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Mookitty

is shy's cat

'ere we go! #announcement blog

NOTE: Comments are locked here because party's moved on over to this thread!

Turn over is in progress! I'm working out some kinks before handing everything over completely, but the majority of things have gone well.

I'm having some fun with the comments, and domains will most likely take a bit of time. But we're here, yell at Shy already.

-Distind

...and turnover complete! Shy/Ravy 2016 is here! If you find any outstanding bugs, post the details here. (When you get an error, ignore the e-mail instructions for now; I haven't gotten the new Admin e-mail set up yet.)

-shy

New boss! #announcement blog

This is possibly my last week folks, but good news, you have a gracious new overlord to bow to! Shy is stepping up to take over admin duties and hopefully we can get the transfer worked out without too much wasted time.

That said, web hosts are being changed in the process. Which means there will be a dead stop of fundies content for at least a few hours, possibly a few days. That said I'm going to be snagging and storing all the relevant data before my hosting runs up and we'll start working on data and domain transfer.

Right now I intend on taking the site down Monday the 28th at whenever the balls I remember to do so. After that you'll get error messages for a bit and hopefully the site comes back up before too long. That said, data transfer from my slow ass server is generally in the realm of hours at best at this scale. So be prepped for at least a day. And possibly more as I may have pulled jury duty for that week. I'll find out Friday.

Edit:
The joys of jury duty are mine, so transfer is going to take a bit. Expect the site to go down around 6pm EST tomorrow, transfer speeds are far better than I'm used to from last time so it may be up sooner than later. I'll post a redirect to the current domain as soon as it's working and we'll get these domains working not too much longer after that.

Brace for impact #announcement blog

Hey folks, start of the last month has gone already.

So far there's a few people who have made efforts but no solid results, so while I'll keep things up till the end of the month I may as well setup some contingency plans.

The jist, I'm not going away on my reddit account for a while. I annoy people off u/distind on a regular basis and don't see a need to change that right now. If you get to the point you want to take something over and have the historic quotes, hit me up there. Once the month ends I'll be finding a place to post the identification stripped files for whoever wants them. I'll most likely pin that location in the FSTDT subreddit in a few days after I've pulled the information and made sure the formatting isn't balls.

That said, of the options discussed, if the time comes and there isn't a viable site to go to and you are willing to run it off the subreddit, I'll happily toss it to someone and let them run with it. The only thing that sucks will be the searching on reddit is garbage. Other places odds are I don't run whatever you find associated with FSTDT so I'm of limited help there.

I'll check back in near the end of the month and make final announcements in the last week of the month.

The end is neigh #announcement blog

Quick Note before going onto the post, we have someone willing to attempt to take the place over and I'm working with them now. We'll see how things go.

Right-o folks. That time thing, yeah, it's happened.

Given I'm a week behind on quotes and don't have a massive interest in catching up I believe I'm going to be calling my actual end of admin here. I'm just to the point I have other things I want to do with my life.

I'm going to keep the lights on and push quotes out for a while yet, at least till the end of the month, possibly to the end of the year if some individual interested needs time to prepare a new home for the place. But if that's the case I'll be downgrading hosting considerably to save myself some money.

The over all, if you want to run FSTDT, well you're going to have a time of it. The code for the most recent version got nuked with my last hard drive failure and what I have is about three revisions old, which means most of the useful shit I've done in the last two years isn't there. It's livable, but frankly I'd recommend a full re-write anyway. It's the work I haven't had the motivation to do, and being in the middle of remodeling a house, I'm realizing it isn't a lack of motivation as much as a lack of interest in that particular project.

I wrote the original version of this site in about a weekend, it worked fine for a year that way. If you want to write your own I can tell you the tricks I've picked up over the years of handling overly large lists and analyzing comments for horror content. I can also supply a set of test data to build around, and once you've got that up and running the full dump to see how well you handle it. But I'm not up for hand holding anymore, I'm done.

