DerekMartin.ca web development, spirituality, UFOs & the occult

Lernin’ Weekend

new site features: now i get email when you comment! so i can reply to you even if it was an old post i wouldn’t normally be re-visiting!

Also – steve sayer got spam yesterday, which said something about derekmartin.ca in the subject line and message. Apparently they’ve scraped email addresses off my blog. SOOO, now I’ve added a feature where you can only see other people’s email if you’re logged in to derekmartin.ca. You can still add comments without logging in though.

I wish I knew how many hits derekmartin.ca got in university and college, and my previous hosting provider before this one. As it stands, I only have the last 3 months of information. So, when I added the page hit counters (see bottom of screen), I had to start them at these lowly numbers, when I know my previous slashdotting (for my shift.com articles) would have added substantially. Oh well. Thanks to Frank for linking to those free hit counter places on his site.

cool: Bored of reading the internet, or posting text to your blog? well, now you can phone the internet! Audlink.com allows you to post mp3s to your blog by calling a phone number! Best part? It’s a free donation-based service! Worst part? I bet they don’t have Canadian or Croatian access numbers.

weekend: On Friday I had a long skype call with feti from mojavi.org. He’s based in Ohio, and it was clear as a bell with no lag! (except for some microphone-related static). Unlike past versions of skype, the latest (0.95) had no sound-drop outs and no dropped calls! So, get the latest version!

Last night I had my first skype with my Mom since I got here. We email a lot, but since I haven’t bothered to get a phone, we haven’t phoned. Happily, she now has broadband internet — so she downloaded Skype and we had a chat Initially it was static-y, but then she just held the mic closer to her mouth, and it was super-clear, and Freeeeeeeeee. Good stuff Apparently the christmas lights are up on our house and the holiday season is shaping up nicely

I also spent a huge portion of the weekend learning stuff, which I love. If you ever need to know how to do something in PHP, ask me, cause I probably have a tutorial on the topic .zipped and ready to go. I always save good tutorials from the web, so I don’t have to find them again.

mark & frank — this shit will blow your minds. Pilgrim 3.0? After you look at that link, check all the free related code here.

I learned how to create dynamic graphs & charts in PHP. So, here’s one for you, based on derekmartin.ca karma rating data. This is accurate since I started posting karma with my blog entries.

If you can’t see the graph, let me know and I’ll change it back from .png to .jpg format. Graphing data is fun. I didn’t want to clutter the legend, so Great is Karma >5, Good is 0 to 5, Okay is -5 to 0, and Bad is less than -5. I have great plans. I wish I knew how to do this in 4th year university, instead of using Statistica.

I also looked back into the open-source effort to do Flash Remoting with PHP (it’s only designed to work with asp & coldfusion). Well, turns out AMFPHP hasn’t been updated since the last time I looked — in July. I thought “there’s got to be a Reason… What is the reason?” — another site had sprung up, with an easier way to make it all work. Easier if you know how to use object-oriented php, which I do. So, Ghostwire is my new friend. I’m looking into this because currently when you search my site, you get a bunch of incorrect search results, even though I’m using the Google API to do my searches. Why is this? Becasue of the random content in those boxes at the bottom of the screen. Google indexes that content, BUT since it’s random on every page, when you follow my search link, that content is no longer there — it’s some other random content. Hence, it appears that ‘my search’ is broken, when really it’s Google indexing my random content — and there’s no way to prevent that — EXCEPT to make the random content un-indexable. How? I’m either going to pull it into flash, or write it using javascript. It’s unclear to me yet whether or not Google will index document.write statements from javascript, so I’m leaning towards flash for the random content.

I also saw a *crappy* tutorial on making your own Custom 404 Page in php, over at phpfreaks.com. I already have a much better Custom 404 page working, and it even does intelligent re-routing. What does this mean? I’m going to write a tutorial for phpfreaks and send it in. Or maybe I’ll send it to DevShed, which is my favourite code-oriented site. Their tutorials all have a “print pdf” option, which means you don’t have to go through them page by page. You can right click the print pdf link and “Save As”. Great stuff!

I also wrote a single-file image gallery, which I’m going to release as open-source code for people who don’t know anything about php. You put the file in a directory, and you tell it what directory the images are in. It does the rest (creating thumbnails etc). You can edit the stylesheet if you want, and it’ll alter the appearance completely. I also re-wrote my file upload code, and it’s much cleaner now. I guess I’ll post that on here too, soon. I’ve been working on DerekMartin.ca Version 5 — which will look much like this site, but have better navigation and ‘mini sites’ with their own navigation. One of those mini-sites will be my free code, and links to great tutorials.

idea: if ORME (orbitally rearranged monoatomic elements) is a cheap superconductor to create, can I create ORME wire, to use in creating better/the best electromagnets? Might it help a lifter lift?

Finally, my friend Sacha is in Hong Kong, and it sounds/looks *crazy*. He sent me some .jpgs I think I’ll ask him to post some updates on his TIG Updates page