Entries tagged with livejournal

Current Mood: curious

Entry tags:

livejournal,
meta

Stat-o-matic time!

So, in the interests of not failing twice in a row, let's unleash the traditional Stat-o-matic and post something more substantial (lest I summon the snark of talismancer...). The code needed a minor tweak this year to generate https urls for the graphics, otherwise it's the same as last year. It's nice when a bit of code just quietly continues working like that.

[ 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 ]

Top commenters on

boggyb's LiveJournal

1	boggyb	558
2	olego	181
3	pleaseremove	123
4	tau_iota_mu_c	72
5	pewterfish	70
6	ralesk	68
7	talismancer	67
8	omgimsuchadork	63
9	Anonymous	44
10	jecook	43

( 11-85 )

Total Commenters: 85
Total Comments: 1972 (not including 492 deleted and 2 screened)

Report generated Fri Nov 09 21:50:00 GMT 2018 by boggyb's LJ Stat-o-matic 1.3 (inspired by scrapdog's LJ Comment Wizard)

Strangely, this journal is down 6 comments and 1 user over last year. A check of the raw data shows there were actually 10 new comments so the changes are probably from deleted comments - sometimes when going over old posts I find spam comments, so that could be it. Unsurprisingly there's been little movement in the top ten - jecook has swapped places with Anonymous, who lost a comment (probably the aforementioned spam).

Hmm... I wonder if I could put together something similar for Facebook...

Current Mood: creative

Entry tags:

livejournal,
meta

The Stat-o-matic!

Amazingly I don't think the Stat-o-matic needs any tweaks this year.

[ 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 ]

Top commenters on

boggyb's LiveJournal

1	boggyb	557
2	olego	179
3	pleaseremove	123
4	tau_iota_mu_c	72
5	pewterfish	70
6	ralesk	68
7	talismancer	67
8	omgimsuchadork	63
9	jecook	43
10	Anonymous	43

( 11-86 )

Total Commenters: 86
Total Comments: 1978 (not including 476 deleted and 2 screened)

Report generated Sun Nov 12 23:06:57 GMT 2017 by boggyb's LJ Stat-o-matic 1.2 (inspired by scrapdog's LJ Comment Wizard)

There's been a little more activity than last year with another 28 comments received. No single user stands out as being particularly chatty however (with the exception of anonymous users, who have conspired together to boot mirrordreams out of the top 10). It's still massively down from the heyday of LiveJournal - a quick calculation shows that this blog has averaged 145-odd comments a year, so given how quiet it is now there must have been a few very comment-heavy years. Perhaps I should have a go at graphing the comments against time?

Current Mood: disappointed

Entry tags:

livejournal

(no subject)

Well, I'm not sure when this changed, but it appears that LiveJournal now shows ads when a guest user (i.e. someone not logged in to a LJ account) views a journal of a Paid account user (except these days that's an "account with Professional package of service").

Sigh.

One of the perks of a paid account always used to be the complete removal of advertising - not just from pages you viewed, but when anyone else viewed your journal. Sadly that's not the case anymore - and FAQ 262 is wonderfully self-contradictory as to when viewers actually see ads or not.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: 2]Whistler's Bride ~ Warder/The Feadanaigh Epic [whistler's bride.it]

Entry tags:

livejournal,
rant

LiveJournal Likes?

Okay, how do likes work on LiveJournal? All I get is an email saying:

"1 user(s) likes this - http://boggyb.livejournal.com/488309.html"

As best as I can tell that's it. I can't see how many likes I have on an entry (for that matter I don't even have a like button), and the like statistics page is empty.

The FAQ does say that this needs the new design and one of the new styles - but I still don't see like buttons even after switching to the new site design (which I'd prefer not to use as it's fallen into the trap of assuming that everything has to be designed for mobile - Vertigo is a far more useful scheme with the left-hand link bar and the smaller journal banner) and previewing my journal in the Air style.

