He can be taught

17th Feb 2006 Danny
Looks like the newest version of Laughability is almost done, except now there's something different. It actually works without JavaScript and Flash. I didn't think he was listening to what everyone was telling him, but perhaps he was. He still doesn't quite get that the advanced features could be ON by default and turned off is he detects that there's no JS or Flash or it's a search engine coming to call. He still doesn't know what it means to degrade gracefully. But, I think he's moving in the right direction. Most of his little customization toys would be a lot more useful in the backoffice, so noob blog authors can edit their skin without touching code. For readers to make those changes on the front end seems a bit useless. But I'm the kind of guy who disables skin switching on most of my blogs, so what do I know? What do you think?
 
 
 
 
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Anonymous
17th Feb 2006
"He still doesn't know what it means to degrade gracefully"

Nuff said ;)

¥
 
Anonymous
17th Feb 2006
LOL ... so why doesn't AM! hacks.php take the $ip ?

Was gonna say that it's nice to see blub taking some constructive criticism ( it only took half a dozen mods to jump his shit :| ). He's still got a long way to "understanding" our argument, as he seems to be coming from a technology-centric viewpoint.

Skin switching?? Doesn't that involve more than one skin? lol

PS ... I even globalized $ip ... still didn't like it. :p (I tried).
 
Anonymous
18th Feb 2006
Why would you need to globalize a variable that's only used within the function that defines it?

¥
 

The Lastest Vaporware Build

8th Feb 2006 stk

Adoring fans are flocking to Ben's new site and the response to the update is under?whelming.

See it for yourself (maybe) at his newest web location. (He'll love all the attention from us, when he looks through his server logs). ;)

Mind you, you'll need to have javaScript enabled, or the page will be nothing more than a JPG file. Also, you'll need the Macromedia Flash add-on, because you won't be able to read a post without it ... (of course, finding out HOW to read a post the first time, might be a tad difficult). AND ... though it's reported to "work flawlessly" in IE, I only get a "undetermined" javascript error in my IE version (6.0.2900.2180) when I try to read a post. :(

However ... if you're lucky enuff to be a member (and have commenting privileges) ... you'll be happy to know that your email is STILL shown on the page with a "mailto:" link.

Watch out for validation errors, though, because there are a "few".

Elmo gives "Lightality" a big thumbs UP, but then again, he's just a stuffed animal. My review is more harsh, but worry naught ... since very few can actually READ the entries, whatever point poor Ben wanted to make, will rest securely locked in his beautiful JPG website. :|

 
 
 
 
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Anonymous
9th Feb 2006
WTF, how can you require flash to read posts? It took me several minutes the first time I went to find the bloody content of the post.

Did you see this? I should keep my mouth shut about stuff that's not released yet, as Ben has taught us, but I didn't. Should I let him test out the plugin?
 
Anonymous
9th Feb 2006
I'd tell him to go fuck himself, closed release == people who can offer a considered opinnion of any coding problems that might occur.

But that might be a tad harsh, how about :-

After reading recent posts regarding degradation of code, this plugin has gone into a extensive rewrite ..... ohhh no, my mistake, it degrades if javascript isn't available, pretty pointless for your site then.


Nah..... I think I'd stick with "go fuck yerself" :|

¥
 
Anonymous
9th Feb 2006
Yeah ... took me some time too. Just seemed that POST CONTENT should be positioned more importantly than, say "comments" or "trackbacks" or (and my personal fav) "add MSN2" (which doesn't work in FFox OR my IE). Hell, most of his site doesn't work. (I love the narcisistic "curtains" he has, unveiling his site). Geez, he's so proud of it that he can't take any constructive criticism at all. His heads so stuck in the clouds.

RE: Polls. I did see the question come up and I was tempted to answer, "coming soon to Astonish Me!" (you hadn't replied yet).

I've been very careful not to "advertise" on the b2evolution.net forums. That will change when we have content that is older than 60-days and free to the general public. Then ... pointing to free content cannot be misconstrued as "advertising" (tho, I'm hoping that the free content downloaders will become full-fledged members).

