I’m feeling rather proud of myself right now. I just completed a script to handle my fanlisting codes and I’m thrilled to say it’s working exactly the way I planned. ^_^

Looking at the page, you wouldn’t see anything that truly different. My images will all appear to load normally. But if you look at the image’s URL, you’ll see it’s PHP rather than an image. *huge grins*

For those technically inclined, the script basically first checks to see whether or not the image is being accessed from my blog. If it is, the script progresses and serves the image being called. However, if someone tries putting the image as part of their signature on say — Xanga or Gaia Online — the script will first log the attempt and then terminate.

To make it easier on myself if someone figures out how to circumvent the script, I even stored the fanlisting code directory in an array. That way if I need to move or rename the folder, I only have to edit just that particular line and every code will be changed.

I’d still like to add a few more security checks, but right now this is awesome. There are times I feel like I’ve learned nothing new in college and then I completely surprise myself by doing something like this.

I have no real problem with people using stuff, but I’m awful protective of my bandwidth. My baseline server costs are plenty without overage charges. Besides, they can download the fanlisting codes on the fanlisting site and use photobucket. It’s just stupid.

College is going well. I got 100% on my first speech — talk about awkward, though. I’m not used to web cameras, so I stared at my monitor the whole time. XD I was so wooden too!

I really need to get around to calling my academic adviser, but I keep procrastinating. I need to get details about what I need to be doing to get an internship somewhere, but I’m feeling rather “meh” about the whole thing.

Well, time to get on my English homework. Yes, another level of English. -_-; Wish I could test out, but it’s business writing so I suppose I should pay attention.

Much ♥ — talk to everyone soon.

For my CS332A final, I decided to make an RSS feed that listed my most recently updated projects for the eFiction script including skins, modifications, and plug-in type functions such as blocks and panels. I installed it in the header of my personal site (rather than crux, which seems to hate me right now) so RSS capable browsers would automatically make it available to my users.

XML Project Feed: project.xml

I originally wanted to do both an RSS feed as well as an XML document listing all my available projects. The RSS feed came together quickly, though I did have some problems getting it to validate correctly. (I kept wanting to use 4 letter month abbreviations and it took me a while to realize it wanted only 3 letter abbreviations.) Unfortunately, I didn’t have the same luck with my project list. I guess I didn’t understand XSL as well as I thought I did, because I’m having a problem figuring out what I’m doing wrong.

If you’d like to see my project list XML document, you can find it here: full_project_list.xml

I do plan on finishing it up eventually, I really do need something to keep my projects straight. Once I finish up the rest of my finals, I’ll probably return to it just to see if I can finish before midnight.

Well, as you may have gathered from Jasson’s journal everything is still more or less going okay.

I really need to find out why I’m so quick to panic. I have two weeks where I’m fine; the picture of calm. And then suddenly I find myself either panicking or pissed off for absolutely no reason whatsoever. >_> *sighs* Basically, if I write a post where I’m super panicked, please don’t take me too seriously. You’ll know if it’s serious if Jasson says something.

….

We’re almost done with fall semester and then we have a bit before Winter semester begins. I’m passing my graphics class with flying colors, though relearning HTML has been a bit of a challenge. I haven’t done any nested table layouts in years… which means I am seriously out of practice. In my final assignment for that chapter, I couldn’t figure out how to get one of the inner tables to align properly. I’ve never been particularly skilled at forms either, so that gave me trouble too. The most forgiving chapter yet has been frames (wow!) and CSS (duh.) XD

However, my absolute lowest moment came when I had to make a CSS map. It was supposed to have little boxes that would appear on top of the map when you moused over the corresponding landmark. I would get one part working and then everything I’d done before would die on me. I finally got it working in MSIE, but the damn thing wouldn’t work in Firefox. Only after I turned it in did I find out I was one character away from making them work.

I wrote:

#point01
{ CSS goes here }

but I had to write:

#point01 A
{ Same CSS goes here}

I forgot to put that “A” at the end of the CSS declaration, which tells browsers that the spot is also a link. >_< Since Firefox is a bit more strict than MSIE, it didn't understand what I was doing.

Other than that, school is going pretty well. I’ll be glad when this semester is over, but I’m not looking forward to next semester either. I’m going to have about $400 – $500 worth of books I’ll need to purchase for just four classes.

I swear these publishers must be bandits. That much money for books is simply outrageous. Though I suppose I should be happy; since once I walked out of the bookstore at CMU once with $800 worth of books and supplies. All the same, I’d really prefer not to have to pay that much or tack that much onto my student loans.

I also recently discovered that I’m probably going to need to either buy more space for Lunaescence or simply buy another space for my graphics. I released two skins for the eFiction script last month and the downloads are simply killing my bandwidth. It took me a bit to figure it out, since I kept having hack attempts all last month. (More on that below.) