Adam's Blog

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Suggestions for Improving digg.com

How do you digg? Do you digg up articles that fascinate you? Articles that your friends recommend? Articles you want to check back on later? Do you use it as a social news system, as intended, or as a bookmarking system? The problem, as I see it, is that as cool as digg is, there's no real guide as to how to use the site. I think it can be fixed with a few minor changes. Read on for more.
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PHP Lesson 2: Behind the Scenes of Threading

This is going to be a very nerdy post, because I'm going to get into some actual PHP code. I've been thinking a lot about efficient threading. The implementation of threading on OSNews is very complex, because it involves lots of math in order to properly construct and align tables. Furthermore, because we don't use CSS for positioning, it's accomplished via 'align' commands and TWO templates, which is really clumsy, because between flat mode, admin mode, collapsed threading mode, and expanded threaded mode, we have several templates, and since they are all independent, they tend to unintentionally vary, so you might see different things in replies and threads. My goal in writing a threaded display for sethadam1.com was to avoid all of the pitfalls in that implementation and come up with something clean. Read on for the gory details.
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firsttube.com gets threads

I understand that some people believe that threading comments are unintuitive, they confuse the user, and that they are ugly. I like 'em. So this site now supports threading in the comments. Now - as of right now, you can only reply once, like digg, but it supports two deep. This is only because I haven't found a more elegant way to allow deeper threading in the code. As soon as I do, I will be allowing deeper threading, probably 3 or 4 comments deep for aesthetic reasons. The entire thing is done in CSS, unlike OSNews which is hard coded to the pixel with very complex code that really makes me uncomfortable when I see it. This is much nicer. It's all done via templates, and there are only two - one for comments and one for threads, and this will probably change to one soon too.
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Video Vault (11/07/2006)

Hey's gay... er, blind How you confuse these terms is beyond me. Someone, I'm sure, had some 'splainin to do when the red light went off. And I'm betting a pissed off mountain climber, who may or may not be blind and/or gay was waiting for it. Via Google Video. Ah...bananas. Proof that there is a God. The funny thing is, every single species of monkey and ape eat bananas the other way. It appears we eat them "upside down," despite "God's pull-tab." Via Google Video. Black Macbook The first and only "I'm a Mac" spoofs that was actually funny. Via YouTube. Faith Hill is a Sore Loser This has got to be a joke. Look closely, it's quick. Vai break.com Yikes. This is actually called "The Man With Exploding Arms." That alone is scary, but when you see his freakish arms, you'll probably have to choke back your own vomit.
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Father Demonstrates That He Is Complete Douche Bag

Just when you think that no one could be a bigger douche bag than Ted Haggard, along comes Dan Hinkle to prove you wrong. Here's the gist of it: Dan Hinkle is the commissioner of a Fairfax, VA football league. His son plays for one of the teams, the South County Raptors. One day, head coach James Owens, pays Dan Hinkle's son Scott on offense instead of defense, and is instantly fired. Turns out Hinkle had a rule: his son plays every minute of every game all season or the league goes bye bye. And, sure enough, he stood by his word. He immediately disbanded the league right before the championship leaving almost 4000 12-14 year olds with no post-season whatsoever. Everything just went - BOOM! - and went away. First off, if I were a 12-14 year old in Fairfax playing for this league, I'd get my buddies together to beat the @!#% out of little Scott Hinkle. That poor kid - his father should know better. How will his friends look at him now that they know that when he didn't get his playtime, his daddy pulled the plug on the entire league. What a sad sack. Sadly...

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A Final Word on the Firefox Fiasco

So the Mozilla develpers - particularly the Firefox ones - appear to have adopted this stance: We are going to bring the XML/RSS easy-subscribe feature to a new, wider group who isn't demanding it yet, with no planned course of action for the people who are currently using it and came to rely upon it. Furthermore, we will leave them with no official way to reproduce the behavior which has been present now in our brower for years. In short, when the Mozilla team mankes a decison, it's final, and it appears that they are looking to expand their userbase, even at the expense of the most dedicated users now. So if you choose to have the search engine of your website return RSS for external apps but styled XML for a browser, turns out -- you can't. It's been days since I posted on this site about this; the goal was to make sure my new post was not overly dramatic. But here goes: I am now going to be suggesting that Windows users I support use IE7. Why? Because IE7 is a nice upgrade. It supports most of the features that I think are necessary in a browser....

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More on Firefox

It's not constructive to constantly rant with no action. So rather than just bitch and moan, I decided to give the Firefox devs the benefit of the doubt and move my complaints to their USENET group as requested. Here's the thread. I got a fairly nice response from one of the devs, and then two slightly shorter responses, including one that appears to do nothing more than suggest that since the way I style my feed sucks, it's pointless to allow people to style threads. One guy has a great point - if Firefox's default style didn't suck, would everyone be happier? Sheesh, hadn't though about that, but you know what?? I admit, maybe I would be less upset. I still think the browser behavior is bad, but if they're going to intercept, at least do it with the same style Microsoft does with IE7. I have to say, I'm fairly pleased with the Firefox guys' responses. For a group that probably has to put up with plenty of people bitching about their bugs of choice, they have been pretty civil and well thought out in their responses.
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You're Killing Me, Firefox

As I've said before, I've been a user of Firefox (albeit, by different names), since 0.2 (possibly 0.1). I've learned to love it. I love my core extensions, I love the tabs and the general feel. I have really enjoyed using Firefox. As I've also detailed before, I have some problems with Firefox. In particular, a certain Firefox bug has pissed me off so much, not because of the bug, but rather, the fact that the Mozilla devs appear/appeared to be perfectly content with their decision, despite the arguments. I have blown off Firefox at home for the also-Gecko-based Camino. I am seriously considering blowing off Firefox at work for Opera. But this is the real reason. It's not just their XML arrogance. It's this: Firefox is a mess when it comes to memory. Click on the image for a full size view Let's break it down: Firefox allows developers to write extensions that utilize XUL, which means memory leaks could come from poorly written extensions. But as a user, my response is: I don't care. If writing extensions can cause a WEB BROWSER to eat up over 1/2GB of memory, you've got a problem! Fix chrome! Fix XUL! Limit...

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What Is Your Blog Worth?

Unfortunately, my blog is currently worth a measly five hundred sixty-something dollars. OSNews, on the other hand, is apparently worth over $800,000 as of right now. Gnomefiles is worth 98 grand. Slashdot is over 11 million bucks, digg 19.1 million. YouTube is only worth 246 million, but MySpace is worth 1.5 billion - with a "b." Take these with a grain of salt - I wouldn't sell my website for 560 dollars; obviously, YouTube was purchased for over 1.5 billion; and I would be very surprised if anyone would actually offer 800,000 dollars for OSNews. You can check the value of your blog too.

My blog is worth $564.54. How much is your blog worth?

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