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Kiki

Find the easter egg!

Software

Nothing new here: I'm still working on new site features, one of them being the expansion of journal entries from a private system to one everyone can enjoy. Unfortunately going from one dedicated journal to a setup where every user can post might cause some regressions. To avoid these, I've posted a journal entry as another user to test properly handling multiple authors.

Try to find a reference to the entry.. if you do, I'll enable the journal beta for your user account! (Alas, no other freebies at the moment, still working on a marketing plan and budget.)

A small hint: the entry is called "Harry Potter and the Invisible Easter Bunny". A small warning: it might be hard to find because at this point any public appearance outside of the daily/weekly e-mail digest would be considered a bug: the easter egg entry is not supposed to show up on my journal anywhere.

Harry Potter and the Invisible Easter Bunny

This is a user journal test entry. You're not supposed to see reference to this entry anywhere on the site yet.

If you do read this: congratulations, you have found an easter egg. Please drop me or Rob a comment stating where you saw this entry and everything will be fixed as soon as possible while in return you'll be rewarded by being able to join the everyone-has-a-journal beta.

Discovering imagecopyresampled

Software

I wonder how many people are aware that when PHP is compiled with version 2 of the GD library, it supports imagecopyresampled. For some reason I never discovered it until tonight when looking for use smooth scaling for thumbnails. And it was just what I was looking for.. all this time I was still using imagecopyresized ad bitching about it while the solution directly preceeds it in PHP's GD library function reference. Silly me.

Obviously I have instantly applied some updates to Kiki: from now images in user profiles and my photography thumbnails will look much nicer. In fact, I also changed the image quality to 85 from the default 75. Enjoy! (Improvements not retroactively applied, so upload your user image again to enhance it.)

Login name restriction

Software

Up until now my site did not put any restrictions on the choice of a login name. All public references were either URL encoded or transformed to proper HTML entities, so it didn't really matter if there were any unusual characters.

However, a lot of spammers attempt to break Kiki's security by sending invalid data, aiming to abuse the registration process as a method of sending e-mail. Sorry lads, your attempts don't work and forgive me for my arrogance, they never will. However, I do end up with annoying zombie accounts in the database due to those silly spamming attempts:

/img/journal/20060803-spammers.png

And I don't like to be annoyed. So let it be known that as of now login names are restricted to letters, numbers, periods, dashes and underscores. And I've added the "random image code" Turing-ish CAPTCHA to registration, including an update to the look and feel of it (matching colours and a new font). Look at it's new-found prettiness:

/img/randomimage.php?token=example

Amarok collection corruption

Software

Well dang nabbit! I love how Amarok has a nice OSD with album covers, works with my laptop's multimedia keys and how it makes searching and queuing wonderfully easy. But did it really have to corrupt my music collection?

It's not fun to see a Taking Back Sunday album filed under Nekromantix with song titles from The Offspring while it is actually an album by Rise Against. Rescanning my collection didn't solve the problem, so I had to manually delete the file and start with empty scores and statistics all over again. It's times likes these I wish Amarok could import statistics from Last.FM, or that I would write a plugin to keep statistics myself (but for now I will focus on extending Kiki's user profiles and my hopefully successful publish your gig calendar campaign).

Put your gig calendar on your site!

Software

Cool: you can now put your gig calendar on your site! Just put this on your MySpace, blog or LiveJournal, but replace login with your login:

<a href="http://www.robertjohnkaper.com/users/login/"><img src="http://www.robertjohnkaper.com/syndicate/login/gigs/box.png" width="300" height="250" alt="My Gig Calendar" /></a>

The result?

http://www.robertjohnkaper.com/syndicate/rob/gigs/box/009m.png

Also available in signature version:

http://www.robertjohnkaper.com/syndicate/rob/gigs/sig/therasmus.png

(Replace 'box' with 'sig' in the code.)

Your image is generated the first time it is loaded. I will make a schedule job to delete the cache every night, which means your image will be updated daily. Kiki is growing up.

Update: this tool will let you preview images and generate code for any style available.

See what gigs your mates are going to!

Gigs

Ever wondered who else is going to a gig you have planned, or wonder if anyone is going anywhere because you're out of plans yourself?

No problem with Kiki. You already had a gig calendar and now it comes with a list of all gigs of your mates. Now you never have to miss out on any fun anymore.

AJAX Instant Messenger

Software

I've added instant messaging to the Kiki user profiles on this web site! It's quite simple: a bit of Javascript sends your messages to the server and retrieves new ones for you, adding them to the page without requiring a refresh/reload of your browser. Tested in Konqueror and Mozilla Firefox.

The database keeps track of what messages you have seen, and you get notified of when a mate enters of leaves the chat. And, if someone chats you up, the site will give you a popup saying there's a new message. From there you can directly join the chat!

To start a conversation you currently have to manually find a mate who is on-line because their profile will have a chat link. But I'll be working on a nice status bar which will tell you which mates are on-line all the time! I shall also make the actual chat window a pop-up, so you won't be limited to a single chat a time (you can work around this by using tabs or multiple windows manually but that's not optimal).

Start popping comment cherries

Software

What do you get when you combine:

Profile pages where registered users can leave each other comments! I'll admit that I'm merely reinventing the wheel because this has of course already been done on countless profile and social networking sites. But I still like to tell Murdock to be afraid: be very afraid, Rupert. Not that I plan on getting bigger than MySpace (please no), but building something prettier and better shouldn't be too hard! (Feature suggestions for a next moment of boredom are welcome. And start popping, people!)

Avatars coming!

Software

You can now upload a user image for your account here. Currently Kiki scales the image to 100x100 no matter what, but I might make it smarter.

In the future I might use the user image box that is now alongside all comments for actual personalised avatars. Anyone willing to help me test advanced features like those, please speak up.

© Copyright 1995-2008 Robert John Kaper. All rights reserved.

Tom has more friends but mine are prettier! (#1/1)