Chris,
We do not advertise on estrip. It is one of our main objectives to maintain a commercial free public space as we have done for four years. Your site has advertisements on it in the form of google ads.

From a web design/programming perspective, your site is not unique enough to warrant talking about it. It is basically yet another vBulletin with google ads clone.

Sorry,
Paul Visco

I can't believe the site has been around for four years. When I first thought of it after reading about The Well in Howard Rheingolds book virtual Communities (The whole book is online) , I thought - I could never make anything so cool. It is crazy that the well started in 1995. When listening to the book, yes I had the computer read it to me in that computer voice I so love, I envisioned it being so far away in the past. Of course it could not have been considering the visual internet really started around 1995. Well I was wrong. There are some great chapters about the minitel experince in france. I would suggest anyone who gets a chance , checks out the book.

So the real point of this journal is google analytics. I use my own software to calculate the actual users usage of certain features but I pretty much stopped logging web data a couple months ago other than journal views and browser types as so much of it became spam.

I am trying to track the stats for the site using Google Analytics and really enjoy the graphs it makes. Best of all it is free. We have such a strange pattern of users. I am totally amazed that almost everyone has Flash player 8 or 9. It was never liek that before. I think that youtube made this change happen. Just about everyone seems to go to youtube and youtube requires flash player 8 or greater. After one month I will post more of the data but it is hard to see the trends yet. Who the fuck uses netscape nowadays?

1. Firefox 49.46%
2. Internet Explorer 38.54%
3. Safari 7.28%
4. Mozilla 4.04%
5. Netscape 0.27%
6. Opera 0.27%
7. Konqueror 0.13%



I was also amazed that 99.3% of visitors have a java runtime engine installed. I am going to start using java I think for some applet stuff. I was concerned that people would not have the JRE but I guess I was wrong.

So far it looks like most people get here by just going right to the address itself. The rest seem to come from google. This is no surprise as their are no lnks to the site form anyone accept for foreverelmwood.com and a very few others.


Here is a map of the location of the people visiting estrip.org. I know who most of the dots in other cities are and of course a couple of the people are random googlers that found it. Today we had some visitor from Compton, CA and Sao Paul Brazil. It is so weird to see people from other places come here. What do they think of it?

I fixed it so the inline external links e.g. work again by automatically opening in a new window, instead of you having to right click and open in new window. Hope that helps.

I also finally got my new opensuse 10.2 linux development system up and running. I managed to get both zend and maya plus the xgl desktop effects library called beryl running. Now I am happy and you can expect more development from me.
--Paul

Fixed the message window and mail window problem where they were not opening up in new windows.

I went to go see that stupid Pan's Labyrinth movie last night. I was so disgusted by it I decided to go to bed afterwards to not allow my mind to associate any of the feelings I was having with anyone or any stuff I was doing;

At some point the server went down and nobody woke me up to check on it. It should be all set now.

--Paul

I fixed the operation aborted error in IE. After a most stressful day of documenting thousands of lines of javascript, I found some spare time and an IE 6 and 7 machine to test the site on and fix the stupid Operation Aborted error that occurs when something is appended to the DOM before it is loaded.

IF YOU USE IE AND COMPLAINED ABOUT THIS MAYBE YOU SHOULD DONATE NOW. I WAS ABOUT 1 SEC SHORT OF JUST REMOVING IE SUPPORT ALTOGETHER. YOU CAN DO THIS BY CLICKING ON THE DONATE LINK AT THE TOP OF THE LATEST ENTRIES LIST.

I do think at some point in the near future the IE 6 support will go (meaning you will be redirected to the strip down mobile/dialup version of the site when visiting with IE 6) unless some people are interested in supporting it, because for me it is a headache and I am really not motivated to always have to get an old machine to test it on.

On an other front I updated the scripts so the site should be a bunch faster. I also have some new faster surebert updates coming out later this week.

I removed transparent PNG support for IE 6 because it was slowing the site down in IE 6 too much. If you hate that get a real browser that can do transparent pngs like opera, firefox, safari, or ie 7

I am going to be updating the ram a little after 5PM today on the server. It will be down for a brief time.

Message Replies
Added new feature so you can respond to messages sent by other logged in peeps directly. Just click the post-it icon in their message.

Mobile site comments page
Updated the mobile sites comment page to use its own comment page that take sthe user back to the journal they are commenting on.

Tonight Windows Updated Me To IE7
Windows automatically updated my windows XP development box to Internet Explorer 7 tonight. This mean sthat the era for IE 6 development is over. I will try and keep support for what is there. But dedicated testing and support for Internet Explorer 6 on estrip is over. I will test everything with 7 this weekend.

Bunch of backend SQL updates should make some stuff faster. . . more to come.

I rewrote 99% of the javascript for the site and compressed it into much more efficient files. Everything accept for the stupid yahoo map loader. I am considering just ditching it as it as big as all the rest of the javascript combined. It won't even cache. I got it down to about 60k of caching javascript for the entire site functionality and then the yahoo stupid maps are another 59k and their javascript does not cache. Argh. Maybe ajay can help with this. For now I just removed it, until I can come up with a better solution.

Now that it is all organized I can more efficiently work on it.

The site should be much faster when switching between journals. One of the problems before was the usersound player was loading the entire song on every journal load even if you didn't play it. So right now I have a button that loads the player when you want. That is what was causing the userpics to load slowly.

There was also tons of other stuff that got cleaned up. On the backend my new system allows me to have really efficient, highly commented code that then gets compressed into tiny chunks of javascript that you download.

If you notice any other problems message paul.

--paul

I updated the system to use the new surebert 2.11 for which there might be some problems. You guys are the beta testers.

Anyhow, I returned the restore backup button which records everything you are typing to a flash storage area on you comp so that if your browser crashes you should be able to click the restore backup button and continue where you left off writing - like it used to be. Wow, this turned out useful as I just left this page in the middle of writing the journal and it was all there when I got back.

The files are a lot smaller now when compressed. If you notice anything out of the ordinary, send me a post it.