Blogs

Nominations Review #announcement fstdt.com blog

Nominations are up for review in the subreddit!

This isn't voting yet, this is me taking a pass through and seeing if I have a decent enough set of nominations for voting. I'm a bit behind so I'm only going to leave them open to review this week.

I've also got to figure out how I want to handle voting, I've done custom text parsing in the past, but I also didn't have this many items to vote on then. May do something a tad strange unless I find a good poll site. Anyway, take a look at the nominations, yell out any good ones that haven't made it under the categories, and hope to see you guys over there.

subreddit off the port bow #announcement reddit.com blog

Oi! After entirely too much preamble without any progress I've opened up the FSTDT subreddit.

I've got the basic rules up on the side bar. I'm running the place myself so be fully aware I have minimal tolerance for bullshit of the forum drama variety these days. It's actually a fair part of why I went with reddit. It's roughly as annon as here, and if you want to discuss something that doesn't fit within the rules there's probably another subreddit where you'll be in fine company. Want to screw around with other members of the community, commiserate or generally shoot the shit. Perfectly welcome. Actual discussion of topics, also welcome. I look forward to talking to folks.

That said, I'm running it myself and I'm already short on time these days. If it becomes a time sink I may well close it down. This is a bit of a trial period for me. If you'd like to help moderate the place hit me on the mod mail from the subreddit and we can talk.

Hosts #announcement fstdt.com blog

Been actively poking around and found a great reason to push through the test site's cancellation, my current host has a plan that's half the price of what I'm paying with twice the SQL space that I've been carefully managing to not exceed for the last few years. That's a thing. That's a hell of a thing. I'll be chasing after that and will try and warn folks if it looks like there may be a rough transition. Chance for an outage, and another one while I'm fucking around with the configuration to play with whatever new toys I wind up with. But hot damn if I can keep this level of service and just get more space I'd probably not care about paying less, just really don't want to get shafted service wise after the repeated fuck ups with the test site host.

Had to start some time. #announcement fstdt.com blog

Moving along, I have the first stages of the fundies together and... well, it'll mostly be quote of the year as the remaining categories are frankly predictable. If you have new category ideas let's hear them. But there are some nice quotes and I have a slightly different idea than usual I'll roll out and we can see how that goes.

Working with the preview site host, got my money back and will be closing that account before much longer. Sorry to cut it off, but next version will be elsewhere, with a few updates when I get the time.

If you have any nominations, throw them in the comments.

Now I'm off to make dinner, hope everyone had a great new year #announcement fstdt.com blog

Happy new year folks, quick run down time:

Been sick as a dog the last week
Got promoted the week before that because my boss was leaving
Busy is an understatement when I've been able to do anything
Yes we will be doing fundie of the year, I'll be working on that this weekend and setting up categories hit me with suggestions in the comments below.

My host for the preview site has had a few billing irregularities this last week, so that will be coming down by the end of the month. Anyone who knows good .net hosts let me know, I may well be having a conversation with my current one to see if I can't get my plan tweaked a bit to fit the site better.

That whole someone taking over the site thing didn't pan out, no one with the time and the money popped up. In the end I can't quite bring myself to say do or die and off the site, but I will say if there is someone interested I'd love the help. And I got plenty of offers to help in other ways which I'll be working out once I actually have some time again. It bugs me that I don't have the time to free up some time, but it goes that way at some points so hold on for the ride.

What's that mean? Well, I have a crap load of people who want in to public admin and a few folks who have volunteered to do quote corrections or even full administration. So with some luck that means less waiting on me to get quotes out soon as I get folks setup. Also, I've secured a new community location and I've been pounding out some rough guidelines. Going to finish those and make sure the volunteers are fully on board with them before it launches. May prioritize that for fundie of the year discussion, scream if that interests you.

After all that #announcement fstdt.com blog

Rolling along with some parallel projects at work. I have the basics of the current iteration of .NET Identity working, and frankly don't need half the additional features at work, so I'm going to use that knowledge to build out the fuller version for the site including registration, password recovery and basic user functionality as I have time. Which should let me give people public admin access to see what I have, and then blow time on some admin interfaces before coming back around to do the interface cleaning. Depending on what time I have when I'll be in and out with updates.

That said, I have something resembling a personal life which is making this rather difficult to focus on so I'm glad I'm down to more bite sized chunks.