As much as I don't want the site to die, I'm not willing to devote time to it any more and I should at least be honest about that. If you are, well, I'll happily hand the place over to the first schmuck who can handle the test data.

Where the balls have I been? #announcement fstdt.com blog

Remember that whole attempting to hand off the site thing I did a few months back before I started getting too busy to handle it myself anymore. The busy part of it happened.

Once I have a bit more free time I'll be talking to some of the volunteers and see what I can do to set things up, but given the state of the site itself someone would need to be technically competent to actually take it over without driving themselves insane trying to use the existing tools to handle the random shit I have to deal with on a regular basis.

As it stands I generally have enough time to get quotes out still and half the reason I'm still here is that I refuse to let the shitposter win so I'll always make time for that.

Depending on how my checking in goes we'll see how the future goes, and even in the absolute worst case I know three or four people have expressed interest in preserving the database even if they don't quite know what they will use it for. Which I'd be fine with supplying them once I'd stripped out user identifying data should I ditch.

Don't know exactly what I'm up to now for the future, I can't promise consistent quotes these days given my schedule but I should be able to manage something for the near future.

FSTDT Wants You! #announcement fstdt.com blog

Hey folks,

I'm looking for folks who would like to join public admin.

Public admin is how quotes get approved, corrected, and otherwise make it to the main page. I approve items out of the queue on a daily basis and it's been a while since we had enough people to actually approve a quote without my intervention, I'd like to fix that.

If you're interested, comment here with your account and I'll do a review and let folks know if they're in or not. I will most likely handle this on weekends, so it may take me a bit to respond, but I will.

If you want to discuss, hit me over on the subreddit as I check that more.

And a few notes for those who are accepted:

Using Public Admin

Access
Once you've been added to public admin log in to your FSTDT account and go to the home page. On the home page in the right hand column you see a link half way down the column "Admin" with a smartass line of text under it. Click that and you will be brought to the public admin page.

Use
You will be presented with one quote at a time, each quote has three options for you to select, Approve, Delete or Abstain. If you feel it should go onto the mainpage, approve, if you feel it shouldn't Delete, if you don't have much feeling either way abstain. I should note, these are votes to a community total and do not immediately determine the fate of a quote, express your opinion on the quotes freely.

In addition, if you notice an issue with a quote you can make note of it in the 'Issues' field which is below the approval buttons, making the note of it here allows me to fix it before it hits the mainpage. You will also see any notes made by other members of public admin.

Under the quote there are a selection of recent quotes from similar sources to check for duplicated submissions, along with links to a full search of those fields if you have a strong feeling you've seen it but it does not appear on the list.

As a final note, every time you access to the public admin page it will progress to a new quote, I suggest not check the page too often as it will march you past a fair number of quotes if you do.

Drop the T #announcement change.org blog

[Another reject I find interesting]

We are a group of gay/bisexual men and women who have come to the conclusion that the transgender community needs to be disassociated from the larger LGB community; in essence, we ask that organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, Lambda Legal and media outlets such as The Advocate, Out, Huff Post Gay Voices, etc., stop representing the transgender community as we feel their ideology is not only completely different from that promoted by the LGB community (LGB is about sexual orientation, trans is about gender identity), but is ultimately regressive and actually hostile to the goals of women and gay men.

Fundie Quote of the Year 2016 #announcement fstdt.com blog

Voting is open, let me explain how to ensure your vote counts this year.

Each nominee has a number associated with it in one of the categories below. To vote for that nominee enter it's number into the comment section for that category. I'll be counting the first number I find in the comment and I'll be making sure votes come from unique commenters so please no funny business. Vote in as many or few categories as you like so long as it's only once in each.

Easier than most years since I have all this space to play with. Any questions, comments or general ranting can be addressed here on the subreddit where I'm more likely to look on a regular basis.

To see all of the categories and nothing else click 'Fundies 2016 Voting' below.