Oh, wait, but if I try the Expressive style then it does appear (so much for that FAQ claiming that Air supports this). Interesting. It seems like there's an entirely new function to generate the likes button:

var int likus_journal_id = $.journal.userid; var int likus_post_id = $.itemid; var string likus_url = $.permalink_url; print get_lj_entry_likus("li", "asset-meta-likus item", $likus_journal_id, $likus_post_id, $likus_url);

And that looks is implemented in the base layer as:

function get_lj_entry_likus(string tag, string class, int journal_id, int post_id, string post_uri) : string { # LJSUP-24066 if( not is_likes_display() ) { return ""; } # for js LJSUP-18559 return """<""" + $tag + """ class="$class" lj-likus lj-likus-journal="$journal_id" lj-likus-item="$post_id" lj-likus-uri="$post_uri"></""" + $tag + """>"""; }

Hmm... I wonder if I can hack it into my S2 style? All this does is add a placeholder HTML element so it would seem the actual like button is generated with Javascript - which is a bit annoying as that makes it hard to customise. I might be able to do something with suitably crazy CSS hackery.

Not that such a feature should need a new journal style anyway. S2 is designed to cope with new features without needing all styles to be redesigned - for example, the way the per-entry links work ("Edit Entry", "Add to Memories", "Share" and so on) is that the S2 engine provides a list of actions and a function to generate each link. So adding a new one is straightforward, and unless the style writer has gone for an entirely custom layout ignoring this list then it will Just Work.

Sigh. It does annoy me that the current trend in, well, everything computing-related is to remove open-ended customisability because maintaining it requires effort, and that sounds too much like actual work compared to rewriting everything in the latest shiny framework.

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Moonraker [James Bond Themes]

Entry tags:

The Stat-o-matic retaliates!

I really ought to polish this off and post it on Github or somewhere. I've slightly tweaked it since last time: the base LJ stylesheet includes an unhelpful "height: auto !important" style on IMG tags which breaks the fancy bar graph. The Stat-o-matic now retaliates with its own CSS sledgehammer (now with valid CSS)!

[ 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 ]

Top commenters on

boggyb's LiveJournal

1	boggyb	550
2	olego	178
3	pleaseremove	122
4	tau_iota_mu_c	72
5	pewterfish	69
6	ralesk	68
7	talismancer	65
8	omgimsuchadork	63
9	jecook	43
10	mirrordreams	42

( 11-85 )

Total Commenters: 85
Total Comments: 1950 (not including 469 deleted and 3 screened)

Report generated Tue Nov 15 23:02:35 GMT 2016 by boggyb's LJ Stat-o-matic 1.2 (inspired by scrapdog's LJ Comment Wizard)

It's all been quiet on the commenting front with a mere 10 comments over the past year. About the only change is the accumulated wisdom of anonymous commentators has been dethroned from the top 10.

Current Mood: productive
Current Music: Across the Atlas - Jaded

Entry tags:

Journal tweaking

elemnar pointed out to me the other day that this blog doesn't render well on mobiles. It's a legacy of the table-based design in the Generator layout (which might explain why it seems to have disappeared from the journal customisation pages - or it's just LiveJournal trying to move everyone to the new shinyness regardless of the consequences) which predates anything with a screen taller than it is wide - responsive design is the in thing and is generally quite nice, but requires a lot of CSS tinkering and careful div nesting. Tables, on the other hand, solve an awful lot of web page layout issues with little markup needed (especially back in the dark ages of Internet Explorer 6 or earlier).

Actually making the theme adapt to smaller screens turned out to be trivially easy - all I had to do was disable the min-width attribute on the HTML tag (ironically set in a class named "html-s2-no-adaptive"), and then add a media query so on smaller screens the main entry boxes cease to be fixed-width and just fill the screen. And now on a mobile the entry boxes should fit neatly into the screen, unless a giant image forces the box to grow in which case it'll only break the layout for one entry (at least this is what happens when testing with Firefox's responsive design mode). Sorted!

Since I was tinkering with the style anyway I fixed a few other minor niggles - the bottom-left corner of each post now also contains extra links like Add to Memories and Share, and the link bar at the top of all pages in my journal now once again has the "|" character between links (the S1 version of Generator I believe did this). It also won't wrap the text within a link because that's just silly.

Current Mood: curious
Current Music: Jools Holland and his Rhythm & Blues Orchestra - Well Alright [The Collection]

Entry tags:

livejournal,
meta

The revenge of the Stat-o-matic

Time for the traditional NaBloPoMo meme! Somehow I've managed to produce this for eight years running.