Back to work #announcement fstdt.com blog

Right, said I was going to post one of these each day. Well, I'm moving on to the vote counting part of the system which has some interesting bits, and aiming to get the user admin stuff done by the end of the day. I hope folks check out the preview build of the site that's out live, but right now let's talk about the vote system and old abuses.

If you look at the archives 2008 looks like a banner year, right? Maybe? Not exactly. The software that was in use at that point was kinda ass and someone more or less hijacked the public admin voting and the top 100 voting to organize the site as they wished by exploiting a few loopholes. I hacked closed the loopholes, booted the responsible party and recalculated the top 100. It was a pain in the ass and rather embarrassing that I only caught on when the top 100 had the top 5 items separated by single digit votes.

That's not going to happen again. The new voting systems are designed to ensure that it is not possible to vote more than once, like literally I cannot record more than one vote from a given IP on an account. But how does that stop them from running up the value and not being recorded? Simple, I'm not incrementing on vote, I'm counting up all the stored votes and re generating the score when a new vote is added. I've finished the public admin voting system yesterday and pretty much need user admin working before I can open it up publicly, and there's a thing with login not triggering or redirecting properly that I need to sort out before it's usable. But, what's important here is the design works and I'm already largely done with the ass end of the public rating voting, it's a matter of getting the front and middle parts working and hopefully deployed sometime this weekend for you all to abuse.

On a note, anyone have opinions on changing the Vote tags from "WTF!" and "meh"? I still like them a bit, but simple up and down or + and - seem more intuitive. Or does the content of the site lend itself to those reactions?

Anyway, assuming I get user admin done today I'm going to say it was good 30 hours of work on the site this week and screw off tomorrow, maybe doing a bit more this weekend, but I have some things going on. That said, I do have another week of vacation and no significant plans. Sure as hell won't be spending another full week on the site, but I should have plenty of time to get things handled, particularly with the help volunteers who have stepped up to take over the place.

Free Samples! #announcement fstdt.com blog

Sample Site is out!

Only took me three days longer than I hoped, and I just dicked around another half hour tuning the Latest Comments a bit, but here it is:

Test Site Ahoy!

Note the data is over a year old, and any submissions to it will be tossed with the test data. But if you want to see what I'm planning for an interface, or just want to select random fundie quotes from every month of may the site has had, it can do that. Click around a bit and yell at me if you break something, I've left the error messages full, so just give me the whole text in a comment here.

Humpday #announcement fstdt.com blog

Alright, today's goals are reasonably simple, get Public admin working, then look at quote rating voting. I think what I'm going to do is get a basic mechanic working now, and pile on ajax versions later. If I have spare time today I'm going to work on User Management and do some cleaning on the existing code. Assuming I finish this today the rest is improvements and admin functionality. Which is the easy shit since it all ties back into display mechanics I already have and 90% of the work is SQL that I can rattle off quickly.

That said, it does look like I'll have some work to do after the week is said and done. But this stuff looks manageable in shorter periods of time rather than being the kind of things I actually need a day for.

Monday, and I'm awake at five am, why? #announcement fstdt.com blog

Today I plan on working on:

Comment Driven quote listings
- Latest comment and any similar listings

Finishing user authentication by hooking into the database
- Cleaning up user DB while I'm at it
- Figuring how to migrate folks to a better password encryption

Quote and Comment Admin Edit pages

Review go to latest comment functionality

Review needs for Quote and Comment submissions
- Largely the edit pages, only with less security and more anti-spam and hand holding.
- Get, Redirect, Profit

Review needs for Comment Administration pages
- A generic listing mechanism would probably be useful here

Coding is coming #announcement fstdt.com blog

Evening folks, thought I should announce I'm going to be a bit more active next week as I've taken next week off to work on the site. My intention right now is to make a post in the morning with my todo list for the day and mark things off as I complete them. So, after getting off my ass and delivering the wife to work I'll make a post and get on my merry-ish way getting the site upgrades done. That said, I've been doing some work this week already to give myself some basis to star with and assuming I don't end my day in a complete shit place I'll be updating FSTDT.org with any changes I make. Right now I have a list of core features which I'll detail as I'm working on them. Once I have those done, I'm taking a slacker day, I took a week's vacation for fuck's sake. Assuming I have some time left after that I'll be back with some of the more requested options I've had on the backburner, or get requested here.

