Instead of polluting the main thread list with a bunch of site-software related announcements, I'll start posting to this one thread whenever I make changes to the site. 

I fixed a bug having to do with attempting to register usernames with special characters in them. It wouldn't catch the error until later and erroneously report that the agreement had not been accepted.

Thanks to HurricaneSara for pointing this one out.

Clicking on the "like" link next to a post or other thing (object) on the site now correctly generates a notification which will show up in the notifications list.

So the question is, should I add an option to send out an email when someone "likes" something you've posted? My feeling is probably not but if someone has strong feelings one way or the other please speak up.

Thanks.

I believe I have managed to fix the double notifications bug that was causing two notifications to get generated for every post. 

"Watching" should now also work. For each section there's a "Watch" link at the top. Turning "watch" on causes a notification to be sent every time there's activity. So, for instance, you can "watch" the photos and be notified every time a new photo is posted or a comment added.

I /finally/ have auto-generation of screenshots working. i.e. when you save a map it generates an image of the map along with saving all the map details in the database. This makes it much easier to share the maps out in blog posts, forums, on Facebook, Twitter and in other social media outlets. It also opens the possibility of uploading the maps along with photos to make coffee tables books. 

But man it was painful to figure out why it wasn't working. It involves creating the web page and then pulling it using a "headless browser" which can then render the entire page to an image file. It's a super-heavy process but such a critical feature. 

I hadn't expected getting the screenshots to be so time consuming to get to work. Famous last words but everything else I have left to build is along the lines of things I've already built, so there shouldn't be too many more surprises along the way.

While I was at Deal's Gap, the consumer grade FIOS router that I was using decided to fail. It's the second one that's failed on me and they always seem to fail when I'm away.

I had been under the mistaken impression that I had no choice but to use Verizon's router since I have coax cable coming in from the FIOS "ONT" box. What I didn't realize is there's an actual RJ45 ethernet port on the ONT box which is disabled by default.

As an added complication, the ONT box is outside of the house.

Last week, a good friend of mine, Jeff, who runs a data/fiber cabling company, came over and ran a number of drops for me including a line out to the ONT box. I didn't have a hammer drill nor the equipment to test drops. 

I ordered a couple gigabit switches and a gigabit Cisco router which all arrived yesterday.

Unfortunately, the router wasn't nearly as well executed as I would have hoped for a Cisco product. The documentation is surprisingly terrible and amounts to little more than a description of the screens. 

But after a few hours of trial and error, I was finally able to get routing to work so we are now no longer dependent upon the FIOS router. Hopefully, this new setup will prove to be more reliable. It "feels" faster to me, but I'm not sure. 

The next step which I'll hopefully have time for before too long is to finally move the site off my old shared box onto the dedicated server that rshaug so generously donated to the cause.

Yea, so this Cisco RV042G Gigabit firewall/router appliance gadget may have been a bad purchase. All I want is a real router. You know, something that actually routes. Not this NAT mapping gawdawful nonsense. 

After fiddling with the admin screens for hours, I managed to get the bloody thing to route packets from the outside to the inside and visa versa. All was happiness. Then, for unknown reasons, it suddenly stopped routing. I could ping both sides but the packets would just not go through.

Firmware upgraded. Screens inspected. Multiple hard resets. Hours spent. Suddenly it started routing again. I know not why.

Want some help?

Thanks. It looks like it's a defective product line from Cisco. I'm not the only one who sees this behavior. It runs fine for a few hours and then simply stops forwarding packets. From the diagnostics panel, I can ping the outside world and the inside network, but no packets get forwarded. Firmware bug or hardware problem no doubt.


I upgraded the firmware last night (at around 03:00) but the router was no longer forwarding packets when I got up this morning. 

So, giving up on "real" routing, I've fallen back onto the terrible practice of forwarding external public IPs onto private IPs using the NAT forwarding feature in an experiment to see if it's more reliable. 

Unfortunately, I've only just found out this router is not returnable. Another $180 down the drain. I'd really like to avoid having to spend over a $1k on a real router, so if this current setup proves unreliable I may take one of those blade servers and turn it into a Linux router and be done with it. I probably should have just done that form the get-go.

I have some spares here. I can bring you a decent router/firewall some time this weekend and set it up if you want.

I'd hate to trouble you with this given how ridiculously busy you are. 

gigabit or hundred megabit router?

Will text you separately with details. 

I posted an update which I think has broken a few things. This is a test.

If you notice things breaking please do me a favor and, if you know how, open the javascript console in your browser and let me know any error messages you see there.

This is a test responding to Yermotest

This new bug should be fixed now. 

So I made a few small improvements. If you copy and paste links from the forum, photos or maps to Facebook, the resulting links at Facebook should appear more sanely now.

Facebook has once again changed the way one can share links out to them. Adding "share" links for Facebook, Twitter, Linkin, et al is still on the TODO list.

I still have issues with the post/reply input popup.  Line breaks get lost in the translation to HTML.  All whitespace gets condensed to a single space.  Suggestions?  Doesn't seem to matter what OS I use - linux, windows, bsd.  I generally use firefox.

Firefox?

Yeah.  Line 1.Line 2.Line 3.See?  Currently using Firefox 17 on CentOS 6.x.

I need to fix that. Strangely, of all the browsers, MSIE has given me the least trouble. Go figure.

Each of the three browser classes, WebKit (Safari/Chrome and now Opera), FireFox, and MSIE, take a different approach to this "content editable" area that I use for the rich text input boxes. 

Webkit wraps each line in a div. MSIE in <p> tags but Firefox irrationally appends single <br/> tags to the end.

Each browser, however, when you're editing, does things differently with regard to breaking lines and merging them back together again. So I put a huge amount of effort into figuring out all the cases and writing code to handle each. Royal pain. 

But in FireFox I made an error apparently. I'll look into it and see if I can fix it. Enough people still use FireFox to make it a necessity.

Ian, it should be fixed now. Sometimes I should not listen to that voice that says "Oh that's going to be a bitch to fix" and just go look at it. It turned out to be a simple stupid mistake on my part.

Sorry about that, guys.

Private messages should now correctly include the username of the member sending the message and to which account it's being sent. This one was actually a configuration error on my part. It would help if I actually used the software I built correctly, eh?  

Cooling system info:


 

It is.

See?  This is on another line!