Give test code to Blubberbutt? NO WAY!! He can wait 60 days like everyone else, (or swallow his pride and become a member ... tho I think his IP is already banned ... maybe that's why he switched sites recently ;) )

You're on record as saying when beta is out (tho it will prolly be a tad more than 1.7 ;) ) A more PC answer than Yabbio's might be, "I'm still modifying it and don't like to release code until it's complete." (Though NOT REPLYING is really an answer too and a good one, because it says that you mean what you say ... not out till beta).

I'm crafting an email to you regarding the "Software and Tools" Site ... you should be getting it soon.

-stk
 
Anonymous
9th Feb 2006
Yo. Sup? Lightality? I wonder how hard it will be to get my name removed from his credits bit? Like I want any credit for his creation? Oy vey! Like telling Frankenstein's original Mom that her name would be tattooed on the monster's forehead...

On the other hand credit should be given for the effort he is putting into his creation. When I started webbing I thought it was cool to have a web. I grew up a bit (despite all evidence to the contrary) and learned about things like cross-browser support and the wide variety of people who might visit my web and the methods they might use to get there. I personally believe a web site should be quick to load and deliver content to the visitor. Anything after that is exactly that: after. If your web really needs javascript and a team of detectives to find the content then tell people that!

Blah. My cup runneth empty. Anybody wanna help me make a wicked phat skin? Bonobo: do a wikipedia search for the term, or maybe even google it if you're into corporate behemoths.
 
Anonymous
10th Feb 2006
On the other hand credit should be given for the effort he is putting into his creation.

It's just a shame he doesn't put 1% of that effort into listening to the advice that people are trying to give him ;)

So, about pan paniscus, what sort of thing have you got in mind and what help do you need?

¥
 

Competitor's Tally

18th Dec 2005 stk

Competing In the Same Space?

Ben Lupton ... owner of Lightality

Claim: "Bringing a Rich Experience to Blogging"

Goal: To try and make skinning just as easy and feature packed as creating a post. This will be achieved by attempting to design a "CMS for skinning" by including a "Lightality" tag inside the blog properties. (I think he means 'tab' ... but who's quibbling with the master?) The tab will include the following sections: About, General, Settings and Look-and-Feel - which, in turn, will include: Color Themes, Layouts, Posts & panels.

When: Christmas Eve ... because "I'm heading for a month-long holiday to Europe" (Watch out there Yabba ;) )

Claims to have the Lightality Skin released on Oct. 24th, 2005, but waiting for Christmas release so can work on 'problems' and CMS. A preview of the CMS can be found here.

1) (4/3/2 Columns) - only seen pics of 3 and his site is 2.

2) (Show/Hide, Add/Remove, Drag/Re-Order Panels) - 1 & 3 yes, 2 yields scads of dotted boxes.

3) (Blog, Category and Author Avatars) - Seen 1 & 3 ... not 2

4) (Customizable BGs/Layouts/PostSkins/Styles/Themes) - unknown

Some untold stats:

• He claims on the Oct 24th that his site works in IE 6, but not for me.

geekOkay ... here is a test of the STK pop-up system. This is only a test. For the next 60 seconds ... or however long it takes for you to read the contents of this box ... or however long you keep your mouse hovered over the box (and don't read a thing) ... this box will remain open, revealing detail not included in the original document.

The content is set to "pop", when you hover yer mouse over the little icon. There are currently 4 icons, each with a differently styled background and such: hint warning info geek

I also wanted to find one for "extra geeky detail", but haven't settled on a graphic yet. Where are the smilie faces?

Okay ... stk out!

• He has a trackback icon, but no trackback address (or permalink address for that matter) shows on individual posts. When you click the trackback link ... it indicates you need to log in to leave a message.

• The email icon, when clicked ... opens up an email client (security breach?) dunno ... no "To:" addy is filled out ;)

• Commentors won't be happy tho. Although you must be a registered user to MAKE A comment, any idiot can right click and view source to get the email address of every commentor. :p

• Ergometrics suck. Can't determine number of comments (total doesn't show till you actually VIEW comments). Can't link any articles via a permalink b/c none is displayed (and prolly wouldn't work anyway b/c of the weird js interface). New time visitors will have fun figuring out how to READ the flippin article to begin with ... and of course, as previously explained ... those with IE6, despite his claims, won't get to even if they DO figure out the one, b/c of javascript errors.

