Wow, it's nearly been a month since I last posted here. As you have probably guessed if you've read my recent entries, uni started this month, and has kept me fairly busy. Not so much the work (it's been pretty easy so far), but more the transport, socialising, and my resolution not to skip any lectures, tutes or labs (which I've manage to keep so far, but its becoming harder and harder to). It's hard getting back in the swing of uni life, particularly now that I have assignments to do (boring).

I'm still working too, although only a day a week because of how crappy my timetable turned out.

So a combination of all that, plus some projects that I'm not quite ready to let out of the bag just yet, are keeping me pretty occupied. Things are also more interesting when I have something to 'show and tell', so rather than write half-baked stuff just to fit to a schedule (which has been once a week for the past few months), posting here will become a bit more sporadic. I'll be adding stuff to my tumblelog more often than blogging though.

Keep me on your RSS reader, or subscribe to me if you haven't, and you'll be the first to know when something happens here.

While I have you here, if you're bored, go check out a book called Eight Lives Down by Chris Hunter. It's about a British bomb disposal officer's story in Iraq - gives a really good insight into the conditions and environment over there, its effects on the soldiers stationed, and as a bonus, it's very well written and entertaining at the same time.

Last week MODM was on again - the crowd included a heap of guys from the hippo.com.au job website, the Australian Anthill guy, a heap of web devs, plus a few RMIT entrepreneurship students, not to mention the regulars. Dave from Hippo dropped me a note (where else but facebook) to say my website wasn't very legible in parts. I had thought so too and had some ideas in mind, but some days it looked ok, and because I generally don't see the website from the website view (rather from the admin panel view), I never really got round to fixing it. The extra encouragement, plus the 4-day weekend, pushed me over the line, so here it is.

The tumblelog and posts now should be a lot easier to read after I increased the contrast. I've also removed the alpha-blending for the menu bar - all that transparency was a bit overboard in hindsight. Any printouts should be better too, after I fiddled with it and added a special one in for IE6 (damn IE6 ). There are some better looking pagers and search results too, plus I fixed a small bug in the contact page.

Last week I also had the wonderful opportunity to explore the area near the office of the place I work for, after anyone with keys happened to be conveniently elsewhere when I arrived so I was stuck outside . I spotted this at an apartment complex.

I was tempted to push it - maybe a hidden elevator will activate, descending into a secret underground bunker, with screens everywhere keeping an eye on 'human experiments', and missile switches everywhere... hmm, watching too much Lost I think. More seriously though, running in a suit on a relatively hot day just wasn't appealing enough.

There was also one of those automatic robotic toilets nearby too, which locks you in, clean and maintain themselves, and can call the cops or evict you mid-way through your business (whatever that maybe) if it's not in a good mood.

Picture from Exeloo website

The idea of these toilets is good, especially on late nights when you've broken the seal but have too much integrity to relieve yourself in a corner, or when the cops are watching you, secretly laughing as they watch you run around desperate.

But some of the design decisions are stupid. One example is the position of the status panel (Vacant, Occupied, Closed) and open switch. For starters, it looks like it is just part of the sign promoting the toilet and telling you in size 12 font what to do if you're trapped inside. Is it that hard to make it stand out a bit more? And why is it there anyway - the perfect position is on the door, because if we want to get in, that's where we'll look first. Why are you making it so damn difficult to use a toilet, especially when we're generally desparate when we find one! 

And don't get me started about the open/close switch. The instruction is 'Push to Open Door'. Now does that look like a switch to you?

Just looks like some random piece of coin-shaped metal stuck on to me. And to trigger it, you just touch it. Is it that hard to put something there that at least looks like a button! And maybe something tactile too, but that's pushing it too far I think.

Another example is the integrated basin unit, which features a soap dispenser, tap, and hand dryer. It places all those things in a recessed position at the top, leaving only some instructions and the basin in view. Do you really expect people to read the instructions before washing their hands? Is it that hard to make it motion-sensitive, but visible, so we know where to wave our hands and not get soap squirted on our arm?