As of now I intend to let voting run through the end of the month. With results announced in the following week. Look forward to seeing the results folks.

Nominations Review #announcement fstdt.com blog

Nominations are up for review in the subreddit!

This isn't voting yet, this is me taking a pass through and seeing if I have a decent enough set of nominations for voting. I'm a bit behind so I'm only going to leave them open to review this week.

I've also got to figure out how I want to handle voting, I've done custom text parsing in the past, but I also didn't have this many items to vote on then. May do something a tad strange unless I find a good poll site. Anyway, take a look at the nominations, yell out any good ones that haven't made it under the categories, and hope to see you guys over there.

subreddit off the port bow #announcement reddit.com blog

Oi! After entirely too much preamble without any progress I've opened up the FSTDT subreddit.

I've got the basic rules up on the side bar. I'm running the place myself so be fully aware I have minimal tolerance for bullshit of the forum drama variety these days. It's actually a fair part of why I went with reddit. It's roughly as annon as here, and if you want to discuss something that doesn't fit within the rules there's probably another subreddit where you'll be in fine company. Want to screw around with other members of the community, commiserate or generally shoot the shit. Perfectly welcome. Actual discussion of topics, also welcome. I look forward to talking to folks.

That said, I'm running it myself and I'm already short on time these days. If it becomes a time sink I may well close it down. This is a bit of a trial period for me. If you'd like to help moderate the place hit me on the mod mail from the subreddit and we can talk.

Hosts #announcement fstdt.com blog

Been actively poking around and found a great reason to push through the test site's cancellation, my current host has a plan that's half the price of what I'm paying with twice the SQL space that I've been carefully managing to not exceed for the last few years. That's a thing. That's a hell of a thing. I'll be chasing after that and will try and warn folks if it looks like there may be a rough transition. Chance for an outage, and another one while I'm fucking around with the configuration to play with whatever new toys I wind up with. But hot damn if I can keep this level of service and just get more space I'd probably not care about paying less, just really don't want to get shafted service wise after the repeated fuck ups with the test site host.

Had to start some time. #announcement fstdt.com blog

Moving along, I have the first stages of the fundies together and... well, it'll mostly be quote of the year as the remaining categories are frankly predictable. If you have new category ideas let's hear them. But there are some nice quotes and I have a slightly different idea than usual I'll roll out and we can see how that goes.

Working with the preview site host, got my money back and will be closing that account before much longer. Sorry to cut it off, but next version will be elsewhere, with a few updates when I get the time.

If you have any nominations, throw them in the comments.

Now I'm off to make dinner, hope everyone had a great new year #announcement fstdt.com blog

Happy new year folks, quick run down time:

Been sick as a dog the last week
Got promoted the week before that because my boss was leaving
Busy is an understatement when I've been able to do anything
Yes we will be doing fundie of the year, I'll be working on that this weekend and setting up categories hit me with suggestions in the comments below.

My host for the preview site has had a few billing irregularities this last week, so that will be coming down by the end of the month. Anyone who knows good .net hosts let me know, I may well be having a conversation with my current one to see if I can't get my plan tweaked a bit to fit the site better.

That whole someone taking over the site thing didn't pan out, no one with the time and the money popped up. In the end I can't quite bring myself to say do or die and off the site, but I will say if there is someone interested I'd love the help. And I got plenty of offers to help in other ways which I'll be working out once I actually have some time again. It bugs me that I don't have the time to free up some time, but it goes that way at some points so hold on for the ride.

What's that mean? Well, I have a crap load of people who want in to public admin and a few folks who have volunteered to do quote corrections or even full administration. So with some luck that means less waiting on me to get quotes out soon as I get folks setup. Also, I've secured a new community location and I've been pounding out some rough guidelines. Going to finish those and make sure the volunteers are fully on board with them before it launches. May prioritize that for fundie of the year discussion, scream if that interests you.

