Chroder.com

Well I haven’t written in a while, so I thought it was probably past time It first came to mind just now when I went out for a drive to fetch myself and Iced Cap. Now, every single Canadian you talk to will know what an Iced Cap is — but for the rest of the world, I thought I’d finally show it to you (and now when you see my usertitle “Iced Cap” on forums, you know what it means). I took a picture with my cell phone so excuse the not-so-great quality. The picture itself doesn’t explain much, so let me tell you what it is: It’s a cold cappuccino that tastes like the best thing in the world.

So what have I been up to… Not too much I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I lead a dreadfully boring life for the most part. At least, boring to write about (I hardly think the ups and downs of “life” itself could ever bear a dull moment). But I’ll tell you anyway since I feel this is a personal blog, and I should at least reveal why so much time has passed since my last blog post.

First I had my end-of-semester exams during the end of January. I only had three classes, and two of which I had under my belt (the third, English, yielded a more difficult experience but not by much). But ease does not mean speed, so although I think I could have done what needed doing with my eyes closed, time was limited (explaining my absence from blogging and IRC chat etc). But after all was done, I came out with pretty good grades. My average was 89%* I can’t gloat too much though, because I had 3 easy classes. But I do have to comment on my English grade. I got an 81%, even when I didn’t do half of the summative project. The summative was worth 20% of the final grade, I believe, and I didn’t do half. That’s a big chunk!

Then my second semester begun on Feb 6. This semester is hard. I’ve got one easy class (computer engineering), but three University-level classes: Earth and Space sciences, Calculus and Discrete Math. The latter is the troublesome one. I’m not sure what kind of grade I’ll get in these classes. Suffice it to say that I actually have to do my work for the first time in over a year, and for those I work with and talk to, my absence is noticeable.

I still do manage to get work done. I’m scarce during the week, but on weekends I try to finish all the work that needs to be done. Webmaster-Talk always has something that needs doing, so I don’t idle too too much Recently we decided to switch back to our older style from the new one since no one really liked it. We call it our “New Old Style”. Actually it’s called “Sleek” because I was starting to get confused with all the styles being variants of “WT Style” (WT Style, W-T Style, WT_Style… which is which?!!??!). So I updated our older style for vB3.5 (which basically means I started from scratch rather then having to worry about all the new Javascript additions to the templates). It’s live on the site right now and has very good feedback so far, though I’m not satisfied with the header. I made a possible replacement, I’ll see what Tim thinks.

I also created an AdShare plugin for vB specifically for Webmaster-Talk. If you visit Digital Point forums, then you know what I mean. Basically, it lets members input their AdSense client ID’s (we also allow an option channel ID for those who want use that feature) and it shows their adsense code in our site. In our case, a thread starter has a 50% chance of his code showing up, then 25% goes to the last poster in a thread, and then the last %25 is split between the admins. I was skeptical at first, since I really really hate ads (I’m an avid AdBlock user [FF extension]). But now that we’ve got it going, I really like it. A simple and effective way to give back to the community! Our members seem to like it too.

And then this weekend I created a “todays top ten posters” for forumhome. It’s a dreadfully simple plugin, but I though I’d explain what I had to do in case someone runs into the same problem. The problem is the SQL query; it takes forever to grab the 10 users with the most posts within (TIMENOW - 86400). So the solution, of course, is to cache it! In the case of vBulletin, you can use the ‘datastore’ table as a generic cache location (vB has a datastore class that lets you use advanced features like mem cache, but you don’t have to use it*). Just store the data in the datastore (usually a serialized array of some sort which includes the last update time), and then update it periodically. In our case, the list is updated every 2 hours (yes, that means some unlucky lout has to wait a few seconds for the forumhome to load).

There is on last thing on my list (as it stands right now) for WT. We want to let users enter the URL to their blog’s RSS feed, and we want to show a link/title in their postbit of their latest blog entry (also something you’d see at Digital Point, but I’ve seen it a lot of other places too — we’re not copying, I swear!). This also brings up some problems of efficiency. How do you go about getting the latest blog post from each user? You have to parse the off-site RSS feed to do that. But we can’t go out and parse 10 different RSS feeds for every user on showthread, for example, so the plugin has to do it smartly. I’ve got a few ideas of a “smart cache” system. And I want to make a pingback system so users can enter us into their services to ping when they make a new post. This means that we don’t have to worry about updating the cache, the cache is updated only when pinged. I think most users will use this option as it’ll update their post in realtime instead of waiting for the cache life to run out.

After that, I’m working on a project for Robert Winter. A song database of sorts, which needs to be completed by the end of March. I’ve already started and I’ve got the spec down, just need to code the meat.

So I’m keeping busy. Between my online work, school and poker (of which I haven’t won in a long time, though I came in second last game), I keep busy. It’s kind of scary knowing this is my last few months of high school. For the last 12 years, I’ve known year after year that I’d be “going to school again in September”. Not that’s all about to change. Scary, but exhilarating at the same time.

Anyway, that’s that. Consider this entry to fill my post-quota for the week

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 19th, 2006 at 5:43 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.