Oh, and in case anyone's wondering, the MSN Competition below, this and this are why updates are a bit slow round here lately!
Meant to post this a while ago, when I put it up on my Blogger and MSN Spaces, here it is, just a little late!
My first entry to the MSN World's Best App competition, an online, multi-player version of the classic Connect Four game, has just made it through the checking process and is now live on MSN!Please try it out, have a game with me, or anyone else you know on Messenger: Just click here to play multi-player Connect Four! (requires Internet Explorer and MSN Messenger) Please play it as much as you can, and if you have any comments, questions about it or problems with it I'd be very grateful if you could please leave me feedback on my MSN Space.
Thanks, and please play it as much as you can, every time you launch the app counts as a vote for me :).
Oh, and if you've got your own MSN Space and you'd like to spread the word, just click the
![](http://spaces.msn.com/BlogIt.aspx?Title=Connect+Four+game+in+MSN&SourceURL=http://www.worldsbestapp.com/EntryDetail.aspx?Value%3DNZ25nHSyDEQURJRR6k5kF4BhfOAjbugX585yvemqcgQ%25253d&description=I've+played+the+classic+<i>Connect+Four</i>+game+against+my+friends+on+MSN+Messenger!+<a+href%3D"http://www.worldsbestapp.com/EntryDetail.aspx?Value%3DNZ25nHSyDEQURJRR6k5kF4BhfOAjbugX585yvemqcgQ%25253d">Click+here+to+launch+a+new+game</a>+and+play+it+against+your+MSN+Messenger+buddies.<br+/><img+src%3D"http://www.jard.co.uk/msnmsngr/conn4/thumb.png"><br+/><small>(Part+of+the+MSN+World's+Best+App+Competition).</small>){kind=small}
BlogIt! button to put it straight on your Space.jardMail forms have been amended to slow down the spammers, will take a judgement at the weekend about whether they need to be taken down too.
Few days late in this update, but I've been busy. Let's start with the nice and move to the nasty.
jardMail Christmas Theme: enabled (you might need to reload a page to see the new background).
jardMail subject index page Google ads: modified to make them less intrusive.
Spammers: scum.
Ok that last one needs a bit more explanation. Some
This has made me unhappy.
Not that this was totally unanticipated, I've been slowly upgrading the security of those forms from their original ah-heck-just-send-some-email-to-someone format, to the current send-an-email-to-me-and-me-alone-and-with-only-the-specified-safe-text-in-it form. Unfortunately I think someone's found a buffer over-run or an injection type problem, and to be honest I haven't got time to search it out and fix it at the moment (especially as while the forms are up there I'm getting around 300 NDRs in my inbox every day from bad addresses the spammers are trying to send to, so who knows how many working email addresses they're managing to get through to).
This leaves me with three choices:
- Replace the email checking/sending scripts with a more secure heavily tested alternative.
- Spend time testing, fixing and repairing my scripts.
- Take down the forms and disable the ability to send emails using the web form.
Options one and two are going to involve putting in an amount of time that I can't spare, so unfortunately option three has been carried out, this means that there is no easy way to send me a message at the moment, and won't be until probably around mid-January when I should get time to look into it. Although anyone who notices this website's address, and the fact that my name is "James" may be able to work out a way to email me!
Conclusions: Google ads work. I've deployed them across all the jardMail content pages (small block of ads immediately below all long jokes) and it seems to be pulling in quite a few punters. You know, this thing could take off! Definitely the best of the site ad solutions that I've tried.
(Bonus sell-out moment) Sign up for your own Google AdSense account here:
The adventure continues - Google Ads now deployed on my BlogSpot Blog.
Announcing a new semi-regular feature on jardMail: Pedants Corner, somewhere to keep all the silly emails I get from 'tards that take the whole thing too seriously for their own good. For bonus points you can try to work out what a typical pedant would think of the page's title (hint: it is the corner of the pedants).
Sold my soul to Google! jardMail now has Google ads on selected pages as a trial deployment.
Updated the Droid FAQ on the SWG pages.
Been playing around with some of the older (but still not so well known) advanced Google features: Google Glossary. Just noticed that I'm doing rather well. Looks like the optimisation work I did on the Laser Two Land Glossary ages ago paid off :) Just a pity I forgot to check it!
Here's the lowdown:
- The only result for "portsmouth yardstick number" (archived screenie).
- And for "spinnaker chute" (archived screenie).
- The number one result for "buoyancy aid" (archived screenie).
- The first sailing related answer for an incredibly common word, "run" (archived screenie).
- One of only three definitions for the phrase "spinnaker pole" (archived screenie).
- Third out of twenty-one results for "cockpit" (archived screenie).