After all that #announcement fstdt.com blog

Rolling along with some parallel projects at work. I have the basics of the current iteration of .NET Identity working, and frankly don't need half the additional features at work, so I'm going to use that knowledge to build out the fuller version for the site including registration, password recovery and basic user functionality as I have time. Which should let me give people public admin access to see what I have, and then blow time on some admin interfaces before coming back around to do the interface cleaning. Depending on what time I have when I'll be in and out with updates.

That said, I have something resembling a personal life which is making this rather difficult to focus on so I'm glad I'm down to more bite sized chunks.

Back to work #announcement fstdt.com blog

Right, said I was going to post one of these each day. Well, I'm moving on to the vote counting part of the system which has some interesting bits, and aiming to get the user admin stuff done by the end of the day. I hope folks check out the preview build of the site that's out live, but right now let's talk about the vote system and old abuses.

If you look at the archives 2008 looks like a banner year, right? Maybe? Not exactly. The software that was in use at that point was kinda ass and someone more or less hijacked the public admin voting and the top 100 voting to organize the site as they wished by exploiting a few loopholes. I hacked closed the loopholes, booted the responsible party and recalculated the top 100. It was a pain in the ass and rather embarrassing that I only caught on when the top 100 had the top 5 items separated by single digit votes.

That's not going to happen again. The new voting systems are designed to ensure that it is not possible to vote more than once, like literally I cannot record more than one vote from a given IP on an account. But how does that stop them from running up the value and not being recorded? Simple, I'm not incrementing on vote, I'm counting up all the stored votes and re generating the score when a new vote is added. I've finished the public admin voting system yesterday and pretty much need user admin working before I can open it up publicly, and there's a thing with login not triggering or redirecting properly that I need to sort out before it's usable. But, what's important here is the design works and I'm already largely done with the ass end of the public rating voting, it's a matter of getting the front and middle parts working and hopefully deployed sometime this weekend for you all to abuse.

On a note, anyone have opinions on changing the Vote tags from "WTF!" and "meh"? I still like them a bit, but simple up and down or + and - seem more intuitive. Or does the content of the site lend itself to those reactions?

Anyway, assuming I get user admin done today I'm going to say it was good 30 hours of work on the site this week and screw off tomorrow, maybe doing a bit more this weekend, but I have some things going on. That said, I do have another week of vacation and no significant plans. Sure as hell won't be spending another full week on the site, but I should have plenty of time to get things handled, particularly with the help volunteers who have stepped up to take over the place.

Free Samples! #announcement fstdt.com blog

Sample Site is out!

Only took me three days longer than I hoped, and I just dicked around another half hour tuning the Latest Comments a bit, but here it is:

Test Site Ahoy!

Note the data is over a year old, and any submissions to it will be tossed with the test data. But if you want to see what I'm planning for an interface, or just want to select random fundie quotes from every month of may the site has had, it can do that. Click around a bit and yell at me if you break something, I've left the error messages full, so just give me the whole text in a comment here.

Humpday #announcement fstdt.com blog

Alright, today's goals are reasonably simple, get Public admin working, then look at quote rating voting. I think what I'm going to do is get a basic mechanic working now, and pile on ajax versions later. If I have spare time today I'm going to work on User Management and do some cleaning on the existing code. Assuming I finish this today the rest is improvements and admin functionality. Which is the easy shit since it all ties back into display mechanics I already have and 90% of the work is SQL that I can rattle off quickly.

That said, it does look like I'll have some work to do after the week is said and done. But this stuff looks manageable in shorter periods of time rather than being the kind of things I actually need a day for.

