Four Island

Well, in all of my random spare time, I've come up with a random Related Posts game. Random.

Want to know how to play? Of course you do.

1. First, go to the newest Four Island post
2. Check to see if there any related posts. If there aren't, go to the next most recent post.
3. Once you've gotten a starting post, the game starts. Every chooses a related post.
4. On the related post, check to see if there are any related posts that you haven't been to already. If there aren't, the game ends for you. If there are, you get one point.
5. Choose a related post that you haven't been to already
6. Repeat steps 4-5 until the game is over for you.

Once the game ends for everyone, the person with the most points wins.

Like it? Think it's completely random? Well, that's what you get. I'm INSANE about the new Four Island.

Also, as a sidenote, I've modified the way that Pingbacks display here on Four Island. Instead of saying:

Someone has posted a link to this post on URL

Pingback

It will say:

URL

EXCERPT OF LINKING POST

Pingback

This makes much more sense, I believe. I'm still open to any Pingbacks! Remember, the test Pingback is still going, so continue to Pingback The New Four Island!

And, another sidenote, I've added a Top Commenters to the sidebar so you can see those commenters who are really.... commenty. However, it is a little disheartening to see me with 84 comments, and the next person down with 14 comments. That's a BIIIIIIIIG difference, and one that I hope will shrink. Pwease?

EDIT: Remember the downtime I talked about yesterday? Well, you can forget about it. Maybe. I don't know, but it seems a possibility that it'll be avoided. Just wait until tomorrow to see.

EDIT: Remember, feel free to play the Related Posts Game and posts your results here. I'd be happy to play anytime as long as someone else does.

Finally. It's finally here. The new Four Island....

Well everyone, I hope you enjoy the new Four Island! It was quite a lot of work to put together! How about I start by enumerating the new features?

The blog has many new Wordpress-esque features even though it isn't Wordpress. I've written a Related Posts module that searches for other posts that could possibly be related and shows you the top 5. There's a Popular Posts module that gives each post a Popularity score that can be increased by reading it, commenting on it, and most importantly, giving it pingbacks.<!--more-->

Speaking of Pingbacks, yes! The Pingback support is finally here! And, peoples, just to test out this newfound Pingback support, I would appreciate it if someone Pingbacked this post. You know, add a link to this post in a post on your blog. Thanks in advance to anyone who does this!

Another great new feature. Anonymous commenting has finally been re-enabled! But, rather like Wordpress, you must have your comment moderated before it can appear. But after you've had one comment moderated, any others using your same Anonymous Username and Email will automatically appear.

The Popular Posts module has also added a Thumbs-Up Thumbs-Down method of rating a post. This way, you can support the post without writing a comment. However, a post won't get as many popularity points from rating than commenting, and it is possible to negatively rate a post.

One of my favorite new features (though I don't quite know why) is the usage of slugs. No you lollipop licker, I'm not talking about slimy little molluscs, I'm talking about the method of writing pathnames. Let me elaborate. If I had a blog post called.... say.... "The New Four Island". The equivalent slug would be "the-new-four-island". And thus, it's path would be: "http://www.fourisland.com/blog/the-new-four-island/". It's a newer (and better) method of naming paths than URLEncoding them as the old Four Island did.

That gets me onto the Wiki. The Wiki system has been completely rewritten. And guess what, it uses slugs as well. It also has Page History support so if there are bad people doing bad things, an admin can go look at the past and revert.

Also, while I've written the new Wiki, I haven't moved the old Wiki to the new Wiki. I'd like some people to help me do so. I'll release a link to the new Wiki in a couple of posts, kay?

Fourm time. Well, the Fourm is muchly the same as ever, but due to being included in a strange fashion, the Fourm has a couple of bugs now that I'd like to resolve. First of all, when logging in, registering or searching, the page looks really hideous and has other information at the bottom. Another thing, clicking on the "Fourm" button at the top logs you out. Please stand by these errors while I try to resolve them, kay?

The Poll is pretty much the same, except for the new rendering model that has gripped nearly all of Four Island. Using the beautiful CSS-Bubbles located at http://www.willmayo.com/2007/02/10/css-speech-bubbles/ (hey look, I've sent a Pingback!), I've redesigned most of Four Island to include them. Just look at the RightBar, the blog, the blog comments, the Poll Archive. They look prettyful, and you know it.

The Quotes DB has been completely re-written so that it isn't Rash anymore, now it's completely my own code. Also, I've added a convenience method. If you are logged in while contributing a quote, you don't have to get it moderated.