Picture from Exeloo website

Ok, maybe I'm just bitter that I made a fool of myself trying to get it open.

At least I'm not the only one feeling like a fool in town. Earlier that day, I saw this outside Southern Cross Station.

Seriously, how low can you get. At least those people who annoy you at the shopping centre for credit cards, phones, foxtel or the Mathomagic Computer Tutor pretend to know what they're selling themselves for.

And as if there isn't enough advertising everywhere already - I don't want a random guy with a massive lightbox on their back standing in a busy intersection when I'm trying to cross! Although I'm getting an odd vision that those things are so heavy that when these guys fall over, they're like turtles

It's kind of ironic that the University of Southern Queensland is advertising on it too, given the people carrying these 'moving boards' are generally uni students.

There was also a guy wearing these at the coffee shop.

Enough said.

On the other hand, this guy isn't a fool; far from it. Looks like the guy who cracked the Australian Government's has turned into a white hat, helping the government now. I'm surprised the government cared enough about this program to ask him for help.

Today, Coonan hinted that 16-year-old Tom Wood, who was able to crack the filter within half an hour, has been helping the government finetune the software package.

"We've been working with the young person concerned, in the lab … and we're now working on some of those issues with Microsoft," she said.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Teen-hacker-helps-govt-block-porn/0,130061733,339283512,00.htm?feed=rss

The guy's doing great for a 16 year old, probably gonna be setup for the next few years after high school at least. Pretty smart to contact a newspaper about his findings.

Alright, back to actual 'work', whatever that is...

It seems I had let some bugs slip through the cracks - some big ones too.

The RSS feed for my blog is now fixed, as are the tag browsing pages. If you're using a web-based feed reader, you might have gotten a heap of duplicates as I fixed the feed - sorry, it shouldn't happen from now on.

Some non-visible changes include the trackback/pingback links (fixed), and the RSS feeds for comments. I have discovered the comments RSS feed link has changed in CS2007, so you will need to resubscribe if you were subscribed to the comments RSS feed. The blog RSS feed URL has not changed.

Other dead-end links have either been fixed or removed. On the whole, apart from the comment RSS feed mentioned above, all URLs from the old site should link to the correct pages on the new site as the URL scheme has not changed. If not, please let me know.

Other than finding out that I should test my site in more detail before I release, I've realised that the exceptions report in CS (Control Panel -> Administration -> Reports -> Exceptions Report) is an invaluable resource in discovering errors, as it is all logged there. It's amazing how active search engine spiders are - my new site was only up a couple of hours before they began to drop by, one by one, and discovered all the dead-end and faulty links on my site.

In some more positive news, the comment email notification system has passed my brief tests - subscription works, notification works, and unsubscription works.

Anyway, everything should be 100% working now, but if you do stumble across a problem (dead-end links, faulty links, error messages, whatever), please let me know. Enjoy!

This post will concentrate on the technical side of things behind Drive:Activated 2.0.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I upgraded to Community Server 2007 for Drive:Activated 2.0. The first thing I noticed was that although it threw out a lot of the stuff I had learnt previously, theming was so much easier, faster and customisable than Community Server 2.1 which I used for Drive:Activated 1.0 (the initial version).

There are things I did here that would not have been possible in CS 2.1 without significant CS code changes, e.g. separation of comments and trackbacks in blog posts. Also there is now basically no hard-coded HTML code anymore - all the controls emit no code unless specified, so you have full control over your design. The new theme engine alone is worth upgrading for I reckon. The docs, as well as Ben Tiedt's blog are worth reading for info on the new theme engine.

