Four Island

So, as you may have noticed, Four Island was just down for about a week. Nearly. Well, you may have not in fact noticed this because you may have instead noticed that I haven't posted for about four months. Yikes. I have some weak, barely feasible excuses that I will talk about later, but I first want to talk about Four Island's recent downtime.

As you may know, Hurricane Irene recently hit New York, bringing with it a huge reaction of "WHAT THE FRUGALITY IS GOING ON I DON'T UNDERSTAND THIS AND THAT MAKES ME ANGRY" from virulent New Yorkers who have never seen a hurricane before and really just wanted something to overreact about. Sure, if you add the earthquake a couple of weeks ago, we have been experiencing some natural phenomena that we aren't really used to as East Coasters, but Irene was just downright exploitable. I'm getting kind of sick of the "HURT BY IRENE? WE'VE GOT YOUR BACK--AND YOUR TORSO TOO! LOL" commercials all over the radio. Oh, and I don't care that Irene was only a category 1 tropical storm by the time it reached New York, it has an official name. That name is Hurricane Irene. Stop trying to be so smart.

Irene did have quite an impact on Four Island, anyway, as it caused a record number of power outages across Long Island. Yeah, we were all quite angry at LIPA. I've never been in a power outage longer than a day before and this was pretty ridiculous, especially considering LIPA completely refused to give out any information to anyone. I walked down the street I live on (since by the third day, everyone around us (we live on a corner) had regained power and it was pretty much just our street that was still out) and saw a broken box with severed wires hanging from the power line and took a picture of it, as can be seen to the right, but apparently that can't possibly cause a power outage. :| The actual problem was a whole bunch of fallen power lines down at the end of the street, but still. At least power has finally been restored.

Now, on a completely different subject, as an official iOS developer (check out the business my friends and I set up! Apathetic Ink), I have access to some neat prerelease stuff. This includes iOS 5 beta, which has been tempting me for a while and god I just have to try it out. My dilemma? No untethered jailbreak. I wasn't really sure if I would be cool with a tethered jailbreak, but I eventually figured that the main and almost only reason I jailbreak is for scrobbling, right? Well, if I tethered jailbreak, it's A) unlikely that I'll ever really be more than a day away from my computer, so I'll always be able to rejailbreak pretty quickly and B) I could find some ugly app on the App Store that scrobbled in the foreground and use that when I lost my jailbreak. Sounds okay, right? Besides, iOS 5 just sounded so great and I had to have it.

Well, how did it go? Well, first of all, iOS 5 is just amazing. Can't wait until Apple releases it, hoping they first polish some stuff up. Notification Center? Freaking amazing. I love you, I love you Notification Center! iMessage, too, is amazing and makes me wonder why I even installed WhatsApp. Syncing in the background, though I already had that functionality through my jailbreak, is another great feature and all the other little features Apple has sprinkled over this update really just... make it difficult for me to go back to 4.3. Why would I do that? Well, remember when I said I would only have a tethered jailbreak? Yeah, barely. Somehow, before upgrading to iOS 5 (perhaps because I hadn't read it yet), I missed this paragraph in the text about redsn0w for iOS 5 beta:

THIS JAILBREAK IS INTENDED ONLY FOR DEVELOPERS OF JAILBROKEN APPS! There are just too many broken components (Apple’s official apps, 3rd-party App Store apps, Cydia apps, MobileSubstrate apps, etc) for this to be useful to anyone but those truly looking to fix bugs in their iOS 5 jailbroken apps. (Seriously!)

iPhone Dev Team

There was one app, ONLY ONE APP that I needed to work on jailbroken iOS 5... and Scrobbl disappointed. Gah. I tried to find some way to survive; I downloaded iScrob from the App Store, and as you can see to the left, it is rather ugly. Sorry developer. Sitting here, listening to Adele (darn this is catchy), I decided I really was not very happy with it, and I was especially not very happy with having to break away from the official Music app. I'm fairly sure now that after I'm done writing this post, I'm going to restore to iOS 4.3.3. Thank god for SHSHes.

Apple, please listen to me: INTEGRATE LAST.FM INTO iOS. You integrated Twitter, why not last.fm? Spotify has it, please join the party. You would make a lot of people very happy and I probably wouldn't even jailbreak if I could scrobble songs from the official Music app.

