Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Graffiti Board (and a Rant)
NEW TOY !!! The BNL Graffiti Board (try it out)
*** This is the post that was to be sent yesterday, but I couldn’t get Bogger.com to accept posts ***
OK, I’ll add this edit by hand, which I can do since I’m not on blogspot.com as well. Today Blogger gives me:
Error
We apologize for the inconvenience, but we are unable to process your request at this time. Our engineers have been notified of this problem and will work to resolve it.
*** ON WITH THE ORIGINAL POST (which was attempted while Blogger.com was sputtering out) ***
I just about went crazy yesterday [day before yesterday] from blogger’s slow ability to update. I then found my hit counter was just about unusable as well, causing the page to freeze in mid-load waiting for the hit count. Then I discovered some recent change to my sidebar had messed up the sidebar look in IE though it looked fine in FireFox. I put in some quick bandaids and took the hit counter out. Trouble shooting all this with blogger on the fritz just about had me pulling my hair out.
Today [yesterday] blogger’s responsiveness is even slower and has even timed out on occasion with “unable to connect to server” messages. Blogger’s profile stats have been inactive for going on a month now.
I realize this is a free service or at least free the way I’m using it, but if service quality gets much worse I will have to think about switching blogging tools. I’m not on blogspot.com so this is a real possibility.
OK with the rant out of the way onto blog business.
About the NEW TOY
Hope you guys enjoy the new toy I’ve put on this page. Not many have left comments yet, so it remains to be seen how popular this will be but I have created a Graffiti Board for BNL
The GB allows you to cover a brick wall with Graffiti. Not real Graffiti, and sadly not with a virtual spray can, though I am thinking about how to code such a beast. This Graffiti Board does however let you use various Font Styles, Colors, and Backgrounds. Graffiti will show up in random positions on the wall, but you can keep your graffiti grouped with someone else’s by clicking reply first. Short messages get a very large font, long messages a very small font. A new board will show up every month and the old boards can still be visited.
You can vote for the best Graffiti with trash or keep buttons. Too many trashes and the graffiti gets erased with a flashing TRASH tag and a garbage can icon.
I wrote this Perl/HTML program for The Canopy Club and it gets used a lot there. Here is the Canopy’s GB should you want to check one that has a lot of use and has had a lot of past months filled.
I can’t offer this code for reuse for everyday bloggers – sorry – it relies on being on the server side, plus I don’t want to release it into the wild until I’ve decided what to do with it.
In the coming months I plan on putting a collection of interactive toys on this site, but only ones that I am the author of, so please let me know what you think of them as they come online. I’ll also take any suggests for things you think would be COOL and I’ll see if I’m up to the coding challenge.
Still Hawking my Meme
Remember, try to work the phases “gone all eights” or “he went all eights” into everyday conversations (see last post).
*** OK I'm trying again tonight to repost this the correct way ***