Speaking of errors ... and i'm only hashing this again because I want to document the numbers: (XHTML) - FAILS on 'transitional' and what's worse ... no character encoding is defined ... 182 XHTML errors. (CSS) - Irrelevant, b/c XHTML is so badly screwed up.

Two more things: (1) TABLES layout? Gimme a break (2) Got JS turned off? Site is little more than a JPG image. :o

OKAY ... This guy scares me. Not just b/c of what he's like on the boards, but b/c i think his idea is really GREAT ... just his execution sucks (and of course, he has no real clue). What do you think of an idea like he's describing, where one can basically build an object-oriented skin from a back office tab? The big problem that i see with it: to allow the kind of flexibility that would suit 80% of people's personal wants/desires/needs ... the interface would be too cumbersome for the average joe. But still ... esp if color and images could be customized ... it would seem you could hit 50% of ppls needs and still have a lightweight, user-friendly interface.

OKAY ... enough on this. I gotta de-blubbertise myself for a while ... i feel yucky all over

 
 
 
 
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Anonymous
19th Dec 2005

It's a shame I never kept a copy of my ancient 9.0.summat version, if you remember it had two new tabs on the blogs tab in the BO, one for layout and one for theme. At the time, I abandoned it because it meant I had to convert all of the sidebar stuff into customiseable modules, of course in Phoenix these are now the plugins.

I also started to recreate the same system as a plugin for Phoenix, if you look in the archives of my dev blog, you'll see me rabbiting about a skin/system called simplicity. Now that Phoenix has pretty much hit beta and the code is "fairly" stable I'll probably ressurect it and expand it into a full skinning system..... after I've got all the other plugins ported across and tested ;)

Just to touch upon the subject of blubber, his attitudes and methods, when it comes to coding, are rife amongst amateur coders ... usually the sort that call themselves "webmaster", they get on the big wide web and it's full of bells and whistles and new toys and they just want to have them all. So, they produce a website made of tables (when it'd be far easier and bandwidth friendly to use divs), they have flash buttons (to achieve a rollover effect that could be achieved with css), they use javascript effects (quite a few of which can be reproduced with just css) and usually their site only works in IE6 (although a few hours with a validator could cure most of that). They also tend to produce fixed width sites, because they're easier.

Ok, I might sound like a bitch, but let me tell you why I find all of the above appalling.

One of the main aspects of the web is the WW bit, it stands for "Word Wide" (yeah, yeah, I know you know). What that actually means is, it's available to anyone and everyone in the world (allow me a rose tinted glasses moment) and is controlled and owned by nobody. This means that even a blind man in outer mongolia has the right to expect to browse the internet as freely and easily as anybody else (this is what WAI/508 is all about) ...... lets follow him as he hits a "webmasters" site using a text reader :-

  1. Every bit of javascript on the page fails, so, there go all the special effects, but, more importantly, there goes all of the content that they controlled.
  2. Every bit of flash fails, so there goes all the site navigation, now we're limited to just one page .... and half of that dissapeared with the javascript failing :|
  3. All of the nested tables used make the poor text reader work like a demon trying to understand what follows what, now all of the remaining content is starting to sound jibberish, and you can't navigate to another page because the navigation failed with the flash.

So, until the web has a damn sight less "webmasters" and more coders who actually give a shit about the visitor being able to browse through their site no matter what their abilities or needs, I'm afraid it's been reduced to just plain "Web". Of course, the "webmaster" couldn't care less, his stats show that 98% of his visitors are using IE6 with javascript enabled and flash installed ....... they never think to ask "why ?".

I say all this from experience, my first website was a pure javascript controlled monstrosity that only worked in IE (mind you my stats showed me that all my visitors used IE with js enabled :| ), and even when I converted it to be cross-browser compliant it still requires javascript !! As you know it's since then gone into recoding, and the next version only uses javascript to enhance a visit, if it's enabled, and to still be fully functional with as many bells and whistles as possible, even in a text reader ...... once I finish the galleries :p

So, if you're a webmaster and you happen to be reading this, here's what I recomend you should do :-

  1. Your website should work with css, flash, javascript turned off
  2. Your website should not make use of excessive tables for layouts
  3. Your website should validate for both (x)html and css, and, ideally, WAI/508 (this now becoming a legal requirement in several countries, especially for any websites that have anything to do with the government).
  4. Your website should work in all major browsers.
  5. Your website should work at all screen resolutions.

