Tuesday Rant XV
From the desk of pieterh
Via the so-tell-me-about-your-parents department, on 1257237153|%e %B %Y, %H:%M
Today it's Tuesday. Here in Torun, Poland, the sun is shining, and the birds are singing, or at least they would be if it was not so insanely cold that the birds are actually hiding in a hole in the ground, drinking vodka and tweeting "Kurwa! It's cold!" to each other. That's my rant for today: someone has turned off the heating here in Northern Europe, and it sucks.
Back to Wikidot, the unavoidable focal point of my blog. Tuesday is the day for ranting, complaining, and generally getting the kind of great unburdening feeling that Californians pay a five hundred an hour therapist to give. No Eliot Spitzer jokes, please!
But before we turn up the music and start the party, please go take a look at Timothy Foster's notebook application. Timothy has taken a decent note-taking application (MS OneNote) and wikified it, and the results are an elegant demo of what Wikidot (or rather, Wikidot in the hands of a skilled designer like Timothy) can do.
The notebook app is purely amazing. I've used OneNote before but it didn't suit my needs well enough so I ditched it. Now that there's a Wikidot equivalent, it's customisable, meaning I can make it suit my needs and it'll be a perfect tool :)
Onto ranting… CSIs don't work when trying to include from a private site! :(
— Shane | Blog | CycloDS Revolution | Compatibility List | Want me to manage your next wiki? | XBL: leiger40
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___TTT___/ http://www.trumpetexercises.net
(_|||_) \ - Janne
Any chance you're interested in the Science fiction genre? I'm enjoying a show called Stargate Universe… but I'd recommend that if you were to start watching it, you should at least catch up on the 5 episodes that have already aired the past few weeks.
— Shane | Blog | CycloDS Revolution | Compatibility List | Want me to manage your next wiki? | XBL: leiger40
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I was a huge fan of the original Star Trek series :)
Will have to check out that SGU when it starts running here in Finland.
___TTT___/ http://www.trumpetexercises.net
(_|||_) \ - Janne
I never watched Star Trek, and barely even watched Stargate until about a year ago when I started buying the DVDs for the previous seasons. Hope you enjoy SGU :)
Now… we better not get too off-topic, or else Pieter will be ranting about us next! ;-)
— Shane | Blog | CycloDS Revolution | Compatibility List | Want me to manage your next wiki? | XBL: leiger40
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netbooks are good an all for portability and (you guessed it) browsing the internet, but its very annoying when you try to run a program thats to stubborn to downsize from its 1024X768 rez or what ever to 1024X576, so that the darn thing is expanding way past the reaches of you screen and the you have to alt F4 to quit the X button is no where to be found
i will be inactive until the winter holidays because of school — Rhombus p.
That's my rant for today: someone has turned off the heating here in Northern Central Europe, and it sucks.
Piotr Gabryjeluk
visit my blog
But they left the tap on: it hasn't stopped raining in my part of Scotland since Saturday.
That's my rant for today: someone has turned off the heating here in moved Central Europe 2,000 km north into the Arctic circle, and it sucks.
The Wikidot Blog | My other works
In Poland — it should get warmer in the next few days… but more rainy too :-(
Any suggestion where we could move our headquarters to enjoy nice weather a bit more?
Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me
Bundaberg is supposed to have one of the best climates in the world. The average middle-of-winter overnight temperature is +10C and the average middle—of-summer high is +30C. Doesn' t get much better than that, unless you like snow boarding!!!.
Wayne Eddy
Bundaberg, Australia
I've heard that South Australia is a nice place to live:
λ James Kanjo | blog | photos | contact
In other words…. don't visit Victoria! :)
— Shane | Blog | CycloDS Revolution | Compatibility List | Want me to manage your next wiki? | XBL: leiger40
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Shush!
λ James Kanjo | blog | photos | contact
Yeah, let's move the servers down there…
I like the picture of Spain brunhilda gave. Let's move it to spain!!!
"But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear;" ~ 1 Peter 3:16
Spain… We have had a nice and warm day here, 21º C, the Sun came up at 7.30 and went down some 10-11 hours later… I had a wonderful day, having my coffee and a sandwich in a terrace of the next door bar, then took a walk with my dog for about three hours, then went back home and continued to enjoy the good weather at my terrace…
Pieter, if I could, I would send you a little bit of this Spanish sun, you really deserved it… :D
http://isbitestsite.wdfiles.com/local--files/system:start/November%203rd.jpg
Now, time to rant a little bit…
I hate when after uploading a picture I have to clear cache and hit some four or five times (average) Ctrl + R in order to actually SEE the link of an uploaded picture. Uploading comes very fast to 100%, but never ends, so I have to go over again and again through the process of clearing cache and reloading the page endless times…
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. Bertrand Russell
It's hard to rant given all of the positive things happening around Wikidot lately, but I 100% agree with Brunhilda. Something has changed regarding uploading and the wait is intolerable most of the time. It turns into a bit of a guessing game.