Monday, and I'm awake at five am, why? #announcement fstdt.com blog

Today I plan on working on:

Comment Driven quote listings
- Latest comment and any similar listings

Finishing user authentication by hooking into the database
- Cleaning up user DB while I'm at it
- Figuring how to migrate folks to a better password encryption

Quote and Comment Admin Edit pages

Review go to latest comment functionality

Review needs for Quote and Comment submissions
- Largely the edit pages, only with less security and more anti-spam and hand holding.
- Get, Redirect, Profit

Review needs for Comment Administration pages
- A generic listing mechanism would probably be useful here

Coding is coming #announcement fstdt.com blog

Evening folks, thought I should announce I'm going to be a bit more active next week as I've taken next week off to work on the site. My intention right now is to make a post in the morning with my todo list for the day and mark things off as I complete them. So, after getting off my ass and delivering the wife to work I'll make a post and get on my merry-ish way getting the site upgrades done. That said, I've been doing some work this week already to give myself some basis to star with and assuming I don't end my day in a complete shit place I'll be updating FSTDT.org with any changes I make. Right now I have a list of core features which I'll detail as I'm working on them. Once I have those done, I'm taking a slacker day, I took a week's vacation for fuck's sake. Assuming I have some time left after that I'll be back with some of the more requested options I've had on the backburner, or get requested here.

I will note, I'm still watching the volunteers email and had someone volunteer this morning. I'm debating cutting it off, but I honestly don't see the point. If you want to help, hit that email.

Organization #announcement fstdt.com blog

Organizing! I'm working on it now, I've sent out emails to those who have them on their accounts here and none of them looked particularly disposable, but, if you don't have access to the email you registered with or just generally don't even have an account email me at Volunteers@fstdt.net

Let me know who you are and I'll fire off the community details I'm getting together.

What the balls is this about? Well check out this post for more. If anyone else is interested in volunteering I'll happily add you to the list.

Public Annoucement #announcement fstdt.com blog

(Edit: New Post on Volunteering read if you want in)

Alright folks, I'm looking for people to replace me and make sure the site keeps going now since I'm not hanging around for too much longer. Frankly there's a lot to do and I've neglected a fair bit of it for the sake of personal life and it hasn't done the site any good.

I figure a team of people would do a better job and make one person leaving a little less traumatic. If you want to help but aren't sure how, here's the kind of people involved in keeping the site:

Owner
* Who's paying the domain name and hosting charges. Hosting runs about ten bucks a month, registering the .com domain name is 10.29 a year and .net is 12.08 a year.
* I'll help you out with domain registration and have a few recommendations for hosting(including NOT arvixe)
* As a note, the site has never turned a profit and donations don't often make a dent in hosting costs, be prepared to pay the lot of that.

Developer
* This is what scares most people, working with the code and doing work to improve the site's speed and functionality.
* We've got a volunteer for this already, but if you're interested offer up, more eyes is better.

Quote Admin
* Take the time to curate quotes, this means you approve them, make corrections and generally keep up the quality of what's sent to the main page

Quote Volunteer
* Vote on which quotes will make it to the main page and help catalog things that need to be corrected.

Community Manager
* Spam hunting mostly, you skim comments for spam and excessive trolling
* Read and respond to Admin email, let developer or quote admin know about issues outside your scope.

Odds are you could take a few of these, but doing all of it is pretty pain in the ass.

I'm not going to ask too much from those who pick up the site after me, all I'm going to ask is whoever winds up with the rights to the domain name itself makes sure it moves on to someone else when they move on from the place.

What else I will do is work on finishing up the code for the new revision of the site(soon as I get the host for it straightened out). Either by myself or in concert with any new volunteers. I'll follow up with what needs to be done if folks are interested.

Balls balls balls #announcement blog

Had intended on doing a public announcement on getting work done and switch over, only I've blown half my fucking day trying to ahold of someone at my alternate webhost to pay them and get this bill out of my face. Now my wife is telling me she's found things saying the company is more or less dead after acquisition and all of it's employees fired a week ago. Which would all explain quite clearly why in the balls I didn't get my "Hey pay us" email a week ago.

So yeah, don't host with arvixe right now. Probably never again, this is disgraceful.