I will note, I'm still watching the volunteers email and had someone volunteer this morning. I'm debating cutting it off, but I honestly don't see the point. If you want to help, hit that email.

Organization #announcement fstdt.com blog

Organizing! I'm working on it now, I've sent out emails to those who have them on their accounts here and none of them looked particularly disposable, but, if you don't have access to the email you registered with or just generally don't even have an account email me at Volunteers@fstdt.net

Let me know who you are and I'll fire off the community details I'm getting together.

What the balls is this about? Well check out this post for more. If anyone else is interested in volunteering I'll happily add you to the list.

Public Annoucement #announcement fstdt.com blog

(Edit: New Post on Volunteering read if you want in)

Alright folks, I'm looking for people to replace me and make sure the site keeps going now since I'm not hanging around for too much longer. Frankly there's a lot to do and I've neglected a fair bit of it for the sake of personal life and it hasn't done the site any good.

I figure a team of people would do a better job and make one person leaving a little less traumatic. If you want to help but aren't sure how, here's the kind of people involved in keeping the site:

Owner
* Who's paying the domain name and hosting charges. Hosting runs about ten bucks a month, registering the .com domain name is 10.29 a year and .net is 12.08 a year.
* I'll help you out with domain registration and have a few recommendations for hosting(including NOT arvixe)
* As a note, the site has never turned a profit and donations don't often make a dent in hosting costs, be prepared to pay the lot of that.

Developer
* This is what scares most people, working with the code and doing work to improve the site's speed and functionality.
* We've got a volunteer for this already, but if you're interested offer up, more eyes is better.

Quote Admin
* Take the time to curate quotes, this means you approve them, make corrections and generally keep up the quality of what's sent to the main page

Quote Volunteer
* Vote on which quotes will make it to the main page and help catalog things that need to be corrected.

Community Manager
* Spam hunting mostly, you skim comments for spam and excessive trolling
* Read and respond to Admin email, let developer or quote admin know about issues outside your scope.

Odds are you could take a few of these, but doing all of it is pretty pain in the ass.

I'm not going to ask too much from those who pick up the site after me, all I'm going to ask is whoever winds up with the rights to the domain name itself makes sure it moves on to someone else when they move on from the place.

What else I will do is work on finishing up the code for the new revision of the site(soon as I get the host for it straightened out). Either by myself or in concert with any new volunteers. I'll follow up with what needs to be done if folks are interested.

Balls balls balls #announcement blog

Had intended on doing a public announcement on getting work done and switch over, only I've blown half my fucking day trying to ahold of someone at my alternate webhost to pay them and get this bill out of my face. Now my wife is telling me she's found things saying the company is more or less dead after acquisition and all of it's employees fired a week ago. Which would all explain quite clearly why in the balls I didn't get my "Hey pay us" email a week ago.

So yeah, don't host with arvixe right now. Probably never again, this is disgraceful.

See Distind tweet for the third time ever!

Warning, edit rant inbound.

ONE FUCKING MINUTE, I SPENT TWO FUCKING HOURS ON THE PHONE AND THE FUCKERS TAKE ONE FUCKING MINTUTE TO RESPOND... now the wait for someone to actually do something. Seriously, I edited this and they'd responded.

Further edit confusion:
Five minutes after the twitter complaint I've got a response to my ticket. I think I'm officially into twitter now. Here's to hoping it actually works. Also holy shit it's horrible this is what it takes to get service, I've hit literally every real access point they have, it takes bitching publicly on my clearly highly followed, rated and prized twitter account to actually get a response.

Calling all admins #announcement fstdt.com blog

Lots of ways to say it, lots of things I could rant on about, but long story short I think I'm about done with my tenure as admin of FSTDT. I don't have the time or interest to keep up with administration and development without taking time from my personal life, which has been my priority these last few years.

But, sky isn't falling, I'll keep the place propped up for a while yet and see if anyone is interested in taking over. I did it five, six, actually I'm not sure how many years ago now, so I'd like to find someone new to take things over before I have a day where giving the site the boot becomes particularly appealing. Don't know much about coding, websites or all those scary things? Not as big of a problem as you'd think, the site itself is pretty simple and if you show interest sooner than later I'd be willing to walk you through the redux code and either finish it or teach you how to.