Security on all web Contact forms on jard and jardMail has been upgraded, as they are currently being attacked by auto-send spam bots (none of these bots are succesfully spamming the general public as far as I can tell, but they have been filling my mailbox up with their nonsense pretty quickly).
Laser Two Land links page updated to remove and replace dead links (thanks Avram).
Updated jardSuite/jardBRAIN RSS autodiscovery tags to make them more discoverable as per the best practices in Microsoft's Windows RSS Publisher's Guide (in no way am I making any of it Windows- or Microsoft-centric, they're just a good set of common sense guidelines).
Added a few more definitions to the Laser 2 Land Glossary.
jardAlbum upgraded to v2.7. Architectural changes and reorganisation under the hood. Major outcome is that its now got RSS feeds all over it like a rash. Photoblog style feeds (with images included inline as enclosures) and feeds of album collections.
Added XML icon to Feeds page link on homepage.
Ran (X)HTML validator over a few random pages, all passed (after correcting a couple of minor typos).
Updated quite a few pages that weren't following the jard Style Guide.
Updated the site's tracker scripts, these had a whole set of email addresses etc stripped out yesterday, but I admit I was kind'a scared to touch them, I've had them sitting there running EasyTracker 1.3(+), for a long time. Heck, v1.4's been available for download from jardScripts since March 2003, and I never got round to upgrading to that! (well actually 1.3+ is just the test version of 1.4, with only very cosmetic differences, but even so). Anyway that's done now.
Updated the Easytracker 1.4 download package to v1.4a to include these changes, because this update makes no changes to the functionality v1.4 is deprecated and isn't available for download any more.
Finally got round to updating the SWG House and Harvester naming guide that I wrote up ages ago for Kabar's forums, and posting it on this site in a new tutorials/guides section on my SWG site.
More Yak-shaving, re-organised my to-do list. Most of today's updates are all very old points on the list that are finally being crossed off.
Changed home page to add a warning about one of my email addresses no longer working.
Searched through entirety of all my web pages (phew!) and removed all references to my non-working email address.
Searched through entirety of all my web pages (phew!) and removed all publicly visible references to any email address whether mine, or anyone else's (I don't think I've missed any, will be running various different scans and searches against the site and source to check).
Animal Resource Calculator updated to version 1.45c (minor updates, full notes on its changelog).
Added some more redirects to simplify URLs, and eliminate common mistakes.
NYM: Rearranged greetings on front page.
Next step a bit of re-orientation in the NYM code (well I'm reading Joel's book at the moment, seems he was right about re-orienting yourself in old code).
First stage of getting the NYM memberlist/records workings properly (as opposed to just working as it is now) a bit of yak shaving: re-organising the scripts to separate from the YaBB bits properly.
A few updates to this site's RSS feeds, firstly the feeds weren't validating any more suddenly, apparently my RFC-822 compliant dates weren't (seems I didn't do any testing with Thursdays in the feed). Now fixed and content can safely be added on a Thursday.
Next, updated the RSS2 feeds to give them a style sheet (initial ideas from this O'Reilly article, but had been toying with the idea since seeing the idea on Mark Pilgrim's DiveIntoMark.org (can't find the link to the original article but his follow-ups using ATOM and XSL are here and here).
While looking at RSS stuff, I revisited the LINK/GUID (isPermaLink) debate, still can't see the point in moving from LINK to GUID, still can't get my head round whether GUID is meant to be an identifier of one particular article, or meant to be an identifier of one particular version of one particular article. Personally I'd feel that the point of a GUID would be to point to a version of an article, but some articles seem to disagree, the current specs (in the Comments section) seem to side on the "one particular article" side, but I still can't see the point in that, the older (UserLand) specs didn't specify this at all. Maybe I just use feeds/aggregators differently from some people, and have a different conceptual model in my head which is what's causing the problems here.
Finally I'm sticking to "non-funky" RSS 2.0 for my feeds for the moment, RSS 0.9x is too fragmented and essentially outdated, RSS 1.0 is RDF based, and I just don't fancy getting my head round all that mess, and ATOM is a whole new format which I can't be arsed to even look at :-).
Part of these updates require an update to jardSuite and also jardBRAIN (to v0.48 and v0.94 respectively). I've been doing some irrelevant work on the jardSubs part of jardSuite as I'm writing a more generic app out of it (again) so there are some behind the scenes changes, but hopefully nothing noticeable has changed (except that the Javascript bits have had a tiny bit of bug-fixing, been generalised and split out to an external file).
Finally have been looking at Microsoft's proposed extensions to RSS, that's another one I can't totally get my head around. The specs still don't say what on Earth the 'group' element is actually for (and obviously there's no example feeds anywhere to be seen). While I can see the point in the Simple List Extensions and how specifying the order that certain types of content can be used, I can't see the point of Dare's NetFlicks examples they're just confusing me all over when i thought I had it, again maybe I just use feeds/aggregators differently from some people, and have a different conceptual model in my head which is what's causing the problems here.
