Ree’s musings

I think I've found a cure, or at least a salve, for my burgeoning dissatisfaction.

It's simple. I'm a sort of creative person, but sometimes the creative part of me gets a little burnt out. Trying to force it only makes me miserable. What I need—what I've lacked for too long—is a project where ideas and cooperation take a back seat to getting shit done.

Another aspect of my frustration has to do with roleplay by forum post. Every site has a different CMS. The main site where I play will be moving to a different CMS, but right now we don't even know which CMS that will be. It's all up in the air and making me crazy. Until that gets settled, my own little modded forum will be on hiatus, because I don't want to divide anyone's attention (especially mine) between the sites and CMSes.

But my grumpy mood finally came to a head.

Screw it, I thought. I'm working on my site anyway. I won't try to get any members there until everything else evens out a little, but I need something to do. There is a specific feature lacking from every forum and CMS I try (excepting a phpBB mod that is highly insecure, so DO NOT WANT). I don't want to open my site without that in place and it's the perfect little project.

I estimate there are four main aspects of adding my desired feature. There must be a way to add my special data to the site, to edit it, to delete it, and to use it on forum posts. There are many other niceties that could be added, but these are required before the feature is ready for use.

Today I've been snowed in. I built a control panel for this data. By noon I was able to add rows. By five P.M. I was able to delete data. Editing will probably take as long as those two combined, since I must both access data from the database and write it back, instead of just one or the other. As for using it in posts, I don't know. It might be straightforward to do or it might be unremitting hell.

But I had four goalposts on the project, and I've already met two. I'm a lot more content now than I've been in a long time. In fact, after I get the Christmas tree done, I think I'll have enough pent-up creativity to work on a story post I owe.

I love this.

Tried to troubleshoot a DNS problem for someone else. Best I can figure, I can't fix and neither can they. The dev with the power to fix it knows about the problem. Knew five days ago. Still nothing. Not even "I'm still working on it." And the support docs on the subject are outdated enough to be perfectly useless.

Got bored. Went outside. Played mobile phone Tetris. Tried to update my blog (thereby updating my domain homepage, which updates whenever my blog RSS feed does). Blog updated, domain didn't. Blog updated but blog RSS feed did not. Tried editing entry and resaving. But the future RSS feed refused to change.

Got tetchy.

Think I'm all done internet today.

I like the look of Dreamwidth so far. They have this purple sitescheme that is luscious, constantly makes me hungry, and keeps my checking my DW inbox every five minutes just to see the pretty, pretty purple. Yummy. They let OpenID users do a bit more than LiveJournal does, too, so I’ve been poking around there in my pokitty.com guise and have ported a layout over, friended folks I know, and set up a DW feed of my journal for my DW friends’ convenience.

Short version: DW is like LiveJournal, but far prettier, with all the 1999 cruft replaced by a clearer sense of where it should go, based on LJ’s history.

DW has a very nice separation of trust and reading: instead of a friends page, you have a reading page. When you want to add someone to that list, you’re given checkboxes to decide separately if you a) want them on your reading page and b) want to let them read your friends-only entries. It’s possible to do this on LJ with filters (and I do, couldn’t stand to lose my filters) but DW makes the whole thing straightforward.

Tabulas doesn’t have anything like filters, which is too bad. I can only add people to my friends list if I’m okay with them reading my friends-only entries. Tabs also has no communities, so any layout sharing communities are actually personal accounts. That can read your friends-only entries once you add them to your Tabulas friends list. Not good.

Luckily, all Tabulas sites have RSS feeds, so I add the layout “comms” to my Bloglines and follow them that way, but it feels like a work-around. I hope someday Tabulas separates reading and access, so I can add layout sites to my friends page without giving them access, or so I can grant access to someone whose posts I’m not interested in seeing on my Tabulas friends page. Until then, viva la Bloglines.

I’m a little unsure how DW’s OpenID stuff will go. Evidently they’re letting OpenID users read friends-only entries, and they’re planning to let people read all their LJ/DeadJournal/InsaneJournal friends pages through the Dreamwidth site. That unnerves me, since I keep hearing about security flaws inherent in OpenID - it sounds like it has potential to expose friends-only data to hackers with a minimum of effort on the bad guy’s part. I wonder how it will actually pan out?

All the DW interoperability is making me realise how isolated Tabulas is. It’s very hard to find other Tabulas users that have things in common with you - there are no communities, no interests list in profiles, no blogrolls, no way to find a group of like-minded people. There are the official Tabulas forums, but they aren’t the sort of place you can ask “Who else is into Super Nintendo?” and expect any sort of answer. Some days, I’d skin a cat* to get LJ’s interests feature cloned into Tabulas. I would list myself under things like “writing, reading, web design, web development, openid, Tabulas, ancient Egypt, cats, layouts, South Dakota, EarthBound, video games, Nintendo” - I am rambling so bad right now, but you get the idea.

I am going to blame my negativity on the local overcast blahs, and find something to do. Likely contenders are finding a versatile layout to port over to Tabulas or running through PHP.net documentation on array sorts. Again. Someday, it’ll sink in. I hope.

(*not really, but it sounded good)

I have spent the last hour and a half trying to get Opera's Fast Forward feature to work on my InsaneJournal friends page. Currently the function is broken, as the "Next 5" link on my IJ flist actually goes to the entries I have read already; I need to convince Opera that the way forward lies under the link labeled, untruthfully, "Previous 5".

The simplest thing, you'd think, would be to change the link text on those links, so that Next is Previous and Previous is next. Alas, the only layout option I could find on IJ that didn't make me want to remove my eyeballs with a melon baller has no such options.

Next up, crafting an Opera UserJS script to add rel="next" to the link of my choice. I was able to do this, but Fast Forward continued to use the wrong link.

After that, I had my UserJS add a LINK to the page header specifying the sole rel="next" of my choice, which should have been the end of the matter as there were no other Next LINKs. Fast Forward continued to point backward.

Just to spite me, Fast Forward appears to override the behaviour of the "Next" link in the Opera navbar as well. It will only appear if it finds a LINK rel="next", but clicking it activates Fast Fucking Forward and takes me backward even though it's only there because I told it the correct link to use I'mo bust somethin' it gonna be messy.

So I am not a happy ReeToes.

I am going to chose some sort of violent video game, consistently refer to in-game enemies as "IJ" and "FF", and then I am going to render them broken, bloody, and ideally in multiple pieces. It will be pleasant.

Guess I'm just spoiled: Tabulas has the most perfectly perfect friends page behaviour I could want Fast Forward to use, and LiveJournal's Minimalism layout (which something of a sludge in terms of markup) adds it too. That should be lovely, but it only makes it all the more maddening when IJ does exactly the opposite of every sane thing it could do in the history of ever.

Game. Break 'em in effigy. Right, on it. I'll be better after.

EDIT: Solved thanks to Candy. Yay!