[ 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 ]

Top commenters on

boggyb's LiveJournal

1	boggyb	549
2	olego	173
3	pleaseremove	122
4	tau_iota_mu_c	72
5	pewterfish	69
6	ralesk	68
7	talismancer	64
8	omgimsuchadork	63
9	Anonymous	43
10	jecook	42

( 11-83 )

Total Commenters: 83
Total Comments: 1940 (not including 461 deleted and 7 screened)

Report generated Tue Nov 24 23:22:56 GMT 2015 by boggyb's LJ Stat-o-matic 1.1 (inspired by scrapdog's LJ Comment Wizard)

There's been a few upsets to the leaderboard over the past year: tau_iota_mu_c has overtaken pewterfish, and talismancer and omgimsuchadork have swapped places. jecook has also managed to sneak into the top 10.

olego is still sitting at #2 with no real competition.

One of these days I ought to publish the Stat-o-matic online somewhere...

Current Music: Deepest Blue - Deepest Blue (Jon Hopkins mix) [Chilled 1991-2008 - Disc 3]

Entry tags:

The LJ Stat-o-matic returns!

Because despite not taking part

talismancer will still (justifiably) snark at me if I leave it at that, here's a bonus post! Admittedly it's a meme, but it's the traditional NaBloPoMo one, now back for a seventh year...

2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and now 2014:

Top commenters on

boggyb's LiveJournal

1	boggyb	540
2	olego	172
3	pleaseremove	119
4	pewterfish	69
5	tau_iota_mu_c	69
6	ralesk	68
7	omgimsuchadork	61
8	talismancer	58
9	Anonymous	43
10	mirrordreams	42

( 11-80 )

Total Commenters: 80
Total Comments: 1897 (not including 461 deleted and 4 screened)

Report generated Sat Nov 15 23:40:31 GMT 2014 by boggyb's LJ Stat-o-matic 1.1 (inspired by scrapdog's LJ Comment Wizard)

Compared to last year there's been very little change - two pairs in the top 10 have swapped position (

ralesk and

tau_iota_mu_c, Anonymous and

mirrordreams), but in both cases only because one person in the pair has posted any comments.

As a minor aside, it took me only a couple of minutes to download the 150MB zip file for Eclipse, and maybe half that to extract it (then five minutes spent trying to work out why it wasn't starting - it'd help if the 64-bit package actually used the 64-bit Java runtime...). Back when I started university doing the same took much longer - Internet access wasn't anywhere near as fast, and both processors and disks were much slower. Modern computing is fast.

Interestingly my 7-year-old desktop is actually more responsive than the shiny new Lenovo T440 laptop $WORK has allocated. The laptop has a high-end Core i-something-or-other (probably an i5, probably 3GHz, definitely 8 cores), 8GB of RAM, and plenty of disk space. Nyx, the desktop, has an old Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.4GHz and only 4 cores), a mere 4GB RAM... and a crazy fast Plextor M5S SSD. It's no contest, really.

Current Mood: silly
Current Music: Don’t Go ~ Wretch 32 feat. Josh Kumra/RTIST Various Artists

Entry tags:

The obligatory LJ Stat-O-Matic post

Well, a sample size of 2 isn't remotely statistically significant but both omgimsuchadork and talismancer did ask for more memes...

2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and now 2013:

Top commenters on

boggyb's LiveJournal

1	boggyb	520
2	olego	171
3	pleaseremove	111
4	pewterfish	69
5	ralesk	68
6	tau_iota_mu_c	61
7	omgimsuchadork	50
8	talismancer	49
9	mirrordreams	42
10	Anonymous	42

( 11-78 )

Total Commenters: 78
Total Comments: 1814 (not including 441 deleted and 5 screened)

Report generated Fri Nov 15 22:19:09 GMT 2013 by boggyb's LJ Stat-o-matic 1.1 (inspired by scrapdog's LJ Comment Wizard)

Compared to last year there's been little change in the top ten, other than the rise of omgimsuchadork who's risen up to 7th place! Congratulations!

Current Mood: silly
Current Music: Scandalous ~ Faithless/The Dance

Entry tags:

livejournal

(no subject)

Oh dear, I've just had a silly idea for how to make an off-site friends page equivalent that actually has the full metadata (the RSS feed lacks some of it) and LJ-tags available:

Write a custom S2 style to display a journal or a single entry in a nicely parseable format. You could use the Lynx theme for this with a little effort, but having your own S2 style means you don't have to fix your parser every time LJ update their site. On the flip side, you do have to update your S2 style every time LJ adds some new feature... but that's only if you actually care about their changes.

