suggestions because I dislike Four Island not being as functional as it used to be.

I really don't like posting more than once a day, but this is necessary. I was looking through my logs recently when I saw that my webserver had a lot of email, somehow. I looked through it, and this is what I saw:

This is the mail system at host trindla.fourisland.com.

I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not
be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster.

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the attached returned message.

                   The mail system

<****@hotmail.com>: host mx4.hotmail.com[65.54.244.104]
said: 550 DY-001 Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail
for policy reasons. We generally do not accept email
from dynamic IP's as they are not typically used to
deliver unauthenticated SMTP e-mail to an Internet mail
server. http://www.spamhaus.org maintains lists of
dynamic and residential IP addresses. If you are not an
email/network admin please contact your E-mail/Internet
Service Provider for help. Email/network admins, please
visit http://postmaster.live.com for email delivery
information and support (in reply to MAIL FROM command)

Apparently, I'm not allowed to send emails to Windows Live Hotmail. Among the messages rejected were:

• The activation code for someone trying to register for the Fourm. Gryphic, this's probably your friend.
• A password reset email. Pyro, this is yours, sorry about that. Now you know why you didn't get the email.
• Various pingback and comment notification messages from Color Pencils. This is probably why Gryphic never noticed I commented on her "The Pigeon Reports" page.

I'm really sorry about this and I'll try to get it fixed by routing my email through my ISP's email server. Again, I'm sorry. If you have a Hotmail account and you haven't been recieving emails, this is why.

Ok, so the first week of Four Island being back up is coming to a close. Tomorrow I'll post my regular weekly poll, so don't worry. I just wanted to say a few things about Four Island.

First of all, that weird thing with the duplicate posts, yes, that was my fault. Don't blame Four Island. When I was manually posting the "I'm back!" post, I accidentally posted it twice, so I removed the second and posted the Lorelle post. But, I forgot to remove the Lorelle post from the pending queue, so Four Island decided to post it again the next day. Sorry about that!

Four Island's source control system has been changed from Subversion to Mercurial. This is because as I can't always be at the server now, I can make use of Mercurial's distributive property by downloading the repository and modifying that off the network, then pushing the changes back to the server later.

The project management system has also been changed from Trac to Redmine, an interesting-looking system that allows you to host all your projects in a SINGLE environment instead of many different ones. I hope it works out well, it was a chore to set up as it runs on Ruby on Rails.

By the way, I've been checking the new quotes queue recently and found quite a lot there. I just want to say, if you're logged in when you submit the quote, it'll go straight to the database without me having to verify it. That way, it's less work for me and your quote shows up instantly.

I've been reading a blog recently called Lorelle on Wordpress. It's a blog about blogging, and it's UBER GOOD. I don't know why, but it's like a jinxed book. I can't get off of it, there's so much good content on it.

Even if you do not have a Wordpress blog (like me), I'd still suggest Lorelle on Wordpress. Not everything posted there is strictly Wordpress related (like the title of this post, for example). A lot of it is just blogging in general.

And that brings me to the second point of this post. Dually inspired by Lorelle's "Blog Challenge" series (a type of post challenging you to post something belonging to some criteria on your blog--besides being fun, it gives you post ideas) and the comment thread of Dream Weaver's Entry 2 - "Are all Angels bad?", I've created a challenge of my own. But, since I don't want to copy Lorelle completely, I've decided I won't do a blog challenge. No, I'll do a comment challenge.

I want you to find a post on some blog (not on your own blog!) with some content that you can really reply to. Write a very long comment on it, like the ones on the DW post. Make sure you fill out the "Post Comment" form with your website's address in it, because when you write your comment, you need to comment on this post with the URL to the blog post you commented on and the username you are going as. Then, if your comment strikes me as particularly well thought-out and long, I'll post a link to your blog on my blog.

This challenge expires in exactly one month. I think it'll be interesting to see who actually cares enough about getting their blog linked to to actually manage to complete this challenge within the time limit. After the 30 days are up, I will take a day to judge, and then I'll post the results the day after. And comments posts exactly 30 days after this post will be rendered invalid.

Sorry about the excitement, I'm just so happy to be back up again!!!!! It's taken a lot of hard work (read: begging), but we're finally up again! I hope you people still like Four Island, even with our killer downtime. However, there shouldn't be many more of those as now, Four Island lives on it's own dedicated server!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In other news, I was recently in the database putting the links to the hosted sites into the main HatNav when I noticed Color Pencils' assigned AID, "lonely". I thought it was pretty funny at the time, but then I remembered that Gryphic's blog used to be called "Lonely Ramblements". Funny story, but Gryphic's blog has changed it's names several times (most of them jokes, mind, I really do hope she was kidding with "Three Island" :) ), and the result has been the lovely name you see today. (Gryphic, I know you'll change your blog's name to something hideous after you see this)

Anyway, I am so happy to be back and to be able to run my website again with all of it's fun perks. This is Hatkirby, and my closing statement is:

 * Hatkirby is listening to Running by No Doubt

It's good to be back.

EDIT: Oops, sorry, I'm back. I wanted to mention that while I did post a hidden post (Yay me!), I did disable my pending post queue for the during Four Island's downtime. The Entrecard post accidentally slipped through. Anyway, I have re-enabled the pending queue so you can get your daily Four Island fix again! (TimTam, I'm looking at you :) )

Welcome to our prettyful weekly poll post.

I hope you've enjoyed this week's poll post.

(We were right. 8()

I do have iNet access, just our ISP is stupid. That's right. Blame Optimum.

Anyways, as you no doubt know (because at the time of writing, only Hatkirby can be on the site, and later, this post will be old and archived), the commenting system's changed. Now it's more of a threaded discussion section, instead of being flat.

You didn't see anything

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.