I knew about half of what I needed to when I picked this place up, a few months I wound up re-writing the site in a day and a half in on my own. The site still largely works off that code. I wanted to make sure the community stuck around and had the time to spare to make sure it happened, that's all you need as I am willing to help you through the technical aspect. At least at the time being, give me a few more months and I may not have that left in me.

Anyway, if folks show interest I'll toss up some communication lines and we can chat. If there are a number of people we can work that out, it may actually work out better with a larger crew running the place, smaller upsets when one leaves. If you're interested in making sure FSTDT continues, drop a comment below.

Search Lives #announcement fstdt.com blog

It lives!

It's a tad ugly but I have a standard solution to that I'll be bringing over when I get onto more of the panels.

Use guide, enter your text plain and it searches for all of the given words in all given fields. If you want to search a specific phrase put quotes around it "like this". If you want to do some wild card searching put * at the end of the word or phrase and it should work. Anything more complex won't work, but it is entirely possible I could do more additions later.

Now, what's left to do for quote search is actually rather complicated. To search the comments and display matched comments along with their quotes I need to search a second table for matches and correctly display at least one of those matching comments along with the related quote. if I hard coded the search it'd be rather easy, only as I've mentioned before I can't hard code the method I'm using. So instead I'm working out something I've been idling on at work for a while now, searching multiple tables and handling the output gracefully. I'm pretty sure I have the search part down, and the display may be a rather simple matter if I don't over complicate it with functionality, but once I have something working I'll go more into specifics on what I can and can't do easily.

Also, if you're regularly annoyed with the current search and want me to update the data on the test site kvetch in the comments and I'll dedicate some time but I should mention it's a couple hour process which is why I don't do it regularly. The glory of cheap webhosting.

Oh, and this version is a little old since I have it torn apart on my dev machine, if you put in a double quote without a match it will error. Should be fixed next update.

Quick search update #announcement fstdt.com blog

What I could do and what I've done are a tad different. I have a bit more testing to do before I release it but I have a quote search together than handles words, phrases and postfix wildcards. Should be able to put it out this weekend and I'll rattle off what else there is to do in a longer post this weekend, though I will say comment search is coming, I just intend to do it well rather than quickly.

Searching Again #announcement fstdt.com blog

So I have a much more solid idea of what needs to be done for the search since I've been actively playing with the mechanics involved. I've found something suprising, it actually works better than I expected.

Say I search for David J. Stewart. The new functionality I'm using would find that term, or David J Stewart or David Jay Stewart. The new search functionality i'm looking at has some built in thesaurus comparisons it will make, while it won't automatically look for everything starting with a J, it will look for anything that actually sounds like J. And this is all accomplished using one of the simpler syntax possiblities.

Which brings me into the next part, the differences between what I can do and what I probably should. This is the definitions for the term I'm using, you may note it's a tad complicated and well it gets a whole lot worse with more search terms. If I took the time and had the knowledge I could setup all kinds of potentially useful syntax to the search page. Except I'm a lazy git despite having changed the name of this little bloggy bit.

What I'm most likely going to do is setup the search interface so that the given search parameters are handled appropriately based on the type. Which is harder said than done. For instance that David J. Stewart example above has some problems depending on the syntax used, if I search for all three parts of that separately by sending in '"David" AND "J" AND "Stewart"' into the contains function, so it will try to find each word in the author field, it returns nothing. Still figuring out why, but if I just search david and stewart it returns everything, this was a few hours of my week. But oddly enough, if I send in '"David J Stewart"' I get the results I mentioned above, where it checks thesauruses and is generally really bloody useful.

But there's still a catch there, all that nice functionality, yeah it involves very carefully deciding how something is searched. When I send it all in wrapped in "" it's looked for as phrase, fine for authors or sources, maybe even URLs, but completely useless for searching the content of quotes. Wait, it gets even better, this search relies on full word matches unless explicitly told what it is receiving is a prefix, and then requires that it MUST be a prefix or nothing will be found. Send in Test* and you get back Testing but not Test. Which has all been fun to play with, but frustrating to figure out how to really implement.

What I could do right now is just always assume people are searching for phrases, but I know that's not true. I do keyword searches regularly and I know a few others did back when search worked reliably. What I need to do is figure out how I'm going to parse what is received in a quote or comment search and best instruct the search engine to handle it. I doubt people want to have to figure out this syntax for themselves, so I'm going to do what I can to simplify it a bit and take care of assumptions. This is my project for the next few days, and I'll poke my head back up when I have something to mention.

