BubblesSOC

For the past 2 or 3 months BubblesSOC has been experiencing frequent downtime. It seemed as though I was contacting my host about it everyday. Sure, my site would be back for a moment, but within the following hours it’d be down again. Even after moving to a different server I was still having problems. Next thing I know, one of my sites was the source of the problems!

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Have you ever noticed on forums that some users’ avatars will be different each time the page reloads? I recently decided that I wanted to display multiple avatars on Snark, so I sat down and wrote this little script. (This method only works for forums that allow off-site avatars.)

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Last night I was sifting through my Akismet spam and noticed that one of the spammers apologized to me for his following spam comment

I’m currently attempting to write my first WP plugin. I want to integrate my plugboard and Caption Challenge into WP pages, but these scripts need to be plugins before I can accomplish this.

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Just when I thought I’d learned all I need to know about webdesign (not literally), I come across mod_rewrite - which is quite useful! I still have the hardest time comprehending regular expressions, so I’m just using it in its simplest form. Rather than typing profile.php?id=1 every time I want to access a member profile I can use profile/1 instead! Neil Crosby can explain it better than I, so I’ll leave the job to him. Btw - if you are using an .htaccess file to protect against direct linkers, you are using mod_rewrite!

Speaking of direct linkers, I made a new hotlink warning image:

(I stole the ingenious idea from Jem :))

Look what I found! Poor Coco is going to have a whole wardrobe soon…

Clearing a float container without source markup.

Looks like I’ll be renovating my skins again. I’m still using the <br class="clear" /> to clear my floating elements.

I started feeling under the weather this past Saturday. I was scared it was the flu because I had body aches, congestion, and a sore throat. Sunday, however, I felt a lot better. Monday was ok, but that night, it hit me again like a ton of bricks. This morning, I woke up with no voice! I’ve never lost my voice before, so it’s the weirdest thing ever. I cannot talk louder than a whisper.

The Mac is back. While in target disk mode, I burned the contents of my hard drive to CDs. Afterwards, I tried an Archive and Install. It didn’t work, so I had to erase my hard drive and start from scratch. I still don’t know what caused the malfunction. I see it happening again, though, because I’m still having some problems. I guess it may be a hardware issue after all.

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I wanted to integrate my 404 page into my skins, but I needed it to be a .php file instead of .shtml (which is the default filetype I believe). So here’s how I did it.Open your existing .htaccess file. If you do not have one already, create a new file and save it as .htaccess. Add the following code to the file:

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.bubblessoc.net/404.php

You can change 404.php to anything you want. It can be error.php or mysiterox.php. And of course, you use your URL instead of mine

I’ve also integrated custom 404 pages for my subdomains as well using the same method. This is useful if you have hostees who want their own error pages. Just make an .htaccess file for each of your subdomains. Otherwise, the root .htaccess will take precedence.

If you want to display the name of the page that issued a 404 use:

<?= $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] ?>

Pretty nifty I think.

Does anyone know of any free (or free trial) programs to convert songs from .ogg to .mp3 or .wav?

Would you care to join Cute Top 25 or Oh My Cuteness?

i have to type this entry in lowercase because my keyboard is acting up again

in my quest to convert my site to pure css, i’ve been working a lot with styled fieldsets using a great tutorial found here. i stumbled upon a bug that’s been bothering me for days. the textarea and submit button inside of my fieldsets keep getting shoved over in ie, causing the entire layout to collapse. the other form elements, however, are not affected.

here’s what it’s supposed to look like (firefox)
here’s what it looks like in ie

after tweaking the stylesheet a bit, i discovered that the textarea/button nested inside the fieldset was inheriting all other specified left-margins in ie. here’s an example of what i mean:

the code:

<div class="cont1">
     .cont1
     <div class="cont2">
          .cont2
          <fieldset>
               <textarea cols="10" rows="5"></textarea><br />
               <input type="button" value="Button" />
          </fieldset>
     </div>
</div>

the css:

.cont1 {
     background: blue;
     margin: 0 0 0 10px;
     padding: 5px;
}
.cont2 {
     background: yellow;
     margin: 0 0 0 15px;
     padding: 5px;
}
fieldset {
     margin: 0;
     padding: 0;
}
fieldset textarea {
     margin: 0;
     padding: 0;
}

the textarea and input button are shoved to the right by 25 pixels (the left margin of cont1 + the left margin of cont2). i haven’t had time to do thorough research, but as far as i know, there is no workaround for this bug. i did find someone else who had the same problem, however. someone suggested in the comments to enclose the elements in an arbitrary div, and that seemed to work for me.

new code (same stylesheet):

<div class="cont1">
     .cont1
     <div class="cont2">
          .cont2
          <fieldset>
               <div class="arbitrary">
                    <textarea cols="10" rows="5"></textarea><br />
                    <input type="button" value="Button" />
               </div>
          </fieldset>
     </div>
</div>

the arbitrary div idea is fine for now, but i’d like to find another way to remedy this bug. has anyone else had this problem? if so, how did you fix it?

this is the last week of the semester! hopefully i’ll be back to blogging regularly by next week

Can anyone tell me how to take a song from a CD and convert it to an MP3 rather than a WAV file? My friend Michael recorded a demo and I really want to upload his songs to my Radio.Blog Thanks to Will and Ashley, I figured it out Be sure to check out Michael’s songs on my Radio.Blog. If you like his tracks, share the link with your friends.

I love computers, but I hate printers. I always mess them up because I don’t know a thing about them and I don’t care to read the instruction manual Today, Will tried to print something and received some strange error regarding the print cartridges. I opened it up, fiddled with the cartridges, then tried to close it back, but it wouldn’t shut. I instinctively got mad and started yelling at Will for breaking my brand new printer. In turn, he got mad and left. Well, a few minutes later I discovered the true culprit - a piece of bark that Pixie had brought in from outside. How she managed to get a piece of bark up inside my printer is quite a mystery. Poor Will, he gets blamed for everything! hehe

I finally fixed all the bugs in my plugboard script. If you’re interested in my script, you can download it here. It uses PHP/MySQL and protects against spamming and broken images/links. There is also an option to email you when someone submits a button. It’s a simple script, but I’m proud because it’s my first If you decide to use it, let me know your name and website and I’ll plug you. Currently, Michelle and Natasja are using my script.

I have four tests next week… I think that’s the most I’ve ever had in one week, aside from finals. Calculus and Math 115 on Tuesday, Computer Science on Thursday, and Visual Basic on Friday. I’m going to be in the library the rest of the weekend, so I better get some sleep tonight.