See Distind tweet for the third time ever!

Warning, edit rant inbound.

ONE FUCKING MINUTE, I SPENT TWO FUCKING HOURS ON THE PHONE AND THE FUCKERS TAKE ONE FUCKING MINTUTE TO RESPOND... now the wait for someone to actually do something. Seriously, I edited this and they'd responded.

Further edit confusion:
Five minutes after the twitter complaint I've got a response to my ticket. I think I'm officially into twitter now. Here's to hoping it actually works. Also holy shit it's horrible this is what it takes to get service, I've hit literally every real access point they have, it takes bitching publicly on my clearly highly followed, rated and prized twitter account to actually get a response.

Calling all admins #announcement fstdt.com blog

Lots of ways to say it, lots of things I could rant on about, but long story short I think I'm about done with my tenure as admin of FSTDT. I don't have the time or interest to keep up with administration and development without taking time from my personal life, which has been my priority these last few years.

But, sky isn't falling, I'll keep the place propped up for a while yet and see if anyone is interested in taking over. I did it five, six, actually I'm not sure how many years ago now, so I'd like to find someone new to take things over before I have a day where giving the site the boot becomes particularly appealing. Don't know much about coding, websites or all those scary things? Not as big of a problem as you'd think, the site itself is pretty simple and if you show interest sooner than later I'd be willing to walk you through the redux code and either finish it or teach you how to.

I knew about half of what I needed to when I picked this place up, a few months I wound up re-writing the site in a day and a half in on my own. The site still largely works off that code. I wanted to make sure the community stuck around and had the time to spare to make sure it happened, that's all you need as I am willing to help you through the technical aspect. At least at the time being, give me a few more months and I may not have that left in me.

Anyway, if folks show interest I'll toss up some communication lines and we can chat. If there are a number of people we can work that out, it may actually work out better with a larger crew running the place, smaller upsets when one leaves. If you're interested in making sure FSTDT continues, drop a comment below.

Search Lives #announcement fstdt.com blog

It lives!

It's a tad ugly but I have a standard solution to that I'll be bringing over when I get onto more of the panels.

Use guide, enter your text plain and it searches for all of the given words in all given fields. If you want to search a specific phrase put quotes around it "like this". If you want to do some wild card searching put * at the end of the word or phrase and it should work. Anything more complex won't work, but it is entirely possible I could do more additions later.

Now, what's left to do for quote search is actually rather complicated. To search the comments and display matched comments along with their quotes I need to search a second table for matches and correctly display at least one of those matching comments along with the related quote. if I hard coded the search it'd be rather easy, only as I've mentioned before I can't hard code the method I'm using. So instead I'm working out something I've been idling on at work for a while now, searching multiple tables and handling the output gracefully. I'm pretty sure I have the search part down, and the display may be a rather simple matter if I don't over complicate it with functionality, but once I have something working I'll go more into specifics on what I can and can't do easily.

Also, if you're regularly annoyed with the current search and want me to update the data on the test site kvetch in the comments and I'll dedicate some time but I should mention it's a couple hour process which is why I don't do it regularly. The glory of cheap webhosting.

Oh, and this version is a little old since I have it torn apart on my dev machine, if you put in a double quote without a match it will error. Should be fixed next update.

Quick search update #announcement fstdt.com blog

What I could do and what I've done are a tad different. I have a bit more testing to do before I release it but I have a quote search together than handles words, phrases and postfix wildcards. Should be able to put it out this weekend and I'll rattle off what else there is to do in a longer post this weekend, though I will say comment search is coming, I just intend to do it well rather than quickly.

Searching Again #announcement fstdt.com blog

So I have a much more solid idea of what needs to be done for the search since I've been actively playing with the mechanics involved. I've found something suprising, it actually works better than I expected.

