Imminent Transcendence

Ok, so I’ve been gone for about a week.

The reason was, exactly as the title says. I was robbed on the street, at gunpoint no less.

The robber got everything, and in a fit of rage I punched and kicked everything in site.

Luckily, I didn’t break a single bone in my hand (surprisingly, I hit stuff really, really fucking hard).

Anyway, I did, however, mess my hand up enough to the point I couldn’t do anything. Today is the first day I’ve been able to type with both hands.

So yeah, that’s where I’ve been.

Because I’m a lazy bastard and I don’t feel like creating a web interface for posting news to the FFCC site, I’m just going to make the vB Blog do it.

The plan is, when an entry is posted to a specific blog (User FFCC’s blog on the forums) the entry will be posted on the Main Site via a database insert on the main sites database.

The database will contain the essential information. Title, Poster’s ID, Content, etc. etc. but it will also contain the blog entry it is linked too.

On the main site, the comments to each news posts will actually be the comments linked to that blog entry. And comments from both ends will show up in both places.

For example, if user A comments on a news post via the main site, then that comment will also show up on the linked Blog Entry on the forums. If user B comments on the Blog Entry via the forums, then that comment will also show up on the main site.

What I’m hoping, is that I can eliminate a lot of unnessicary coding but still provide the site with a full article posting and commenting system via the vBulletin Blog’s Data Managers.

This will also allow my News Reporters to post news on the main site without having to create a permissions system for the main site and without giving them any FTP access as well.

This is quite possibly the best idea I’ve ever had, now hopefully the vBlog will be up to the challenge.

This always sort of bugged me…

Often people will post screenshots of websites using their Windows based PC’s, and the fonts simply look terrible. The edges are jagged and just look awful.

Windows has this nice feature called “font smoothing,” which will make all fonts rendered within Windows to appear clearer and look better overall.

(continue reading…)

Let me start off by saying, I’m a very tolerant person of other people’s religious beliefs. If you believe in God, Jesus, Satan, Buddha, Allah, or whatever, then more power to you and I fully support your desicion to do so.

But, there is -one- group of people I have a problem with, and it’s not even the religion itself, just it’s people.

If, by now, you’re sitting there thinking “Oh god, this white trash American is going go wave his American flag, talk about how his country is the best in the world, and trash talk all the Muslims and call them all terrorists and whatnot.” then you ned to go take your hippy-self somewhere else, cuz you’re way off.

In short, no, I’m not going to talk about Muslim. I know a Jordanian man down the street and he’s a pretty cool guy.

No, this time, I’m going to talk about Jehova’s Witnesses.

Surely, everyone knows who these people are, they are the fuckers that come bother you on your day off from work while you’re sitting and relaxing at home, and when you be courteous and actually answer the fucking door, they refuse to leave.

But, alas, I didn’t have the pleasure of actual talking to these people, so I could tell them to piss off in front of their face.

Today, there were two Jehova’s Witnesses prowling around the street, whatever, no big deal to me. If they bug me, I’ll just say “I’m an Atheist, and no, no matter what you’re not going to recruit me. Good day to you.” and shut the door.

In fact, I didn’t even know they were on the street until I heard the front screen door slam shut, as it usually does when someone opens it.

So, I’m sitting here, minding my own business when I hear this “BAM!” Of course, I jump up and look outside the window. What do I see? A random black man walking away from my house in a quick pace.

At this point, I’m pissed, because it appears to be that someone, who I do not know, attempted to come into my house without permission.

I go to the front door and notice something sticking out of the bottom of it. I pick it up, and it’s fucking Jehova’s Witness propaganda.

At this point, I’m furious. This man scared me half to death by quietly (I mean quietly, normally you can hear it squeak when it’s opened but it didn’t even do that) opening the screen door and putting his trash in it, then let it slam, thus scaring me into thinking someone was trying to break in. I’m the only one home and everyone else is at school or work, so I know it’s not them else they would have called first.

Anyway, back to the sketchy black man. As he was walking away (in a very fast pace) he saw me in the window, then he proceeded to make a call on his cell phone and continuously look back at my house.

Now I’m in a rage. Why does he keep staring at my house while talking on his cell phone and trying to look at me through the window?

Now I’m just hoping they come back, so I can tell them where they can shove that little paper they gave us.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re a Jehova’s Witness, do the world a favor and stop shoving your bullshit propaganda and religious views down our throats. It’s called “freedom of religion” asshats, that means “I will pick what fucking religion I want to be in and NO you are not going to change that.”

Anyway, after reading this over I figure’d I’d mention that IF this man would have just come to my door and knocked, all would be well. But no, he OPENED my fucking door WITHOUT permission then made it look even more skep by walking away while trying to look back and see my in the window.

I was working on the FFCC website for a little bit today, and decided I’m gonna add support for a shit-ton of stuff…

So far I’ve got classes prepped for Twitter, Akismet, ReCAPTCHA, and Last.fm. I’m also planning to add support for Facebook (possibly, if I can find a use for it) and Flickr. As well as support for my new Network, which will be elaborated on some other time. The database will use MySQLi (of course) and I’m thinking of looking into XCache or APC for Opcode caching. I’m also going to build a template engine based off of Audentio’s, which Mike coded.

But, for now I’ve started on Twitter and ReCAPTCHA. Both of which, are bugged, and I have no idea why. Lol.

Twitter won’t submit status updates, and that’s the only thing it’s supposed to do, so that means the Twitter support does not work at all.

ReCAPTCHA works partially, I can get the Captcha to display, but when I submit I’m always getting a failure… at least I think I am anyway, I haven’t exactly learned ReCAPTCHA’s response codes yet… or I just did something wrong in the submit method… which is highly likely.

There’s also support for ReCAPTCHA’s mailhide module, but that doesn’t work because this server doesn’t have the mcrypt PHP module installed, so I gotta poke James sometime and see if he can install that for me.

And, of course, integration with the forums is implemented.

The original plan for FFCC was to use the Zend Framework as the backend but it would have taken more time to set that up than it would have to just code my own backend.

Oh yeah, gotta go with pretty URL’s, since I’m actually getting relatively good at mod_rewrite.

I’m also reconsidering the design of the site… I love the design but it’s not very versatile. So we’ll just have to see if someone wants to do a new design for me.

You can see the new site here: http://www.ffcrystalcosmo.com/dev/

Comments are welcome, of course, but one thing to keep in mind is the fact that the backend comes first… so NONE of the pages are done yet.