Now, finally, I'm going to talk a little about Four Island 3. I've been mentioning the new version of my website for quite a while now and while I don't want to get any hopes up, it may be coming out fairly soon. As soon as I get a good upgrade plan down (god I'm busy), it should be good to go. The reasons I haven't really been posting lately are A) April-June was an ehh time for me and posting wasn't really my first priority and B) once I finally had some free time around August, I decided I didn't want to post until Four Island 3 came out. Then, Irene and iOS 5 happened and I realized that, ugly as my website is at the moment, I really want to write stuff and have other people read it. I'm really hoping, though, that I'll get around to releasing Four Island 3 soon because it will be great and awesome. Expect a massive post explaining a whole ton of superfluous stuff when it gets released. :P

Hey.... there's something different about Four Island.... Well, Fouripedia's back! Like, duh. :P

Fouripedia was removed when I created the 7th layout because I couldn't be bothered to fix it to conform to the new layout/it was hideously broken anyway. Well, I've made some changes. First, I've done some SSO magic, so now, if you've logged into the rest of Four Island, you've logged into Fouripedia as well. It also looks nicer and integrates well with all available layouts.

So, now that Fouripedia's back up, what're you going to do? WRITE PAGES FOR IT YAYY!!!!! :P

On the fifth day of Kirby Week, Four Island gave to me: An way of making URLs look prettier.

As I promised yesterday, today I'll be showing you how to use prettier URLs to reference your blog posts. We'll be removing the query string.

In this tutorial, I'm assuming you're using the Apache web server with mod_rewrite enabled. Otherwise, you'll probably need to read more elsewhere when we get up to the .htaccess file.

Speaking of the .htaccess file, let's do that now. In your kirbyweek08 folder, create a file called .htaccess and put this in it:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule (.*)/ read.php?slug=$1 [L]

Well, that's yummy-yay-yay, but the read.php file does not yet accept a slug parameter. Let's add that functionality now with an upgrade to the read.php file. Find the line that says:

$getpost = "SELECT * FROM posts WHERE id = " . $_GET['id'];

Replace it with the following:

if (isset($_GET['id']))
{
 $getpost = "SELECT * FROM posts WHERE id = ";
 $getpost .= $_GET['id'];
} else if (isset($_GET['slug']))
{
 $getpost = "SELECT * FROM posts WHERE slug = \"";
 $getpost .= $_GET['slug'] . "\"";
}

This will allow read.php to parse slugged URLs. Now that Prettiful URL support has been added, you think you're done, right? Wrong. We have to fix the links to read.php in functions.php and rss.php.

Within functions.php, there are two occurances of this partial line of code:

<A HREF="read.php?id=<?php echo($sqlOutput['id']); ?>">

Replace both with:

<A HREF="http://example.org/kirbyweek08/<?php echo($sqlOutput['slug']); ?>/">

Of couse, remember to replace http://example.org/kirbyweek08/ with the path to your blog.

In addition, the following partial line of code appears in rss.php:

/read.php?id=<?php echo($getposts3[$i]['id']); ?></link>

Replace it with:

/<?php echo($getposts3[$i]['slug']); ?>/</link>

And there! You're done! You've added prettiful URL support to your blog! YAY!

Tomorrow we'll be discussing other small improvements you can make to your homebrew blogging system.

I'm glad to see many "I LOVE ITs" for TGS, because it's such a great project. For you who don't know what it is, see this: The Greatest Story.

I LOVE IT. - 9 vote(s)! It's an interesting idea. - 0 vote(s)! What the negative is it? - 2 vote(s)! **** - 0 vote(s)!

I'm sure you all know, Kirby Week 2008 starts today! For those who don't know, Kirby Week is the third week of advent, when the candle is pink. Yes, I know, that wasn't funny. :)

I started the strange idea of Kirby Week in December 2006, a year before Four Island even existed. Since then, each Kirby Week has been a week of fun, joy and excitement at the holiday to come. Starting this year, I'd also like to do something for Four Island during Kirby Week.

I've decided that during Kirby Week, I shall post a weekly special (like VisitorGrid Week) on a set topic. Sound like fun? I hope it does!

This year's topic is how to code your own blog. TimTam has been nagging me to do this anyway, so I might as well use it for Kirby Week!

And also, I've decided to do use last year's Kirby Week poll for this year as well. So, all in all, I hope you all enjoy Kirby Week 2008!