It seems to primarily be a problem with images and the post-processing step that is creating the various scaled down images. Other files seem to take longer, but I noticed that non-image files usually give me the "upload complete!" message before I totally lose my patience and refresh.
Now for something completely different…
It's been unseasonably cold here in Minnesota the last month or so, but I'm still keeping my golf clubs in the trunk and holding out for a couple more 50º+ F (+10º C) days before the snow flies.
Like Bundaberg, San Deigo, CA is known for near-prefect weather year round. But if you're looking to expand into the US, Minnesota is a great place to live and work!
-Ed
Free Wikidot Applications · Your Shared Photo Gallery · Your Personal Blog
Regarding images, once this had happened and I ended up somehow uploading the file twice since evidently after refreshing the file ended up uploading. When I deleted one of the copies, the other file remained, but it claimed to not have been existing at the time, so I had to start over. To say the least, although the file uploader says "all done!", it doesn't actually seem to be done.
Where I am, the weather is a perfect 15 to 21 degrees Celsius (60 - 70oF), though summers can get up to an infernal 43oC (110oF)!
— Blog ~ Life's Handbook
That reminds me of another annoyance with the multi-file uploader. It doesn't prompt to overwrite existing files. You either have to delete the original files one-by-one first ("options" "delete", "are you sure?", "yes!") or use the old uploader and upload files one-by-one so you can overwrite the originals.
-Ed
Free Wikidot Applications · Your Shared Photo Gallery · Your Personal Blog
With the global warming, Spain will become a desert.
Hence, Brussels seems to be the best choice…
Even if this was true (which isn't :P), we will not live long enough to see it…
Spain is a big country, and has different types of climate. In the south it is truth they have very hot summers, but in the North and East, the climate is very nice… Barcelona is one of very nice places to live. Many sunny days per year, very few days of rain, no snow (ever!), winters are mild without rain… And all the Eastern Mediterranian coast of Spain is similar. Also, there are Canary Islands, where the temperature is 26ºC all year around… Balearic Islands, too. And one thing more: the food is excellent! Maybe France and Italy can compete with Spain in that field, but nobody else, for sure.
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. Bertrand Russell
To me, it happens all the time. Right now, I am uploading all the photos I use in my site (there are some 340 photos), and for several days I achieve to upload some 5 photos per hour, only because of this. Clearing cache, reloading, reloading reloading until the photo link finally appears… In the beginning, everything was excellent. The picture would upload, and then Refresh your page would appear… I would refresh and the link was there… But now, it is really awful…
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. Bertrand Russell
I didn't even know there was a 'refresh your page' notice! I guess I must wind up reloading before it gets that far (I usually reload after the upload bar gets to 100%, and then I have to wait a while because the browser hangs while whatever processing is going on).
@Timothy — I did that the first time too: wound up with two uploaded copies, deleted one, and then had a ghost file listed on the page.
I know there is post processing going on for images to create the various sized thumbnails. Beyond that, I don't know what else is going on beyond updating the database records to keep track of the files and their locations.
Free Wikidot Applications · Your Shared Photo Gallery · Your Personal Blog
I often have to upload images and files using the old uploader. Even on a fast connection it's painfully slow; why does a 2kb file take 51 seconds to upload?!
That happens for me on both uploaders… the main one is even worse.
I tried uploading a "0 kB" (actually 600 Bytes) file and a "1 kB" file the other day…. and on my 20kB/s internet connection, it took about 2 minutes to complete. That's 1kB per minute!
Bigger files seem to upload faster… because it doesn't take as many minutes as kB to upload… but it's still a hell of a lot longer than it was a month or two ago - back then, everything uploaded as quickly as I'd expect it to and most files took no time at all. Suddenly things got slower for no apparent reason.
— Shane | Blog | CycloDS Revolution | Compatibility List | Want me to manage your next wiki? | XBL: leiger40
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Okay, so I just checked, and I can't include a page, and then do iftags inside that include. This bothers me, really. You can't seem to be able to do anything with brackets with an include. Can this be changed? I don't want to do a full listpages, when I know exactly the page I want.