Quick #announcement fstdt.com blog

Ok, been busier than I guessed so my search details are sitting here in a jumbled notepad file. But I do have something to say.

FSTDT is not a news aggregator. It does not need full news articles submitted to it. In fact posting these articles is a remarkably bad idea as there is legal precedent(set against FreeRepublic of all places) saying doing so is grounds for various types of infringement. It's one thing to quote people who have posted something, or even parts of an article that are specifically quotable, but the entire thing is just not what should be submitted. We link to the whole thing so people can read it while we give them the mind bending parts.

I may look at setting up a place where people could share related links without submitting quotes, but at the moment this isn't that place and I don't have one to recommend off hand.

Moving Merch #announcement fstdt.com blog

Hey folks, largely finished with that moving business finally. AC is wonderful, now I just need to figure out what to do with a dozen empty totes and I've got some shit to sell.

While I was moving a few ideas were floated for new Archive Icons and I want folks opinions. I've never really come up with anything better than Shotgun Jesus, but I have someone who is interested in doing a redraw of it at some point, which got us to talking about the others. CSTDT, I think we have a good one, an alien, wearing a tinfoil hat, while hosting a radio show. I think this is gold, better than what we have gold, and the artist is interested as well. RSTDT I have something to float but it's an old in joke and I'm still trying to make it work, a neo-Nazi singing I feel pretty. I'd need an iconic image from the musical to pull it off, but it's my favorite idea so far.

Anyone have opinions or thoughts? Assuming I get this done it would make fundie merch possible.

Seriously read it #announcement cagle.com blog

Site dev is on hold at the moment while I move, when I move I will have central air and no more of this sweating to death in my office business. I have to be out half way through next month, trying to get out earlier. If I have time I'll write up a bit about search, it's turned into something interesting, which while bad for time lines is great for learning.

That said, I've found something I'm actually interested in commenting on. I'm sure most everyone who is on here has heard of Josh Duggar recent revelations and the rather disturbing show of support he's recieved over this. Well, I caught wind of someone actually willing to call him and the conservative christian media on it's handling of the situation. Michael Reagan wrote quite the article over on cagle that I want to support because it supports people doing the right thing regardless of if they happen to agree with the man's politics, questioning the integrity of those who are giving Duggar a pass on this. Read the article, it's worth the couple minutes.

Since I'm a left leaning asshole I'd also like to remind our side not to give people passes just because they are popular political figures who are on our side. We do it too, and we shouldn't. Just because some people on the other side are assholes does not grant us the moral right to do the same. And that's true in all kinds of things, take it from someone who's been amusedly poking at both "sides" of gamergate for a while. And pair of equal and opposite assholes do not cancel out, they just make things worse all around.

The search for code #announcement fstdt.com blog

Search is progressing, the query powering the new search page is remarkably fast, I now know we have over 11,000 comments using the word 'Moron' and I can return the lot in under a second. Except the syntax involved doesn't let me do one of my standard shortcuts to use fewer lines of SQL to do more work. I need to invest some time in ensuring I can dynamically create the query without leaving it open to security holes, which I plan to do over the course of this week.

For those who didn't notice in the comments of the last post I have the sample site up. Check it out, give me some thoughts, once I have search working as intended I'll be moving on to getting archive selections working somehow, which will be interesting.

In utterly unrelated news, the new Mad Max movie is a good movie. People calling it feminist are making a bit of a leap as it's not exactly new territory, but people jump the gun on this kind of thing all the time. It is however an excellent follow up to the road warrior and does a few things that actually make the third movie suck less. Max is Max, cars are cool, explosions are awesome, world is fucked.

It's another #announcement fstdt.com blog

If it isn't one thing...

Ok, so I've cleared up the paging issue and have a viable sample to post and show off the fact you can page through over 1500 pages of FSTDT content without any trouble. So I want to FTP it up to the new host... it doesn't fucking work.

I'm hitting them with a support ticket and see how it goes.

That all said, I managed to get it working by effectively pre-populating any possible combination of filters rather than ignoring turned off filters. I thought this would be a huge amount of data, and for this place it is. But it's size totals out to all of 8 megs of a table including an index that restates the content of the table in the order I want it to... so yeah, that's a wonderful damn thing right there. Almost no size for a damn nice improvement in speed. For reference the similar index on the current site is around 250 megs, but it has to include a great deal more data to offer anywhere near the same amount of speed.