Ran a spell checker over random parts of the site, was quite shocked by some of the typos I made years ago that were still showing. Corrected some errors, clicked "ignore" on a lot of my made up words, couldn't quite believe that I had to add the word "internet" into my personal dictionary because a modern, open source, British English dictionary (as also used in my web browser and email apps) apparently doesn't have it. Might consider submitting a bug to them on this if I can a) work out where to do this, and b) work up the enthusiasm to upgrade to the latest version of their dictionary and re-test.
Few small updates to the WAP site. I'm currently looking for a provider for the weather forecasts since OnlineWeather.com were taken over by AccuWeather (who promptly carried out the standard practice of removing all halfway useful services, and being a big US company they haven't bothered with non-US versions of anything but the core webcasts (and obviously the premium services). They removed half the services from OnlineWeather, and currently only seem to offer US forecasts in any halfway digestible format, so if anyone knows another site that provides usable weather forecast feeds I'd be happy to hear from you.
"robots.txt" was massively out of date, referencing dirs that don't exist anymore, and missing some new ones updated (and if you don't know what that means, then there's probably not much point in me going into it).
jardSubs and kbase tidy up: filter algorithms reorganised, redone to speed up certain filters. Small quirks in date filters ironed out. RSS advertising improved. jardSuite jardSubs and jardBRAIN upgraded to v0.47 and v0.93 respectively.
Parts of the authentication routines rewritten for better security and better feedback when logging out of the system. jardBRAIN record listings given conditional displays (long listings only show titles by default until plus sign clicked and one-item listings select the one item by default) combo of server side and client side changes.
jardSuite jardSubs version upgraded to v1.45 to allow for following changes: site single log in system upgraded to be "friendlier", jardBRAIN lists given collapsible entries.
Front page shifted around, log in box changed (part of single log in changes), links list expanded, Tools section added with link to jardBRAIN and Site Info section added with links to About page, Updates, Contact page, WAP version and Feeds page.
Couple of small changes made to style sheets after trying out the Deer Park Alpha 1 to see the forthcoming changes in Gecko 1.8 based browsers (eg Firefox 1.1), and seeing some of the cool things in the update (style-able Select boxes and so on).
Minor update to the Nympho Maniacs site , see this forum post for full info on update v20050531 (you will need to be logged in to view it).
SWG Animal Resource Calculator upgraded to v1.45b, see the Change Log for full info
Quick panic update, my host made a whole load of upgrades over the weekend, including web server software and Perl version. Unfortunately some part of this broke my scripts (broke my file-locking to be precise) so I've just had to redo a couple of sections of the core jardSubs module to get most of the rest of the site working again!
Big update to the Nympho Maniacs site , see this forum post for full info on update v20050329 (you will need to be logged in to view it).
Some incremental updates for the Nympho Maniacs site (including the first version of the Recruiter tool). See these forum posts for more info: version 20050304 & version 20050310.
Nympho Maniacs site created for our King's of Chaos alliance. Forum added (in case you didn't guess that's why the Laser 2 Land forum was upgraded yesterday).
Laser 2 Land Forums upgraded to latest supported version, YaBB 1 Gold SP1.4.
Updated 2005 calendar on Laser 2 Land with UK and Irish Open Meetings. Glossary updated.
Improvements made to default Laser 2 Land template and individual pages to improve validation, still 6 known problems (not counting the forum which would be improved by upgrading to the latest version).
Continued process of removing all visible, and otherwise in page, email addresses from public and most especially robot view. Probably too little too late, but we have to try.
All root site pages updated to new template, orphan pages removed.
Filled out the homepage with menu of links to site sub-sections, something I should have done ages ago, and gave it the standard (but rejigged to remove table and shrunk to a half of the code-size) footer.
Added link to Droid FAQ to the swg section's menu (as I couldn't find the page when I was looking for it, and i started with the advantage of knowing the page actually exists)!
Added WAP link to homepage (why have I never done this before?) both to the main text, and as a
rel="alternate" in the headers.Removed all last traces of my email address from jardMail, expunged a couple of other email addresses that were on there too (mainly ones in HTML comments).
Removed ads from subject pages on jardMail (something I should have done long ago, especially as I wasn't making any money from them).
Test of new contact form (first stage of removing all email addresses from public view on this site), will eventually replace the webmaster email links at the bottom of every page of this site.
Checked various sub-pages of the SWG site for XHTML compliance, corrected one or two minor errors.
Added SWG news script supplied by SOE to the main SWG page to give headlines from the official site.
Happy (belated) New Year.
Cleared some dead links from the Laser 2 Land links page.
