Rachel the Great's blog

Blegh, MySpace

Fri, 14 Apr 2006 21:43:32 -0500

I finally got a MySpace account:
http://www.myspace.com/70940932

Say hello if you have one, too!

Read about the "blegh" part here:
http://crowhen.livejournal.com/4259.html

Fleeting

Tue, 21 Feb 2006 07:03:23 -0600

Yesterday, as I was coming out of a local store, I noticed a pretty male in the passenger's side of a car. He wasn't a baby, like most of the males who stick around here (they're either still in highschool or geezers it seems), and his face bore striking similarities to Orlando Bloom's. The funny thing was, he was actually looking at me. Like, with interest. Like he actually could see me. Huh. Fancy that. No males around here look at me like that. They usually have boyish leers or otherwise vacant expressions when I see them. Mostly, I feel like they are looking through me at something else, they way we look through mist to see people coming at us in the fog. But, I got the distinct impression that this guy really saw me.

I am the Chai Goddess

Mon, 20 Feb 2006 17:38:53 -0600

Just made my first evah batch o milky chai tea. I had enough left over to pour into an old pomegranate juice bottle. It's good. A touch bitter, but I think I can fix that by nixing the nutmeg and lowering the cardamon. I added a lot of vanilla. A lot. I cannot wait to try some cold in the morning. Who else love the Chai? Okay, I will stop talking and get back to work fixing the site. *sigh*

Experimenting with sigs and smiles.

Fri, 17 Feb 2006 09:26:37 -0600

gURL.com just comissioned me for another comic, so it looks like my schedule is packed tight, what with NIN in March and all these deadlines. I will try to continue steadily developing the new MP in the meantime. I added a module that adds signatures automatically and changes them site-wide when you change your sig in your user prefs. This means older posts are going to have double sigs. If you don't like it, just edit your post. If you find you cannot edit your post, let me know. Some users are having editing problems, and WE CANNOT GO LIVE UNTIL THEY ARE RESOLVED. I cannot reso

fufufufu

Sat, 28 Jan 2006 12:42:56 -0600

I did it. I did the buggering impossible. I essentially took the forum module and the book review module and smacked them together. What do we get for it? Book reviews now come with bread crumbs (those little link paths across the top of your screen) that work, and we can view book reviews via category now, instead of just flopped in a list. Reviewers can edit their own book reviews. The code for this is HUGE, so I'm going to spend some time removing non-bookreview related material from it (such as functions for making bookreviews sticky, etc.).

Might be able to implement a "search by title" type index.

PHP and book reviews

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 19:48:21 -0600

Just having a good time smacking the book review module's PHP around. I'm hoping to hybridize it with the basic forum module to create a book review core set up like the forum (with breadcrumbs that work and easy to read links to post your own book reviews). Then, hopefully, I can integrate a better search capacity. *yawn* It's so boring. Going to be a couple of days before I figure out what bit of code I screwed up that keeps the front page from showing. I'll upload the old module when I'm not working on the new one so you can still read the book reviews. If you come by and get a blank screen under book reviews, I'm probably tearing my hair out over here.

Reverse Engineering

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 19:23:12 -0600

My kingdom for a MySQL handbook. I'm having much fun reverse engineering the book reviw module so I can actually make it function the way I want it to.

This site's code can't hold out on me forever. It'll have to give in to my supreme will eventually!!!!

More site updates soon. Going live within the next week.

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 14:31:03 -0600

I have no clue if anyone keeps up with my blog, which I use for adding site updates and such. Anywho, during a brief pause in MP development I was crawling all over my own site's store code to make certain it would validate properly. Why was that so important when I need to launch the new MP so soon? Because I'll be running a store for MP using the same code, and I want it to be very compliant. Plus, both stores will run off the same database. Joyness.

I still need to make a black skin for this site and make the user profiles look less dorky (gag). Then I need to wrench the book review module's display around a little so we don't have to look at a long, alphabetical list of book reviews every time we visit the page. Luckily, I think I found some code I can use to much improve that display. *is so evil*

Stalkers ahoy! (and some BBCode junk...)

Sun, 22 Jan 2006 09:48:50 -0600

I found a nifty buddylist module that lets you track your friends' and contacts' posts. It's a really sweet script, but the term "buddy" irks me to no end. With this script, you could list someone as your "buddy" even if they did not return the favor. What if you just want to keep an eye on any new articles or blogs they post? That's not friendship, that's stalking!

So, instead of buddylists, we have stalklists. You can add and remove people you stalk ("stalk-ings" like "stockings" hahaha... heh... okay, it was cute at the time) via their profile pages and you can manage your stalk-ings from the "my stalklist" menu on the left there. When you stalk a person, their recent posts will show up in a box on the left-hand side of your screen! You can also access this info from the "my stalklist" menu under "recent posts", so if you don't like the "recent posts" block on the left, you can turn it off via "my account >> edit (scroll down to 'block configuration')".

Spam and Troll Armor (mod and admin update)

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 17:41:26 -0600

Updated
Mods and admins now have the ability to mark comments as "spam" (if they appear to be such) or "not spam." We won't have trouble with spam until the site goes live, but the system may mistake certain user comments as spam if they have posted the same copy many times in a short span of time or if they link to a blacklisted spam site or if they try to post more than ten links in a comment. It will most likely unpublish those comments and wait for you to judge them as spam or not. We now return you to your regularly scheduled update.

I added some anti-spam and anti-troll mods to this site. Now I and my fellow admins and mods have the ability to block users and content in many ways not limited to just banning IPs!

Book review module up.

Thu, 5 Jan 2006 20:37:13 -0600

I added a book review module. So far, only people I dub Authors and myself will be able to write them, but I'm looking into letting other members submit reviews to be published. The bes part? Adding the ISBN number sets up a link to Amazon.com that will earn us small amounts of every sale. Two birds with one stone: recommend the same books we read and pay for the hosting package!

Testing... Testing...

Wed, 4 Jan 2006 17:15:03 -0600

Hello world!