Next stop after cursing support out is playing with the search functionality, even if I'm not going to renew with these guys at the end of the month I can get some testing done.

If it's not a cracked engine block I'm good, I think #announcement fstdt.com blog

This is not my week.

Car may be on its final bork so I may be blowing significant amounts of time looking for a new car, preferably something I actually fit into the passenger side of. Time may be limited for a bit, I'll know Wednesday.

Edit:
In the mean time I'm mucking about with what looks like a solution to the paging issue I had. It's called actually doing the optimization. Found a better set of tools than I had to figure a few things, went from a ten minute and stop it query to under a second WITH full diagnostics running. So. Those things are looking up, hopefully I can get this working like this for a test site this week.

It's no longer Monday #announcement fstdt.com blog

Alright, sorry about the delay on the quotes had a real Monday. This last one was impressive so I figure it's a good place to hold till tomorrow morning.

Dev work has moved right along, I have a few finer points to decide to run with or scrap before launching anything but both quote and comment pages work. Which is a good place to start when the site consists of only those things.

What I need to do other than the fine points, get hosting setup, get the database setup, get the data transfer to the database and make sure nothing explodes when I try to combine everything on the server. Odds are this is going to lag a bit beyond this weekend, as unless the paging on tags issue clears up I have some shit to deal with before I want to launch it as I don't want to annoy my host within the first day with a few dozen hung page requests.

Now if only the neighbor's dog would shutup #announcement fstdt.com blog

Right, this is a thing, sorry it's been a really nice day and I've been enjoying the hell out of it.

Did a good bit of work yesterday, fixed one of the issues I'd been having and should be able to get to work on the comments page next time I have time free. After that I'm going to get the base of the search page together, if you've been following I mentioned I wasn't able to test the improved search functionality because of my local SQL server version, well, once I have it to a testable point I'm going to be setting up a FSTDT test site where people can take a look at what I'm doing while I actually test the improved search on a system that can do it.

If nothing goes wrong I want to have that up by the end of the month, it'll just be display and it won't be the live data, but it's better than the nothing I have out there now.

Not April Fools #announcement fstdt.com blog

Running a tad late, but I got the pager together and I'm now focused entirely on unfucking my choice of controllers. Or at least one part of it, I may do more changes later but these are actual functional problems I need to finish clearing up.

I can glare at problems with the best of them #announcement fstdt.com blog

Got the pager logic done and I have a notepad file full of arguing with myself over how to fix an unrelated problem. Also annoying myself with the filters selection mechanism and it's propagation. But again, actual progress. Assuming nothing goes horribly wrong I should have something worth showing folks in the next few weeks.

As opposed to the things my wife sends me that I'm going to show off now, this just seemed a bit fitting for this place:
image

From an Art blog found here

Stuff getting done #announcement fstdt.com blog

Sorry for going quiet, been sick and not getting much done anywhere.

That said, making up for quite a bit today. Links now actually go to things, found an unexpected pain in my ass to clean up there. Have Standard, Random, Latest Comment and Top displays functioning no problems. Still need to do the pager, but I want to clean up my stupidity based issue before I bother with them.

Going to come back to what I have again tomorrow to make up for lost time after spending a while thinking on the problem and how to best integrate the pager data into the rest of my back end data.

In utterly unproductive news, I've found War Thunder. TANKS! Absurdly realistic damage model tanks. It's free and I've been having a good bit of fun when I was able to stop hacking. If anyone else is into it let me know, could use some folks to pal around with while I go tank hunting.

Interesting wake up call #announcement fstdt.com blog

Ok, that was unexpected.

Apparently white supremacy asian porno tumblr accounts are a thing and we've had a few submissions. Someone was trawling through them and had some bad links, which lead me to trying to hunt down the actual posts, only to get a slight surprise after reading about Asian women who refuse to date Asian men.

Which leaves me with two questions, what level of pornographic content should I start finding ways to flag(and trust me some of this ranks up there) and exactly what does it take to start filing someone under racist when they're rattling off experiences with their own race? I'm leaning toward having warnings in context links for now and adding tags for it in the new version of the site, the rest I'm not sure I want to touch.