But of course, there were things that I wanted to do that weren't supported, so out came Visual Studio and some custom code:

• DataSourceListCount & DataSourceListCountValueComparison (included)
  When I did the comments and trackback separation, it turned out there was no way of finding out the number of comments and trackbacks separately, even though the data was in the system, so I wrote DataSourceListCount to display it. DataSourceListCountValueComparison allows you to use it as a condition - for example, I used it so if there was a singular trackback, it would write out 'trackback', not 'trackbacks'. These controls are in fact usable in any CS Chameleon list control - it pulls out the number of records retrieved by the list control, including any QueryOverrides - and conform to the standard behaviour of a CS Chameleon single-value control.
• EmailSubscribeAction (not included)
  This action handler jumps in when a blog comment is submitted, and if an email address is provided, it'll set up a user account if one doesn't exist already, and track that blog post's comments. I didn't include it because it was specially designed for this blog and probably won't be much use to other people. Let me know otherwise and I'll release it.
• ExtendedWeblogRssHandler (not included)
  This extends the standard weblog rss handler, and splices in my tumblelog into the blog RSS feed, and publishes the project RSS feed correctly. Again, this is specific to this blog so I didn't see much point in releasing it, but if you're interested in the code, let me know.
• PostHumanDate (included)
  This control takes the date of the post, and transforms it into a human-form date, e.g. 21 minutes ago instead of the actual date. See the bottom of the date box in the top right corner of this post (if you're reading this from the website of course). It's a standard CS single-value control, so it's usable within any post object, so inside blog posts, blog post lists, comments, forum post lists, forum posts etc. The text is hard-coded unfortunately (as there were no usable strings in the language files), and it is designed to list the largest unit up to 'months', so if under 1 minute it'll say x seconds ago, if under 1 hour it'll say under x minutes ago and so on.
• SectionHumanDate (included) - added 06/08/2007
  This control acts like the PostHumanDate control, except instead of grabbing data from a post object in CS, it grabs data from a section object. It is used to get dates from information on a forum, blog, gallery or folder itself - not the items within them. For example, it can be used to replace the 'most recent post date' in forums, which is a section object property.
• RssFeedItemsList (included)
  This control lets you drag in any RSS feed and display it on your blog, without having to mirror it. Like the others, it is a full on CS list control, so you can set pagers, page sizes etc. and have complete control over the layout too. I've used it for the tumblelog, where it is housed in a CallBackPager control. It caches each RSS feed for 30 minutes. One difference is that I couldn't be bothered making a data control, so to get the data out from each feed item, you have to use the standard ASP.NET code - instructions inside.

The source code and compiled module can be downloaded here - Sam's CS2007 Mods - with instructions inside.

CS theming aside, I also had to dust off my rusty javascript skills to do the animations for the popup 'sidebar' menus. I accounted for the fact that some may have javascript turned off, so only when javascript is turned on are the menus turned into popups - otherwise they appear as normal content at the bottom of the page. I've never been much good at javascript animations, so my current animation code is only active in Firefox and Safari (which is the fastest browser surprisingly); it is too slow to be useful in other browsers, so it is disabled and the popups just pop up. My coding is lacking clearly, as it has been done before in all sorts of websites; maybe I'll fix it one day.

I also had to use some javascript for my 'hi there!' welcome message for all first time visitors. Once you've visited once, a cookie is left behind telling me that so the message doesn't appear. Of course I considered if cookies were disabled, and if they are, the message never appears - don't want to annoy the hell out of my visitors.

The background image loader was javascript as well - just detects the browser window size on load and resize, and loads the appropriately sized one.

During the design stage, I designed with all the popular browsers in mind - IE7, Firefox, Safari and Opera - so the full experience is enabled on all of them. But there are still numerous computers out there running the ancient IE6, which among other things doesn't support PNG transparency (used for the translucent effects behind this post), but I didn't want that to prevent me from delivering on my design, so I ignored that up until the end - I'd rather send it an inferior version than have all the other browsers suffer. It ended up quite easily done - some nice conditional commenting sent it a stylesheet that overrode the appropriate elements, wiping out the bits that confused it. I also used ASP.NET's browser detection function to send IE6 viewers an upgrade message. As I don't have IE6 installed anymore, I used the virtual machine image Microsoft provides for testing purposes to test.

