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News

To avoid having to update a static page with news items, this page simply lists the latest entries of my journal mentioning either Kiki CMS.

Javascript image scaling

Software

If there's one feature I'd like for Javascript to be able to do is to scale images. And I don't mean dynamically adjusting width/height when displaying images, but actually changing the JPEG/PNG data into a smaller image for form uploads.

I've seen all too often that users of a CMS will upload an image straight from their digital camera or scanner and therefore submit a megabyte-sized file. It's easy to scale it on the server end (because most web sites won't display the image in full size), but wouldn't it be nice if it could be transformed on the client side first? It would save a lot bandwidth and upload time.

If anyone knows if this is possible, let me know.

Discovering imagecopyresampled

Software

I wonder how many people are aware that when PHP is compiled with version 2 of the GD library, it supports imagecopyresampled. For some reason I never discovered it until tonight when looking for use smooth scaling for thumbnails. And it was just what I was looking for.. all this time I was still using imagecopyresized ad bitching about it while the solution directly preceeds it in PHP's GD library function reference. Silly me.

Obviously I have instantly applied some updates to Kiki: from now images in user profiles and my photography thumbnails will look much nicer. In fact, I also changed the image quality to 85 from the default 75. Enjoy! (Improvements not retroactively applied, so upload your user image again to enhance it.)

Login name restriction

Software

Up until now my site did not put any restrictions on the choice of a login name. All public references were either URL encoded or transformed to proper HTML entities, so it didn't really matter if there were any unusual characters.

However, a lot of spammers attempt to break Kiki's security by sending invalid data, aiming to abuse the registration process as a method of sending e-mail. Sorry lads, your attempts don't work and forgive me for my arrogance, they never will. However, I do end up with annoying zombie accounts in the database due to those silly spamming attempts:

/img/journal/20060803-spammers.png

And I don't like to be annoyed. So let it be known that as of now login names are restricted to letters, numbers, periods, dashes and underscores. And I've added the "random image code" Turing-ish CAPTCHA to registration, including an update to the look and feel of it (matching colours and a new font). Look at it's new-found prettiness:

/img/randomimage.php?token=example

Amarok collection corruption

Software

Well dang nabbit! I love how Amarok has a nice OSD with album covers, works with my laptop's multimedia keys and how it makes searching and queuing wonderfully easy. But did it really have to corrupt my music collection?

It's not fun to see a Taking Back Sunday album filed under Nekromantix with song titles from The Offspring while it is actually an album by Rise Against. Rescanning my collection didn't solve the problem, so I had to manually delete the file and start with empty scores and statistics all over again. It's times likes these I wish Amarok could import statistics from Last.FM, or that I would write a plugin to keep statistics myself (but for now I will focus on extending Kiki's user profiles and my hopefully successful publish your gig calendar campaign).

Put your gig calendar on your site!

Software

Cool: you can now put your gig calendar on your site! Just put this on your MySpace, blog or LiveJournal, but replace with your login:

My Gig Calendar

The result?

https://robertjohnkaper.com/syndicate/rob/gigs/box/009m.png

Also available in signature version:

https://robertjohnkaper.com/syndicate/rob/gigs/sig/therasmus.png

(Replace 'box' with 'sig' in the code.)

Your image is generated the first time it is loaded. I will make a schedule job to delete the cache every night, which means your image will be updated daily. Kiki is growing up.

Update: this tool will let you preview images and generate code for any style available.

See what gigs your mates are going to!

Gigs

Ever wondered who else is going to a gig you have planned, or wonder if anyone is going anywhere because you're out of plans yourself?

No problem with Kiki. You already had a gig calendar and now it comes with a list of all gigs of your mates. Now you never have to miss out on any fun anymore.

Konqueror xmlHttpRequest bug

Software

This really sucks: Konqueror eats characters from user input in xmlHttpRequest POST data, when the input contains UTF-8 characters. I filed a bug report and created a test-case, but as long as this isn't resolved I can't remove my workarounds in Kiki, which upon further investigation turns out to be rather limited.

AJAX Instant Messenger

Software

I've added instant messaging to the Kiki user profiles on this web site! It's quite simple: a bit of Javascript sends your messages to the server and retrieves new ones for you, adding them to the page without requiring a refresh/reload of your browser. Tested in Konqueror and Mozilla Firefox.

The database keeps track of what messages you have seen, and you get notified of when a mate enters of leaves the chat. And, if someone chats you up, the site will give you a popup saying there's a new message. From there you can directly join the chat!

To start a conversation you currently have to manually find a mate who is on-line because their profile will have a chat link. But I'll be working on a nice status bar which will tell you which mates are on-line all the time! I shall also make the actual chat window a pop-up, so you won't be limited to a single chat a time (you can work around this by using tabs or multiple windows manually but that's not optimal).

Happy Fourth of July

Anglosphere

Thanks for reminding me, Kiki. If it weren't for the holiday support in my stylesheet code I would have never noticed.

Happy birthday America!

Start popping comment cherries

Software

What do you get when you combine:

Profile pages where registered users can leave each other comments! I'll admit that I'm merely reinventing the wheel because this has of course already been done on countless profile and social networking sites. But I still like to tell Murdock to be afraid: be very afraid, Rupert. Not that I plan on getting bigger than MySpace (please no), but building something prettier and better shouldn't be too hard! (Feature suggestions for a next moment of boredom are welcome. And start popping, people!)

Avatars coming!

Software

You can now upload a user image for your account here. Currently Kiki scales the image to 100x100 no matter what, but I might make it smarter.

In the future I might use the user image box that is now alongside all comments for actual personalised avatars. Anyone willing to help me test advanced features like those, please speak up.

More Kiki updates

Software

More Kiki software updates? That's correct: Kiki is the name for the PHP software I have written for this web site and I have been doing some work on it. Yesterday's update on access levels has gotten a follow-up: access levels now work for the journal mail digest! And, if your RSS reader has access to your login cookie, for RSS feeds as well.

What else is new in the geek part of my life? Not much. I'm still waiting for KDE 4 to be released so I can take advantage of KSVG2 for Atlantik. I might even resume development on it when that happens.

Software development is not a huge asset on the dating market though, especially not in the rock scene, so ideas to make it look hip and sexy are welcome!

Your own avatar

Software

I've decided to post technical web site updates and ideas under "Software" because it bloody well is software that makes this site do its thing (in fact, it's Kiki CMS).

I am considering adding avatars to the site: registered users would have one displayed next to their comments, as happens on many forums. However, instead of using plain images, I will draw inspiration from Gaia Online. Users would compose their own character and add personality to their avatar by selecting the right clothing and accessories.

It will take time and a lot of work to create such a system, which ranges from drawing template figures and clothing layers to creating a workable market system to trade and purchase items that personalise an avatar. It might not even work too well on a site with two dozen registered users of which only a few are actually active.

So what's my motivation to do all that? Well, it would be fun. And more importantly: it could serve as a prototype for a community-based site I am considering to build, heavily focused on the rock scene and gig culture. MySpace meets Gaia meets Ticketmaster meets Mapquest, sort of. But that's a future plan, right now I'm just interested in personalised avatars.

Please leave a comment and tell me if you think I should waste some time on such a feature. I would need a few people to at least play with the system to have it can evolve properly, if that's not going to happen I might as well not bother with avatars at all.

Update: well, the profile site is here. No avatars yet, but there's progress..

© Copyright 1995-2007 Robert John Kaper. All rights reserved.

Tom has more friends but mine are prettier! (#1/1)