The joy of parsing #announcement fstdt.com blog

And now I understand why I've never replaced the old BBCode engine that Yahweh wrote ages ago. Finicky does not begin to describe some of the engines out there, but I have one up to the same level of functionality the old engine had, and there's no longer the random # breaks links error.

The good:
Tags are up to snuff
Tags can now use # to link to anchors on a page(like specific comments on quote comment pages which has apparently never worked)
There is a quote tag, and I can add them on a whim.

The bad:
That took me about twice as long as I normally devote to development in a week due to switching out a couple candidates and the darnedest error in parsing I've seen due to ordering and an errant Boolean.

Still less time than writing it up from scratch though. So next week's work is going to revolve around pagers and all around getting links to plug into pages correctly.

And for everyone's reference a list of the BBCodes to be available, this will be in the new site's FAQ:
b Bold
s Strikethrough
sub Subscript
sup superscript
i Italics
u Underline
img Image
quote Quote
list Define a list
* Define a list item
url Links, without the damn # problem.

Logins #announcement fstdt.com blog

Looking into login mechanics found an interesting set of options for me, I can either go whole hog with .net Identity or implement the entire thing in 4 lines of code. But if I use .net Identity I would have most of the user admin functionally together and could allow people to use facebook or twitter log ins, which may be the stupidest thing I've ever considered around here, or it might be mildly interesting to people. Effectively any Open ID login could be used if I set it up properly, if anyone is interested let me know, otherwise I'm going to take the short way around and implement the user admin stuff based on code I already have.

Right now I'm working on BBCode handling and getting a pager together. With those I'll be at the point I could put a sample site out there for people to try and break. Even if it doesn't have user functionality.

1 Point #announcement fstdt.com blog

Right, so I'm alive and I've actually accomplished a few of my goals in the code, and then promptly didn't give enough of a shit to write up a proper rant. Basic routing works, I have tags displaying without duplicating quotes, and I need to start seriously looking at user based functionality(Quote submission is tied up in that since I do verification on member comments and quotes).

I'm saving a rant point for now, may wind up unloading it into the general direction of hashtag activism before too long. But, actual progress occurred, and I'm going to keep at it.

Format Change #announcement fstdt.com blog

Going to pull a change of format in here. I'm going to start allowing myself to rant on here each time I finish some meaningful part of the code. I'll do a quick run down of what's been done, and then let myself take aim at something that annoys me. I'm somewhat open to requests but I think I have three to hit before I'll consider much else.

Used this idea to drive myself to do some of the basic overhaul I needed to do any more progress and I got it done in no time. Also have floundered my way through most of the godforsaken problems (I think) MVC can throw at me, which means I'm not going to be delivering on the public admin queue exactly as advertised, but will at least eventually work. I'd describe the problem but it boils down to me trying to do something MVC simply isn't intended for. Or at least doesn't cope with very well. I also tend to get side tracked with streams of obscenity when I think about it.

Anyway, first goal is getting the basic routing straight. Now that I have backend SQL that works correctly with the filters(don't ask) and the display already works reasonably well, it's a rather major component to get right. After that will be displaying the tags, then submission. If I get myself to buckle down I should be able to blow through the lot of them in relatively short order, but after those I have the joy of authentication and authorization to deal with before I move on to anything that cares about which user is involved. So find something else that annoys me so I have motive to make a fourth post, it can't be that hard my wife says I'm typically annoyed with something.

Also considering an alternate reward to myself of buying Darkest Dungeon, then possibly doing a stream of it as I fail to manage anything in it.

FOTY Results #announcement fstdt.com blog

Votes are tallied and the winners are in.

With 85% of the vote we have Wulf Ingessunu with Best Cult from an 80s TV show and has had this fact immortalized as an award on the quote itself.

W. F. Price is the Pseudo-Intellectual of the Year

Patrick Scrivener is the Conspiracy Theorist of the Year.

Anna Diehl is the Fundie Of the Year.

Our Quote of the Year is... almost certainly satire. Quote #102138 is easily the most amusing thing submitted last year even being satire. So I should mention that AV1611VET's Quote #100557 is likely out legitimate quote of the year. That said, if the person who made the post quoted in #102138 wishes to claim the title of funniest satire submitted this year drop me a line and we can honor you appropriately. If you said it and you where serious, go see a fucking doctor.

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