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MySpace fucks up - again

Software

Perhaps I should start a dedicated blog to write about MySpace errors.. because once again the site it horribly broken and I can't visit Bif Naked's profile:

Found a cyclic link in http://www1.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=11152032

Fortunately my social life doesn't depend on MySpace and I've found (read: created) a much better social network, but I feel sorry for people who take MySpace's lack of quality for granted.

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).

Personal quickies

Personal

A few personal quickies:

1. I dreamed of Inge last night. I do not remember the context nor any gory details, but I do remember that at some point the dream involved holding hands.

2. Tomorrow morning I'm having a malaria vaccination. It's 99% sure now that work will send me to Uganda at the end of the month which might possible be my first birthday in Africa.

3. My friends are hot. (Okay we already knew that, I'm just pimping the new and improved profile pages.)

The tribal dance

Personal

Wow. An actual on-line community web site which is styleful, web standards compliant and not a complete pain in the ass? One that actually imports blog entries from my existing journal through the RSS feed? It looks like Tribe is offering just that, so if you're into these sort of things and either befriended to me or called Kirsten Dunst: join my Tribe network. Cheers!

(Actually, join something else: my own profile site!)

Your own avatar

Software

I've decided to post technical web site updates and ideas under "Software" because it bloody well is software that makes this site do its thing (in fact, it's Kiki CMS).

I am considering adding avatars to the site: registered users would have one displayed next to their comments, as happens on many forums. However, instead of using plain images, I will draw inspiration from Gaia Online. Users would compose their own character and add personality to their avatar by selecting the right clothing and accessories.

It will take time and a lot of work to create such a system, which ranges from drawing template figures and clothing layers to creating a workable market system to trade and purchase items that personalise an avatar. It might not even work too well on a site with two dozen registered users of which only a few are actually active.

So what's my motivation to do all that? Well, it would be fun. And more importantly: it could serve as a prototype for a community-based site I am considering to build, heavily focused on the rock scene and gig culture. MySpace meets Gaia meets Ticketmaster meets Mapquest, sort of. But that's a future plan, right now I'm just interested in personalised avatars.

Please leave a comment and tell me if you think I should waste some time on such a feature. I would need a few people to at least play with the system to have it can evolve properly, if that's not going to happen I might as well not bother with avatars at all.

Update: well, the profile site is here. No avatars yet, but there's progress..

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

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