Say I search for David J. Stewart. The new functionality I'm using would find that term, or David J Stewart or David Jay Stewart. The new search functionality i'm looking at has some built in thesaurus comparisons it will make, while it won't automatically look for everything starting with a J, it will look for anything that actually sounds like J. And this is all accomplished using one of the simpler syntax possiblities.

Which brings me into the next part, the differences between what I can do and what I probably should. This is the definitions for the term I'm using, you may note it's a tad complicated and well it gets a whole lot worse with more search terms. If I took the time and had the knowledge I could setup all kinds of potentially useful syntax to the search page. Except I'm a lazy git despite having changed the name of this little bloggy bit.

What I'm most likely going to do is setup the search interface so that the given search parameters are handled appropriately based on the type. Which is harder said than done. For instance that David J. Stewart example above has some problems depending on the syntax used, if I search for all three parts of that separately by sending in '"David" AND "J" AND "Stewart"' into the contains function, so it will try to find each word in the author field, it returns nothing. Still figuring out why, but if I just search david and stewart it returns everything, this was a few hours of my week. But oddly enough, if I send in '"David J Stewart"' I get the results I mentioned above, where it checks thesauruses and is generally really bloody useful.

But there's still a catch there, all that nice functionality, yeah it involves very carefully deciding how something is searched. When I send it all in wrapped in "" it's looked for as phrase, fine for authors or sources, maybe even URLs, but completely useless for searching the content of quotes. Wait, it gets even better, this search relies on full word matches unless explicitly told what it is receiving is a prefix, and then requires that it MUST be a prefix or nothing will be found. Send in Test* and you get back Testing but not Test. Which has all been fun to play with, but frustrating to figure out how to really implement.

What I could do right now is just always assume people are searching for phrases, but I know that's not true. I do keyword searches regularly and I know a few others did back when search worked reliably. What I need to do is figure out how I'm going to parse what is received in a quote or comment search and best instruct the search engine to handle it. I doubt people want to have to figure out this syntax for themselves, so I'm going to do what I can to simplify it a bit and take care of assumptions. This is my project for the next few days, and I'll poke my head back up when I have something to mention.

Quick #announcement fstdt.com blog

Ok, been busier than I guessed so my search details are sitting here in a jumbled notepad file. But I do have something to say.

FSTDT is not a news aggregator. It does not need full news articles submitted to it. In fact posting these articles is a remarkably bad idea as there is legal precedent(set against FreeRepublic of all places) saying doing so is grounds for various types of infringement. It's one thing to quote people who have posted something, or even parts of an article that are specifically quotable, but the entire thing is just not what should be submitted. We link to the whole thing so people can read it while we give them the mind bending parts.

I may look at setting up a place where people could share related links without submitting quotes, but at the moment this isn't that place and I don't have one to recommend off hand.

Moving Merch #announcement fstdt.com blog

Hey folks, largely finished with that moving business finally. AC is wonderful, now I just need to figure out what to do with a dozen empty totes and I've got some shit to sell.

While I was moving a few ideas were floated for new Archive Icons and I want folks opinions. I've never really come up with anything better than Shotgun Jesus, but I have someone who is interested in doing a redraw of it at some point, which got us to talking about the others. CSTDT, I think we have a good one, an alien, wearing a tinfoil hat, while hosting a radio show. I think this is gold, better than what we have gold, and the artist is interested as well. RSTDT I have something to float but it's an old in joke and I'm still trying to make it work, a neo-Nazi singing I feel pretty. I'd need an iconic image from the musical to pull it off, but it's my favorite idea so far.

Anyone have opinions or thoughts? Assuming I get this done it would make fundie merch possible.

Seriously read it #announcement cagle.com blog

Site dev is on hold at the moment while I move, when I move I will have central air and no more of this sweating to death in my office business. I have to be out half way through next month, trying to get out earlier. If I have time I'll write up a bit about search, it's turned into something interesting, which while bad for time lines is great for learning.

