Sealhat.com

After having K2 for quite a while now, I’ve decided to use a new theme called “Andrea” since I was upgrading to WordPress 2.6 anyway. Not many people actually read my blog and I thought I might as well try to make it faster for those of you who actually make it to my little nook on the Internet.

Yes, K2 is quite robust, but it just seems to try to do too much and development is too complex for me to keep it up-to-date…or maybe that’s just my laziness.

I’m still making some changes, but let me know what you think!

First post of 2007 is in mid-June? Inconceivable! Anyway, this post might be a bit shorter than I wanted it to be because WordPress decided to delete my original one when I hit “Save and Continue Editing”…GG.

So for the past couple weeks I’ve been working on this Xfire Stats application for Facebook. All it really does is take information from your public Xfire profile and display it in a nice way on your Facebook profile. Pretty simple, especially since the developers at Xfire Plus created a PHP script that parses the Xfire profiles for you and puts the data in a nice array. After that, it’s just a matter of displaying that data in HTML. Overall, the concept is pretty simple, but the whole Facebook development platform is kinda wonky (that’s the technical term).

Basically, Facebook apps show cached data on their servers. The data originates on my server though. This way, they can ensure the responsiveness of the data I suppose. The issue that I have is the whole “push” rather than “pull” model. Instead of Facebook pulling data from my server to be displayed on a profile, a user (or a crontab iterating through your whole database…eww) must push the data out to the users. This is very important for status applications. Unfortunately, many times my data isn’t refreshed. It might be an issue with my site’s responsiveness, but I don’t really think so since it’s really quite fast loading the same data through a regular browser. With only about one MySQL query per page load, it’s not all that much to transfer. What’s the deal? I dunno. It’s all quite hard to debug when there isn’t any log that I know of.

Anyway, I probably will only release this application to people that I know so that I can regulate its usage. After all, there really doesn’t seem to be that much of an upside to releasing a Facebook application as a single developer. Companies? Yes. They can quickly get hundreds of servers to handle the load and create a huge user base utilizing the Facebook users. Me? I don’t see anything but a large server bill. At least it looks nice on my profile.

Don’t let this discourage you from developing anything though. It was quite fun using Notepad++ for the first time, and I learned quite a bit about PHP (not that much about MySQL though since I use MSSQL so much at work).

Just a few updates around Sealhat.com. My theme, K2, has been updated to the very nice version 0.9. A few other slight color and positioning changes have been made. Also a few nice plugins have been added.

The Sealhat Gallery, which uses Coppermine, has also been updated from the ancient 1.3.1 to 1.4.8 (which is actually XHTML valid!). Even better, commenting is now spam protected by Akismet (just like this blog is). But since it’s a “hack”, it does not fail gracefully for real people commenting. You will just get a “You don’t have permission” error. Just try again and see if it works.

I haven’t posted much here, so I may as well get people up to speed. I am still looking for a job…two on-site interviews the week after spring break. That should be fun. During the break, I’ve been catching up on reading that I should have been doing throughout the semester. Probably going to read ahead some so that I won’t have so much to do later on.

I’m also doing a website for one of my former Asian American Studies professor: The Asian American Online Bibliography Project. This is my first “from scratch and valid” XHTML+CSS website. Let me know what you guys think. I’m thinking I could have done it in PHP, but I don’t know if the server that it will eventually be hosted on will support it.

I’ve also been listening to the new Lost soundtrack. “Win One for the Reaper” (or “Life and Death”…they sound the same) and “I’ve Got a Plane to Catch” are quite good.

I need to upgrade WordPress. Also, this theme seems a little too bare for me. I’m thinking of switching it to the Wuhan theme.

Also, I got a free iPod Shuffle from JudysBook.com a while back.

In other news, Yahoo! Podcast Beta has been launched and they have some pretty good stuff there. The only problem is that you can only subscribe using their software or iTunes (both of which are terrible pieces of software).

Oh, and check out the gallery while you’re here.

I recently found that the “Comments” pages weren’t XHTML validated so I fixed that. I also fixed a few problems that were cited in the Mallow changelog. The only major thing I found different, though, was that the navbar at the top works (i.e. looks correct) in IE now.

Color scheme has also been changed to a bluish one.

That’s all for now.

WordPress 1.5 “Strayhorn” has been released and is ready for download.

1.5 has been our most user-focused development ever: we’ve listened closely to your requests, complaints, praise, pleas, and we’ve done our best to address these both in the core and through enabling plugin authors more flexibility. Any sentence that started “I love WordPress except for…” was fuel for the fire.

I’ll probably wait until spring break to upgrade. I haven’t had any problems with this 1.5 nightly build anyway.