Downtime and Uptime

28 MAR 2010
-Zecro

Recently, the people I buy hosting from had some issues, during which time the site was unavailable. I'm not really clear on the issues, but now it's over.
In any case, sorry for the downtime. I'll be doing some things to make sure this doesn't happen again.
Also, yes, I know the header image is mis-aligned in not-Firefox (Chrome and IE, specifically).

New Site, Again

4 JAN 2010 - 00:53
-Zecro

The new website is up, happy new year! It's kind of ripped off of several other web sites, and hand-scribbled by myself. It should display more or less properly in various browsers. I might continue to fiddle with it for a bit, but things should settle down within a week. If you are so inclined to tell me how much I suck at web design, there's a thread up in /gen/. The whole idea behind this design is no-nonsense, and something about three clicks to find all relevant information.
And pastel colors.

Merry Christmas!

24 DEC 2009 - 22:56
-Zecro

I'm currently working on a front page redesign because having TWO news feeds is redundant and useless. Also, running Drupal is a five-star way to leave the site open to hax, simply because vulnerabilities are published. This part of the site will go away to be replaced by a static page which will link to all the other pages (and a similarly-styled About page). I'll have to hack a link to the Shimmie in Kusabax, but other than that (and messing with stylesheets on the discussion boards) this site will probably attain satisfactory standing in my eyes and I'll buy some advertisements or something. Even though advertising a community project seems kind of counter-intuitive. But it's not like there has been any new content for half a year, so I've nothing to post on 4chan itself.

Yes, I'm still interested in this project and I'm going to keep kicking it in hopes that people will start contributing.

LIVE, DAMNIT, LIVE.

Status

22 OCT 2009 - 04:58
-Zecro

So, what's the deal with this site? It's still running, but I guess people don't care enough to further the project so there is (as always) a lack of contribution. There are currently no plans to go offline and I have not received any complaints about the content. Actually, I have not received any mail at all for the admin@domainname email that I did not send to it. Not even spam. So, as far as continuing to run goes, this site should continue to run even if I drop off the face of the earth probably (it's hosted on a shared server).

I really hate how there are three different backends for this site all linking to each other. This is the most useless part of it, so I'll probably just replace it with static HTML again, or relocate the discussion boards to the root address and add an "about" tab (because that's really the only content on this part of the site right now). The only major hindrance to me doing stuff is that classes are still going (midterms lol), and I don't want to fail everything. Then again, if I sit down and actually WORK on this site instead of lurking 4chan it shouldn't take longer than ten hours and if it actually does take ten hours I would be pretty surprised.

Alive~

05 OCT 2009 - 00:56
-Zecro

What, you thought this site was dead? No, there's just nobody contributing original content, that's all! But I've added the comics archive with sequential comics, which is linked in the main navigation bar. At current posting, there's probably only one comic sequence left to upload (the /x/-and-/d/ one) unless I've forgotten something. ... That's pretty much it!

21 SEP 2009 - 22:26
-Zecro

Forums UP!

The forums are up, and linked to in the main menu. There are a few things that bother me about it, and maybe I'll even get rid of this (Drupal) backend and make the imageboard home the default home, but that's up in the air right now. Honestly, running three different backends for this site is horrible design.

To-Do List Take Two:

  • Add web client for IRC (yes, there is an IRC channel for this project: irc.rizon.net#Boards ) to main site
  • Move all the stories to the stories board (YOU, yes YOU can help!)
  • Work on stitching this site together
  • START CRANKING OUT CHARACTER DESIGNS!

Forum &c

21 SEP 2009 - 01:40
-Zecro

I re-read this post and realized that it made absolutely no sense, so I've re-written it.

I kept talking about putting up a forum on this site, and there are a variety of options. The original idea was to install Drupal (or Joomla) and use a forum module. Another option I considered was to run something similar to the Invisionfree Powerboard. I decided against both of those, as the former is rather lacking, and the latter has a lot of needless hoop-jumping and features. Then I considered installing anonymous imageboard software, but the thought of managing it was frightening. Besides, there's already the Shimmie, which has anonymous uploading as well as tags and comments, so adding in yet another location to upload images would be needlessly redundant.

The final decision was to install a text-only Bulletin Board System (BBS) in the vein of 2ch. It doesn't require registration (so more people can contribute), has tripcodes (instead of registration), and is generally a format that should seem familiar to users.

There's the problem of running perl scripts to overcome, but if it doesn't work out, there is always the (more broken) PHP version that 4chan runs for its text-only boards, made by Shii. Shii is a guy you don't hear about, but he was the guy who convinced moot to start 4chan.

The to-do list in the previous post has two more things: editing in a "home" (and "forum") links on the Shimmie, and the solution for archiving stories.

The Shimmie is written in PHP, and I'm not really a web developer so I'm still figuring that part out. I am stupid and finally figured it out. Link to this page is now on the Shimmie.

The story archive will probably be a /write/ board on the BBS with a directory somewhere on this site. Unless I can figure out a more elegant solution.

14 SEP 2009 - 23:04
-Zecro

Updates

We got some updates up in here! A decent theme (the colors of which are not finalized), some buttons in the navigation bar, and some stuff in the about page. I still need to set up the backend a little bit, but there will be a forum here too. Some things about Drupal bother me, but this site looks pretty decent. There are 439 images in the gallery right now (there is a secret page that tells me this), so that's pretty cool. I didn't make this site just to sit here and be useless, so link to it when it's relevant.

So the TO DO list for me is:

  • Finish setting up backend
  • Set up forum
  • Edit theme colors that should be enough. IE6 won't display the transparent PNGs properly, but you shouldn't be using IE6 anyway.
  • Edit in a home link on the Shimmie
  • Figure out something for writefaggotry
  • Edit favicons for transparency

Stopgap Measures

12 SEP 2009 - 02:42
-Zecro

Drupal is now installed and this site is now sucking less. Even though I was told that "all the major CMSes (drupal, joomla, wordpress) have serious vulnerabilities made public on the order of once a month" and that static pages are clearly superior, static pages won't work for this site at all. Why Drupal over Joomla and Wordpress? It goes Drupal > Joomla > Wordpress for difficulty, but Drupal is the most capable CMS, and I'm not going to mess around with a bunch of limitations.

Good news, though, is that the Shimmie (image board) is independent of the Drupal end, and that's where a bunch of stuff is right now. Just to give you an idea, this site has been up for all of six days, and there have been 220 unique visitors, 36k hits, and just short of a gigabyte of data transferred. There are 436 images uploaded, with at least 50 more to come. So, we're about ready to get the ball rolling, and this post is just here to make sure there's something more than a "SET UP YOUR SITE LOL" page.

The Shimmie has an RSS feed, by the way, so you won't miss uploaded images or comments.

I've still got a bunch of stuff to figure out, but hopefully this is a major improvement over what was here before.

Since all the links are gone, here are relevant links:
http://shimmie.4chanhouse.org/
http://plus4chan.org/boards/coc/res/11204.html
http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Board-tans
http://1d4chan.org/wiki/4chan_anime