Ping the checkfriends API to determine when someone's made a post. When that claims there're new posts, grab the friends page RSS feed using the auth parameter to log in as yourself (so your scripts or whatever can see any friends-only posts that are on your friends page). Parse that to work out which posts are new. Then grab those posts, but add the s2id parameter to the URL to make them appear using your new S2 style. Parse those into whatever style you want.

Wrap all this up in a suitably shiny bunch of PHP or whatever, and hey presto - you now have a friends page that looks exactly how you want it to.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Soft Labyrinth ~ Motoi Sakuraba/Baten Kaitos

Entry tags:

The even shinier and newer LJ Stat-o-matic!

Yes, it's time for the top commenters meme!

Top commenters on

boggyb's LiveJournal

1	boggyb	502
2	olego	167
3	pleaseremove	107
4	pewterfish	68
5	ralesk	68
6	tau_iota_mu_c	58
7	talismancer	47
8	mirrordreams	42
9	Anonymous	42
10	omgimsuchadork	41

( 11-78 )

Total Commenters: 78
Total Comments: 1758 (not including 431 deleted and 4 screened)

Report generated Thu Nov 08 22:50:46 GMT 2012 by boggyb's LJ Stat-o-matic 1.1 (inspired by scrapdog's LJ Comment Wizard)

There's been a little movement in the rankings: dootsie has disappeared off the top ten to be replaced by omgimsuchadork, and some commenters have swapped places (ralesk and pewterfish, along with mirrordreams and talismancer). Of course, olego is still in his rightful place at #2.

My LJ Stat-o-matic has also had some work and now generates logarithmic graphs. I think mine's still not quite the same as whatever algorithm scrapdog's original wizard uses, but I think it looks better than the previous linear graphs. Source is available to anyone who asks for it :)

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Zion ~ Fluke/The Matrix: Reloaded

Entry tags:

livejournal

(no subject)

Sod it, I've had enough of comments full of gibberish about ugg boots (why is it always ugg boots that the spambots are selling?) Effective immediately, anonymous commenting is disabled. Given that these days LiveJournal supports things like Twitter and Facebook accounts, that shouldn't stop actual people from leaving comments.

Current Mood: accomplished

Entry tags:

S2 hackery

I've finally made proper use of that paid account of mine and customised my journal theme. It's only a pair of tiny tweaks (you might not even notice them), but they're things that have been bugging me. I've actually been debating whether or not it's even worth spending the time on it, but it turned out to not take that long and I can hold it up as an example of why being able to customise ones friends page is a Good Thing.

Tweak the first is changing the way the userbox (that thing in the top-right corner of each post on my friends page) displays the usernames. Previously it just displayed the username and linked it to the journal. It now displays the userhead (the little icon of a person) as well, and links that to the user profile page in exactly the same way as links like

boggyb behave.

Tweak the second is making the userbox not only appear on my friends page, but on the lastn and entry pages as well. This also means that when I've used a different userpic to my default, the one I've chosen will now appear.

The actual implementation is a bit ugly - there's no nice place to hook it into the existing Generator layout that I use, so I ended up copying the print_entry() function into my own theme. This means that I'll have to update it whenever the underlying theme gets changed or new stuff is added, but I can live with that. This also means that I can't use the existing Everblue with Greys theme anymore either (as you can only have one layout and one theme selected), so I had to copy in the colours from that as well. And in the process I seem to have broken the background gradient on the navigation strip.

But those are all things that can be either dealt with or ignored, and in the meantime my friends page is now even more how I want.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Energy Recharge ~ Another Soundscape/Super Metroid: Reserve Tank: VARIAtions

Entry tags:

The new feed page

LiveJournal in their infinite wisdom have decide to create a new feed page. And, as per the modern way announcements are done, the news posts are very light on detail and don't answer most of the questions people actually have.

Including very important ones, like "can I keep my old friends page?".

The answer to that question is buried in the comments, and appears to be "no". See this comment: "Once the new friends feed is out of Beta testing, it will no longer be possible to switch back to using other style-based friends pages like there are now.".

To be slightly fair, the reasoning they give makes some sense - the sheer number of different styles is making it hard for them to add new features (apparently the repost feature resulted in confusion because some themes didn't show who made the repost). This is all very well, but the reason there are lots of different styles is because people like customizing their journal. The new feed currently has an unknown level of customisation (they say "at least text size and background images", but that's a far cry from what the built-in themes let you do, let alone what's possible if you write your own theme).

