Trigger Finger

Thanks to a nice bloke called ‘Magnus’ I have been made aware that the commenting system is b0rked with a capital 0. I did think it was strange that there was no comments on anything since April (when we changed to the new look). The problem is that you the commenter should be able to post without being registered, but you supply an email and answer a simple maths question. The problem is that you can’t see the question

Thanks to a nice bloke called ‘Magnus’ I have been made aware that the commenting system is b0rked with a capital 0. I did think it was strange that there was no comments on anything since April (when we changed to the new look). The problem is that you the commenter should be able to post without being registered, but you supply an email and answer a simple maths question. The problem is that you can’t see the maths question which makes providing the answer quite difficult

Soooo, I need to dig into the code and see what the problem is, but in the meantime, if you log in as a registered user you will be able to comment without issue. I have posted Magnus’s comment as myself for now (couldn’t not post it when it was so complimentary )

Thanks for your patience and thanks again Magnus for bringing it to my attention!

UPDATE: The problem is now fixed, but I have had to introduce some stronger spam criteria instead of the maths check. So if your comment doesn’t show up straight away, then it’s in the approval queue and I will approve the genuine comments as quickly as possible. As always the easiest way to hassle free commenting is to register and then most of the checks are removed because I have the added tool of a mighty banhammer

So a lot of the new design is in place, but there is still a lot of more minor tweaking to do. There are a lot of things I like personally about the new look, not least the ease of reading and the clear division between content, the other items such as tags and comments. continue reading »

The old tf.erzz.com - Teenage black!

Though its only been a couple of months since we last updated the look, I was never quite happy with it. SO many different tidbits of information that had no boundaries and required real brainpower to visually seperate. continue reading »

If you like football (and I mean soccer by that you americans!) the check out my new site. It is a digg-like site for footy news that aggregates all the news as well as providing an forum for discussion (comments) and voting in a digg stlye.

You can of course submit your own stories if you have a hot rumour for the transfer window

I recently discovered a real gem for a task I had at work.

We needed something to automatically surf our web site in a specific manner in order that it pre-compiled the jsp’s etc so users would have ready cached pages to view when the new version of the site launched rather than having to wait for things to compile. The site has 30 country specific domains, is clustered so many different caches needed to be populated too, and for each site there are 10-12 servlets that must be hit so that everything is cached up and ready to go. A very laborious task to do manually!

To complicate matters further, some servlets could not be hit by a direct URL as they were pulled via specific javascripts from specfic pages thus you need to go to Page A and then Page B and then click a specific button. So after some serious googling I hit on a few site testing utilities which were good as long as you were talking about specific url’s, but no use for the more complicated javascript sequences that must be run.

Then I found my saviour! Chickenfoot which is an open source, free Firefox plugin that is built by the good guys at MIT. In a nutshell it is a very simple javascript extension that uses extremely simple syntax to build a script that will navigate your pages in almost any way you want. For example:

go("www.google.com")

openTab("www.google.com")

click("images")

enter("monkeys")

sleep(30)

click("search images button")

So simple I could teach my dog to write such scripts! The only issue I have found is that most actions need to be done on the foremost tab/window, but if you are clever you can do things in such a sequence to work around the limitation. Great work fellas!

Speedtest.net

This is one of those sites you will add to your favourites and return to forever more…. eloquent and accurate … I am very impressed

“A digg favorite in the past, the Torrent Search Engine Searcher (very nice redundant name) has received a very large makeover. It searches Bit Torrent, BT Junkie, ISO Hunt, Mininova, and The Pirate Bay just to name a few. Worth a spot in the bookmarks bar for sure.”

Awesome! Nothing more need be said

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