Of course, you don't have to listen to anything that we've said in this post and my reply, you have the right to close your browser and carry on being a webmaster ..... just don't be suprised when I visit your site and I close my browser because I'm using FireFox with flash disabled (and frequently with javascript disabled) and I browse at 1280 x 1024 ...... but your stats will still show you that 98% of your visitors use IE6 with javascript enabled and flash installed, so that's not a problem right?

¥

 

The Daily Blubberton Report

18th Dec 2005 stk

Egomania, Australia - Only 18 minutes after a board member thanked Danny (AKA Personman) for his quick reply and indications that he would follow up on his suggestion, Blurbberton (AKA Balupyers Buddy) chimed in with way more than two cents.

Sources confirm that Blubberton, reeling from an overdose of narcissistic empowerment, which made him feel he had invincible powers of deductive reasoning, decided that the reason the the poster, a Reggie Ryan, wanted to pull up deleted posts was to "monitor what the students have been posting."

Calls to Reggie Ryan have gone unanswered, but at this point, it is uncertain why he wants to pull up deleted posts, or even if he is a teacher a the unnamed middle school. Although ... Blubberton was cagey enough to couch his introduction with a legally-binding, "i[sic]'m guessing" and from the vocabulary, sentence construction and spelling, one might surmise that this mystery poster is, indeed, employed by the unnamed middle school.

Regardless of facts, Blubberton launched into a potential solution, (constructed mainly of off-the-top-of-a-narcissistic-high-head, half-baked thoughts, with little substance). Then, he pulls an about face, declaring the matter even too difficult for himself to solve in 5 seconds. He returns (an unknown amount of time later) to add the periods to his afore-mentioned half-baked ideas ... all presuming, of course, that the unknown poster has the authority to SPY on his students and is seeking a resurrection of posts precisely for this purpose.

An exit poll, conducted at b2evolution headquarters, outside a small French Pub, revealed mixed results.

"That BlabberMouth," one said dressed for some strange reason in a military uniform, "He's an ass."

Still, we did find supporters, though only a few. One remarked, "I just signed on with b2evolution yesterday, so what do I know?"

Taking his final, misanthropic swipe at the b2evolution crowd, a quite heady Blubberton signed off his unsolicited solution for a drug-induced premise, by listing off the various features he's managed to employ on his site.

"Lightality (4/3/2 Columns) (Show/Hide, Add/Remove, Drag/Re-Order Panels) (Blog, Category and Author Avatars) (Customizable BGs/Layouts/PostSkins/Styles/Themes)"

[And a link] - http://blog.blubberton.bimbo.biz

Our own investigation reveals that only 23% of web visitors will actually figure out which buttons are necessary to push, before Blubberton's message can be read. Further, because 90% of the browser universe still relies on IE (and even if you push the correct button, when you use IE, only a javaScript error results and the message is NEVER seen. Consequently, we conclude that Blubberton's fantastic site, built as a testament to narcissistic need, will be thankfully hidden behind a curtain of js errors and invalid code.

The final parting shot is still peeling off partying (er, working) b2evolution developers tongue's - "I've helped you, now you go help someone!" (or, more properly said: I'VE HELPED YOU, NOW YOU HELP SOMEONE!"

Our best advice ... "Go git some help yerself, Blubberton!"

While you were sleeping like a baby

 
 
 
 
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Comments

Anonymous
18th Dec 2005
lmfao!! Would this be the light skin that's heavy on validation errors? ;)

¥
*edit*
At least his css only has 1 error ;)
 
Anonymous
21st Dec 2005
Hmm ... still failing validation ... 116 errors. Still no show in IE6sp2.

But i'm wondering how he's making this claim: "Valid XHTML 1.0 Trans"?? ... posted 12/21 in this update.

Oh ... and I really like the way he numbers his "releases"? The "lightality" he's using on the site is

v0.9.6.0 ALPHA ... his latest update?
v0.1.0.0 BETA ... so it would appear that he's heading down, number-wise ... yet his code is becoming more stable! (Something tells me it's supposed to be v1.0.0.0 ... but why be PICKY, eh?)
 
 

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