With the commotion and dust cloud of introducing the new site, there's quite a bit of information flying around in an unorganized fashion. I suppose I'll take this opportunity to let you know what's going on, what my plans are, and dispel rumors and general confusion.
Unless you registered just now or are not a very observant person in general, the site has radically changed. In fact, this is an entirely new site that I have written from scratch that bears remarkable resemblance to the site you once knew as Two Cans & String that I have pointed the twocansandstring.com domain name to. The old site that twocansandstring.com used to point to is now located at its domainless home
over here. It'll get lonely over the next few weeks, so go ahead and give it a visit. This archive version of the site is read-only, so you can't actively use it. It's a take-photos-leave-footsteps sort of deal.
There are 3 obvious differences between this site and the previous one.
- The Question & Answer section is radically different and AJAX based. If you are using IE6, you may notice another change: it is entirely busted. Upgrade. IE6 was retro in 2004. If you are on a public/school/work computer and cannot upgrade, I suggest you take to arms and stage a protest since your computer has some serious security worries that ought to be overshadowing your need to use TwoCans.
- The Messaging system looks different. Not all that different. Just different. You'll also notice helpful emails from the Notification Fairy when you get a new message. If you would like the Notification Fairy to go away, there's an option to tell her to do so in the account settings page.
- Creating a forum post now has more shiny options. Such as bold, italic, colors, images, emoticons, etc. Please don't abuse these. I wasn't really thinking of forum features when I created these. More on that below.
So the big importance of these upgrades was to combine all my sites. This probably means nothing to you, especially if you have never visited any of my other sites. Even if you have, all my sites will still be visually different and located at different domains. However, they are all running off the same codebase and using the same database and user account system. Like I said, this really has no direct importance to you. But to me, it means I no longer have to waste time working on the same feature multiple times for sites that are 90% similar. For you, this eventually means more features and updates from me. As a bonus side effect, it also means you can log in and use my other sites with your same account you have here. Once nerdparadise.com is complete, feel free to try it out. It's almost kind of creepy!
One of the architectural decisions I made for my new set of sites was to base almost all content-based features on the forum infrastructure. This would also serve as a time saver on my part. For example, all the posts under /things/ are actually forum threads in a hidden forum category. You can comment on them now. Comments are nothing more than replies to the original post in the threads. Since NerdParadise.com is mostly article-focused, the advanced formatting features were a necessity. That's the primary reason why they're there. Especially the code syntax and equation editing buttons which I don't realistically expect users to use often.
Yesterday
Yesterday I finished the site and started to run importers. My goal was to import ALL data from the old site to this new one. I succeeded in most places. I failed in 2. I tried to import the forum posts. The data format was much too different and there were too many posts that it made doing so impractical. I figured I could leave the archived version of the site up and all would be well, eventually. The other part I royally failed at was importing the messages. I wrote the set of queries to import the messages. I got the conversation headers and even the message headers importer just fine. Then when I ran the message item query
THE DATA CENTER IN WHICH THE MYSQL SERVER WAS HOUSED EXPLODED IN A GIANT MUSHROOM CLOUD THUS VAPORIZING ALL HUMANS WITHIN A TWENTY-THREE MILE RADIUS which is why your messages are not currently present. Once the server was restored I dared not run that query again, so you'll just have to look at the archived version of the site for your messages. Again, the archive site is
here. There are 1.9 million messages in the system. The new message format for TwoCans2 actually duplicates each message item so that would have been 3.8 million entries (this is to allow users to independently delete messages). That is a lot for a MySQL hobbyist like my self and the unfortunate bystanders that were near the data center.
Today
I launched TwoCans2. No serious defects have been discovered thanks to the valiant efforts of the people in the IRC channel who bug-bashed the thing last night. Tonight I will be making a few more fixes typically focused around usability that people have pointed out in the forum. Also, I have received a few complaints that messages in conversations that were completely anonymous are not recoverable or useful in any way in read-only mode. Therefore I will write a feature (on the
archive site) that will allow you to click a button next to the message and transfer that conversation over to new TwoCans.
Tomorrow
If no
serious issues are found with TwoCans, I will be moving on to releasing NerdParadise.com. If you were annoyed by the upgrade downtime, think about the poor souls over on NP that have been without a home since TwoCans originally went down. Hopefully the transfer over there will go smoother than it did for TwoCans, but there may be a few service "flickers" when I do certain upgrade/transfer tasks. So heads up on that.
...and that is the scoop of what's going on right now or went on recently. Again, I merged the account systems for TwoCans and NerdParadise. It is entirely possible that something went wrong during that merge causing account casualties. So far I've only run into one (special) case of this happening, but there could be more. If you are having trouble logging in, just register a new temporary account and send me a message with "ZOMG I CANNOT LOG IN WITH MY OTHER ACCOUNT" in the message title. Please let me know what your user account name was and I will try to figure out what happened.
Thank you for reading and hope you enjoy the new site!
But great job on the new site! Thanks!
Will I get in trouble for posting in multiple languages? Like English, French, Romanian, Java... XD j/k about the java, sort of
Will I get in trouble for posting in multiple languages? Like English, French, Romanian, Java... XD j/k about the java, sort of
You can post in Java as long as you use a decent English-language API and don't start making up a bunch of custom classes.
Definitely.
It really isn't that big of a deal. It's actually quite simple if you sit down and think about it.
With all due respect, you could kindly carry on your own business and simply ignore the time of the post and use the convenient little clock in the corner of your screen for all your other time based needs.
However, the precision changes to me is like the difference between one of those fancy watches that are slightly more on the second than another cheaper one.
However, both will easily get me to work on time, so I'm lacking motivation to learn the O'Harean time system.
Edit: I just realized we're taking over the thread.
Yeah, unless I'm mistaken, all those users are TwoCans natives. So, I guess that warning really only applies to the NPer's.
Out of pure curiosity I'm wondering how long twocansandstring.com has been a site? I'm not talking about just this version of TwoCans, but the version before this current one, (and any other versions that were in existence even before).
Also, while I'm on the topic of the old TwoCans, and since I'm feeling nostalgic, there's no way I can still look at the archived site, is there?
This was the first user to register other than me, so his registration date is the creation date of the site. NP was created 12 years ago so you may see older registration dates in cross-listed threads.
btw what is 29th june in o'harean?
Well, I'm not a part of that thread
Wouldn't it have just been easier to store who deleted what instead of another copy of the message? Presumably just a string with the username of whoever deleted it, because if they both delete it you can just drop the row.
The text of each message is only stored once in a separate table and each entry just has an ID# to that entry. Those are deleted when all participants in the thread have deleted a message item.