It doesn't help their case that the new feed is also missing several features. There's no sign of a custom page title, friend colours, mood icons, the link bar, or custom comment labels - all of which are things that the friends page has had since at least 2004. I've also found three bugs in how posts are shown (long links are cut off by the right-hand margin, some RSS feeds are full of extra line breaks, and the "Up" button disappears off the right-hand side of the screen). Wait, make that four bugs: the layout is too wide for a 1024x768 screen. That makes it the only site I use frequently that doesn't fit in a 1024x768 window (even deviantart works in that!), and also makes it unusable for me.

Current Mood: annoyed

Entry tags:

No storyteller

Well, that's rather annoying. I had a wonderful plan for today's (ok, technically yesterday's but I've not gone to bed yet) post, involving an inline version of last year's Storyteller. Unfortuantly this was scuppered by several things: 1) LiveJournal does not allow IFRAMES, 2) using the OBJECT tag with HTML doesn't reliably work in IE6 (it loads the page but doesn't display it), and 3) when you use the OBJECT or EMBED tags in a LJ entry, what actually happens is their backend wraps it in an IFRAME using the lj-toys.com domain. This eats the referer, and so I can't find out which user is viewing that entry.

I could probably make it work by dynamically generating an image and including that - images still get directly included, and so the referer header should still be present. Doing it that way feels like a horrible hack, but that's the Internet for you.

Current Mood: confused

Entry tags:

Weird routing

At the moment, I can only get to LiveJournal via a mobile Vodafone 3G connection - when I try my landline Virgin Media ADSL link, the packets get stuck in a routing loop.

That's not the weird part. The weird part is both connections at one point go through the same routers (marked in bold)!

( Vodafone 3G traceroute )

( Virgin Media ADSL traceroute )

So, who do I pester about this?

Edit: at some point over the past day this mysteriously fixed itself. Of course, something else had to disappear from this connection to maintain the cosmic balance of the routing tables :(

Current Mood: disappointed

Entry tags:

livejournal

And yet another feature that made LiveJournal unique vanishes...

For those of you who haven't been paying attention, a few months ago LiveJournal got sold to SUP, which had been for some time supporting the russian community. At the time they promised a grand 100-day plan, complete with an advisory board formed of some of the most influential figures from LiveJournal's history.

And now we've come to the end of the 100-day plan, and while there were many grand changes announced (and some good ones, like reworking and clarifying the abuse rules), there's been a small but extremely significant change that was very quietly made. FAQ #38, What are the different account levels on LiveJournal, was updated, and the following was added:

"Basic Account is an option available to accounts which were created before March 12, 2008. No account created after this date can be turned into a Basic Account."

Back in ye olden days, one of the core tennants of LiveJournal is that you would not have to pay to have a journal on it. Free accounts were just that - free, while you could, if you wanted, pay for extra features. Then came adverts, but they were very carefully added, such that you only saw them if you were logged out or using an ad-supported account, and paid users *never* had or saw ads anywhere. The basic free account still existed, and was still ad-free.

Now the basic free account has gone, and LiveJournal's joined the ranks of sites that plaster you with adverts unless you pay a subscription.

'Tis a sad day for Livejournal.

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Zelo (serious arrange) ~ Ichiko Furukawa, Makoto Tonosu/Tales of Symphonia

Entry tags:

My coding Muse

My coding Muse has found me again, which is good. I've just spent the past few hours cranking out code for my LiveJournal journal reader, and bashing together a bit of hackery involving internet explorer, visual basic 6 and on-demand post loading. It's now almost at beta level. The only major bug remaining is that friends-only posts *still* don't work, and I think that it's LiveJournal's problem. See the previous post for details.

Now I just need to turn my fingers to the other programs I've been meaning for a while to code. That or actually release something - a trawl through my code folder showed about half-a-dozen programs at release quality, an ancient attempt at writing a Pokémon clone, various unfinished programs ranging from an empty file to a complete UI skeleton, and some stuff that I don't remember writing. Oh, and one program that I think I wrote, but am not actually sure. It has my style, but I can't remember ever writing it.

You know you've been programming too long when you can't remember why you wrote something.