Something you may have noticed. Look at the date if you haven't. Anyways, if you are superstitious, you may be thinking "What's Hatkirby doing, releasing the new Four Island on Friday the 13th?" Well, to answer that, for some reason Friday the 13ths have normally actually been more lucky for me than unlucky. Strange, but true.

Goodness, this has been a loooooong post. Well, anyways, I hope you enjoy the new Four Island! I'm so excited for it, and besides, it was a whole ton of work completely re-writing Four Island!

EDIT: Wow, it turns out that all of the problems with the Fourm have been resolved before I'd even had the chance to examine them. I think that they probably had something to do with the test subdomain I was using to test the new Four Island.

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?

First of all, I apologize. This post was released at 12:30 as usual, but a glitch in the cronjob replaced the post's content with "S". The reason the cronjob was different from usual is that it has been modified to use the new Four Island's post adding functionality as to allow the posts to be compatible with the new Four Island.

Some more info about the new Four Island! First of all, it's nearly out! I just need to finish the Wiki and do the Admin Panel and then it's done! In fact, if I'm super productive, I may even finish today! Wow!

Also, the new Four Island's blog will support Pingbacks. This is exciting. If you don't know what Pingbacks are, well, here's a short explanation:

Suppose that there are two blogs: Alice's blog and Bob's blog. Alice posts a link to one of Bob's blog posts on her blog. Because of this, Alice's blog then sends a "pingback" to Bob's blog notifying his blog that Alice has posted a link to him. When Bob's blog recieves this Pingback, it posts a comment on the post in question saying that Alice has linked to him.

Pingback will be very useful as Gryphic seems to have a fun tendency to post replies to my blog on her blog. I ask one thing, though. Peoples (that includes you, Gryphic), if you wish to post a reply to one of my blog posts on your blog or reference it in some way, please include a link to the post of mine that you are referencing so that I can recieve a Pingback. Thanks!

Well, once again, I'm hosting another site. This time, it's a blog for Timbo94! It's called Dream Weaver and he's already populating it with interesting posts! Find it at http://timbo94.fourisland.com! It's also on the Four Island Links page!

In other news, the new Four Island is doing great! The quotes db has been completely re-written, and I've now decided that, if you are logged in while posting a quote, you don't have to get it verified. You only have to get it verified if you're anonymous.

No, you haven't lost your mind again. I have changed my username. Again.

I just felt as if Starla was too common, I mean, I really liked the name, but too many other people on the Internet used the same name, so it wouldn't be unique.

I've come up with StarlaXY as an alternative as it's unused and actually makes logical sense (though I won't tell you why, and be quiet Tamasys, you're lucky I told you), but I don't think it's cute enough.

So please leave comments on what you think. I'd like help on this because I don't want to always be changing my username. I may even decide to go back to Hatkirby. Please tell me what you think.

NOTE: The Login button is still in existance, it's just invisible. Sorry. That's fixed in the new Four Island. For the time being, it's located next to the "Links" button on the NavBar.

[ #30 + (8) - [X] ](/quotes/30.php)

....We've got a new QOTM. And guess what, it's the (in)famous #30! Click on the link for the full details.

Also, the new Four Island is doing great! I won't reveal much, but I'd like to give you a tiny hint: CSS Speech Bubbles | willmayo.com

Recently, I came upon a web servive entitled reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA system. For those who don't know what CAPTCHA is (shame), CAPTCHA is a method of preventing bot spam on your website. A picture is generated with one or two distorted words on it. A user doing whatever it is you want to protect must type in the words (s)he sees to be allowed to submit his/her comment/whatever.

Many CAPTCHAs annoy people. It seems that all they do is obstruct and prolong the time taken to do something. But reCAPTCHA is different.

reCAPTCHA doesn't just help stop comment span on your website. It helps digitize books. reCAPTCHA sees CAPTCHAs as a way of harnessing human power into doing something useful that cannot be done by a bot. This way, you are not only verifying that you are not a bot when you fill out a CAPTCHA, you are also contributing to a cause.

The people at reCAPTCHA have scanned many books and attempted to convert the scanned pictures into words with OCR software. OCR software cannot always get all of the words, so the words that the OCR doesn't understand are send to be used in a reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA then generates a picture with one word that is known and another word that isn't known. The reCAPTCHA assumes that if one of the words are correct, the other one should be as well.

reCAPTCHA can be used everywhere. They've exported their API to many platforms and written plugins for many web applications. For some of these and some better explained information, please visit the reCAPTCHA website at http://recaptcha.org.

I would also just like to mention that the website has a page with a demo reCAPTCHA that you can use to digitize books without verifying anything. It's at http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html and it's really addicting.

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.

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.