Designing this website however reminded me of my general dislike of javascript, in fact, the whole HTML/CSS/JS model, mainly because there are so many hacks needed to make things work anywhere near universally. I'm sick of the blame game - I mean not even the open-sourced and supposedly standards-based browsers, Firefox and Safari (based on WebKit), are identical in execution. The lack of native vector graphic support sucks too - I'm sick of having to use graphical hacks to get gradient backgrounds. Where's the SVG support? Bring it on Flash/Flex, Silverlight, whatever - as long as it runs the same on all platforms and has basic vector graphic support.

Once the coding and designing was all done, it was time to upload. The file upgrading process was a simple switch - out the old, in the new. The database upgrade process was painless as well, but trying to backup and restore a SQL Server 2005 over the internet wasn't. I ended up having to re-create the database schema, turn off all constraints, import the data from my web host (excluding static tables), and turn on the constraints again (replace NOCHECK with CHECK in the previous set of instructions).

A nice trick to make the upgrading process smoother for your visitors is to create an App_Offline.htm file with a nice informative 'maintenance' message in it and place it in the root of the website. ASP.NET will pick that up, shut down the web app, and return that file for all requests until it is removed again. More info here.

Overall, the upgrading the website went surprisingly smooth - in fact, all it took was about an hour of downtime while the database was upgraded and the files were FTP'd across.

So what will the fate of the old design be? Well, I've backed it up and recreated it in a virtual machine on my desktop, so everything's still there. Some have called for it to be turned into a WordPress template, so that will probably be the eventual fate once I can be bothered learning WP. Let me know if you're interested in it.

Alright, that's enough Drive:Activated 2.0 talk - back to regular programming, whatever that is.

UPDATE (02/08/2007): I released a new version of my CS mods; main difference is that PostHumanDate now supports units up to months (amended above), and is more flexible in which date to use.

UPDATE (06/08/2007): Alright, another new version, v1.2. This time round I've added a SectionHumanDate control - see about for explanation.

So here it is, the new design that had been promised for so long, complete with the 2.0 designation .

The previous design irked me a bit, and while it was only a few months old, I decided to try a different design strategy. This new design is designed to fix the annoying bits of the old one.

For this new design, there was an overriding theme that ran throughout the design - 'the content is king'. To achieve this,

•  the site title and menu bar which is traditionally placed at the top of the page has been moved and fixed to the bottom of the window, promoting the content as the first thing the user sees. After all, most of my visitors come here from the search engine anyway, so chances are they've already found what they're looking for, so no point annoying them with menus first up.
• the traditional sidebar has been hidden in popup menus, so the content has as much of the screen as possible. I've always also found the sidebar stuff distracting when trying to read the main content, and hardly read it anyway.
  

Hopefully everyone can still find their way around - it shouldn't be hard, just different.

I also created (read: used Wingdings) a heap of icons (enclosed in yellow warning road signs) to help identify things, plus added a photo background just to add to the experience, and because I think the typical viewer has enough bandwidth. The background image is set to load after the site loads to avoid delays, and is coded to only download the appropriate size - so if you only have a 1024x768 window open, that's the image you'll download, not the 1400x1050 one.

Of course, given Internet Explorer 6 and below (and similar browsers)'s poor graphic and standards support, you won't be seeing much of the difference, although the website will remain readable.

My tumblelog (which integrates my linkblog) is also now completely integrated into the front page, and is also automatically spliced in with my RSS feed.

Navigation has been revamped too, so it shouldn't be so hard to find my contact details as it was before.

You can now also leave your email address behind while submitting a comment, and be notified as new comments are added to a post. This feature is new, and not 100% tested - while it shouldn't spam you, it may or may not work either as I couldn't test it on my test server.

There are a whole lot of small changes here and there too, including an upgrade of the platform behind this site (Community Server 2007 is leaps and bounds better than the old one btw), all designed to make the website more pleasing to the eye and easier to use.

Let me know what you think, positive, negative or otherwise!

Alright, I'm off to sleep - will post a bit more about this new design and the fate of the old design tomorrow. 

P.S. Went and saw The Simpsons Movie today - treat it like an extended episode of The Simpsons and you'll like it, otherwise it was a bit overhyped. The ending sucked too, and where was Skinner and Burns except for those short cut scenes! Do I smell a sequel...