"But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear;" ~ 1 Peter 3:16
I'm not sure I'm completely following — you want the included iftags to work on the containing page? It should…
Yes. It doesn't work.
"But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear;" ~ 1 Peter 3:16
Since I changed my site to use the open policy a week ago, I've been flooded with people complaining about the mass spam after they join the site.
I've got instructions on the joining page about how to avoid watching, but people seem to ignore them or don't realise how many emails they are subscribing to. Considering I edit that site every few hours… it's more than most people want.
Doesn't help when one of them accidentally sent 12 almost identical messages "by mistake" -_-
— Shane | Blog | CycloDS Revolution | Compatibility List | Want me to manage your next wiki? | XBL: leiger40
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I thought it was already decided to change this, i.e. to remove the automatic subscription when someone joins the site and leave it to a new member to decide if he will subscribe or not…
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. Bertrand Russell
It is, but it's not implemented yet.
— Shane | Blog | CycloDS Revolution | Compatibility List | Want me to manage your next wiki? | XBL: leiger40
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I am happy to say we have fixed some issues with the file uploading by making workarounds for bizarre PHP behavior that we overlooked earlier — it should be much, much, MUCH faster now.
Thanks for ranting about it!
Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me
It now zips along very quickly, thanks Michal.
Thanks, Michal! It is much faster now!
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. Bertrand Russell
This works really fast now!
Service is my success. My webtips:www.blender.org, www.zusi.de (Demo-Video)
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I made the experience today with a new member, who joined our site (in front of me):
I noticed him the "stop watching this site" link right bottom down, and "surprise, surprise" - there is no more this link, but the "start watching rhis site…" is now positined.
Great!
Service is my success. My webtips:www.blender.org, www.zusi.de (Demo-Video)
Wollen Sie Wikidot helfen im deutschen » Handbuch ?
More likely it is how his profile was set up. "Watching new sites" is a per-profile option.
We'd have to remove this profile option and then force it off for all further Join events.
The Wikidot Blog | My other works
Why do that? Surely just having it disabled by default for new user registrations would make a huge difference?
So far only one user that has signed up to my site was an existing member… and that was James when he helped me to set up the chatroom there.
— Shane | Blog | CycloDS Revolution | Compatibility List | Want me to manage your next wiki? | XBL: leiger40
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True. A good suggestion, and this is what we'll do.
The Wikidot Blog | My other works
That'd be a great help! :) Can you let us know when it is implemented? I can remove the warning from my site's join page then.
— Shane | Blog | CycloDS Revolution | Compatibility List | Want me to manage your next wiki? | XBL: leiger40
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Should be working live now. If you want to double check, create a new test account (note that you can use name+something@domain to your email address now).
The Wikidot Blog | My other works
What do you mean by that?
λ James Kanjo | blog | photos | contact
James, a gmail account enables you to alias it by appending "+somealias" after your username and before the "@" symbol. This lets you make many email addresses that all forward to your primary google email address. So, now you can have more than one wikidot account effectively using the same email.
eg primary account "james@gmail.com" would receive messages sent to "james+new@gmail.com" and "james+old@gmail.com".
Sue
OMG! Where is this documented?!
(oops)… I mean, snoooorrrreee…zzzZZZzzzZZZ (I'm sleeping…)
λ James Kanjo | blog | photos | contact
http://www.wikidot.com/forum/t-189694/2009-10-17
The Wikidot Blog | My other works
This seems as good a source as any: http://www.googletutor.com/2005/06/11/gmail-plus-aliases/
Though it says that only a maximum of eight characters can be used after the + symbol. IIRC, I've used much longer aliases than that.
E.g. If my regular email was example@gmail.com, then I could do this: example+wikidot.com@gmail.com and I'd know that anything sent to me at that address originally came from wikidot or from a site that they gave my email address to (Grr!)
It also means that I can create multiple accounts all with the same email address:
example+account1@gmail.com
example+account2@gmail.com
And I'd only have to log into example@gmail.com to get emails for both accounts.
— Shane | Blog | CycloDS Revolution | Compatibility List | Want me to manage your next wiki? | XBL: leiger40
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I've started a FAQ question using Shane's comment:
http://faq.wikidot.com/content:28
Feel free to improve.
The Wikidot Blog | My other works
The profile for this especcially "new account" - and than in a second step a new member of my sote - has the "correct" profile - not to watching any site.I think - this is exact what it should be now…
Service is my success. My webtips:www.blender.org, www.zusi.de (Demo-Video)
Wollen Sie Wikidot helfen im deutschen » Handbuch ?