This Christmas didn’t contain high-profile gifts such as the AE TC4 Factory Team RC car that I received last year, but it wasn’t bad. I received numerous items that will aid hunting and camping, these include a new sleeping bag (mummy style, my old one is the other style, which has a tendency of letting cold air draft in behind my neck) and scope mounts for my hunting rifle (the original ones are defective by design just as DRM is). Instead of hesitating before using the gift cards I received, the day after I went to Target and bought the Sims 2 Holiday Edition. The original Sims was great, and ‘wasted’ allot of time, and the Sims 2 is even better, although the completely 3D gaming engine has a few bugs. A few other games, including Sid Meier’s Railroads! and AEO3, would be enjoyable to own, but Battlefield 2142 seems to overshadow them. Spore and Halo 2 for Vista make the list of games that I want that aren’t out yet.
In other news, my power-backup decided to commit partial suicide. The battery backup sockets no longer work, leaving the surge-only protected sockets working. Now I get to shop for USPs, which are cheaper to get from retail stores as shipping is 15USD or more from e-tailors.
Now for some long-awaited news… The new Weblogs.us website’s tentative launch date is January 1st 2007. To make this deadline may mean the cutting of the listings section until the plug-in is done, but we’ll see how that comes along. Do note though that the new site will still be very much in beta status, as RPC-Heir needs much higher loads to be fully tested, which only a full launch can provide at this time.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
Oooh! Very exciting! I fancy the timing. I say go for it. If the site could settle with the plain page that has served as the front for several years, then what does it matter to have listings missing or some leftover kinks to work out live?
New Years was the delayed/intended launch time, but the time needed to get the code finalized for such a feat didn’t materialize, and a lack of help (which isn’t anyone’s fault, we all got busy as the year went on) didn’t help. I completed RPC Heir last night, after a tad bit of testing it will go “gold”. RPC Rub (the recently updated blogs section on the front page) is practically complete, I’d like to do some changes, but for now I’ve fixed most of it’s critical bugs and it’s going “gold” soon. This leaves lCards (the listings plug-in) which needs allot of work, as of right now it wouldn’t do anything but spew out errors if it was enabled in WordPress. Once lCards reaches an acceptable level of completeness (1/3 of the features implemented) then the new site will launch. We could launch right now without lCards, but I think JD is busy, and he really needs to be around for the launch so that between he and I we can get it up and running without bugs.
-John Havlik
I wish I were any good/knowledgable enough to contribute and help. I don’t like how desolate and solely dependent the community seems to be on you for a good portion of things. It’s just a true imbalance. The average Weblogs.us user seems to be infrequent in attendance/involvement, or inexperienced and unable; more often than not–in search of help. And you can count me into that group for the past while. I go through phases of fluctuations it seems; forgetting what I’ve learned and then re-learning myself back up to marginal function. But then I get to constantly thinking I’m a genius for little accomplishments I’ve never managed previously. Ha!
I guess I forgot to mention that things sometimes take way to long to get done. RPC Heir is my case-in-point. What should have taken maybe an hour of debugging has turned into three nights (and somewhat of a headache). My code wasn’t even at fault for the bug, but now I get to fix the lastRSS’s code to suit our needs. Things like that take a ton of time as I don’t know the code as well (I only learn enough to harness the library for anything that is a library, this is purely for time saving purposes). Now that I’ve written a separate ‘debugger’ of sorts to see the array produced by lastRSS I am finally making some headway. Hopefully JD will be receiving a nice zip archive with the stable plug-ins and theme for installation this Friday.
Once the site is launched it will be very useful if users could follow the API that I will be posting to get a lCard made for testing of that plug-in which won’t make the launch.
-John Havlik