That said, I've found something I'm actually interested in commenting on. I'm sure most everyone who is on here has heard of Josh Duggar recent revelations and the rather disturbing show of support he's recieved over this. Well, I caught wind of someone actually willing to call him and the conservative christian media on it's handling of the situation. Michael Reagan wrote quite the article over on cagle that I want to support because it supports people doing the right thing regardless of if they happen to agree with the man's politics, questioning the integrity of those who are giving Duggar a pass on this. Read the article, it's worth the couple minutes.

Since I'm a left leaning asshole I'd also like to remind our side not to give people passes just because they are popular political figures who are on our side. We do it too, and we shouldn't. Just because some people on the other side are assholes does not grant us the moral right to do the same. And that's true in all kinds of things, take it from someone who's been amusedly poking at both "sides" of gamergate for a while. And pair of equal and opposite assholes do not cancel out, they just make things worse all around.

The search for code #announcement fstdt.com blog

Search is progressing, the query powering the new search page is remarkably fast, I now know we have over 11,000 comments using the word 'Moron' and I can return the lot in under a second. Except the syntax involved doesn't let me do one of my standard shortcuts to use fewer lines of SQL to do more work. I need to invest some time in ensuring I can dynamically create the query without leaving it open to security holes, which I plan to do over the course of this week.

For those who didn't notice in the comments of the last post I have the sample site up. Check it out, give me some thoughts, once I have search working as intended I'll be moving on to getting archive selections working somehow, which will be interesting.

In utterly unrelated news, the new Mad Max movie is a good movie. People calling it feminist are making a bit of a leap as it's not exactly new territory, but people jump the gun on this kind of thing all the time. It is however an excellent follow up to the road warrior and does a few things that actually make the third movie suck less. Max is Max, cars are cool, explosions are awesome, world is fucked.

It's another #announcement fstdt.com blog

If it isn't one thing...

Ok, so I've cleared up the paging issue and have a viable sample to post and show off the fact you can page through over 1500 pages of FSTDT content without any trouble. So I want to FTP it up to the new host... it doesn't fucking work.

I'm hitting them with a support ticket and see how it goes.

That all said, I managed to get it working by effectively pre-populating any possible combination of filters rather than ignoring turned off filters. I thought this would be a huge amount of data, and for this place it is. But it's size totals out to all of 8 megs of a table including an index that restates the content of the table in the order I want it to... so yeah, that's a wonderful damn thing right there. Almost no size for a damn nice improvement in speed. For reference the similar index on the current site is around 250 megs, but it has to include a great deal more data to offer anywhere near the same amount of speed.

Next stop after cursing support out is playing with the search functionality, even if I'm not going to renew with these guys at the end of the month I can get some testing done.

If it's not a cracked engine block I'm good, I think #announcement fstdt.com blog

This is not my week.

Car may be on its final bork so I may be blowing significant amounts of time looking for a new car, preferably something I actually fit into the passenger side of. Time may be limited for a bit, I'll know Wednesday.

Edit:
In the mean time I'm mucking about with what looks like a solution to the paging issue I had. It's called actually doing the optimization. Found a better set of tools than I had to figure a few things, went from a ten minute and stop it query to under a second WITH full diagnostics running. So. Those things are looking up, hopefully I can get this working like this for a test site this week.

It's no longer Monday #announcement fstdt.com blog

Alright, sorry about the delay on the quotes had a real Monday. This last one was impressive so I figure it's a good place to hold till tomorrow morning.

Dev work has moved right along, I have a few finer points to decide to run with or scrap before launching anything but both quote and comment pages work. Which is a good place to start when the site consists of only those things.

What I need to do other than the fine points, get hosting setup, get the database setup, get the data transfer to the database and make sure nothing explodes when I try to combine everything on the server. Odds are this is going to lag a bit beyond this weekend, as unless the paging on tags issue clears up I have some shit to deal with before I want to launch it as I don't want to annoy my host within the first day with a few dozen hung page requests.

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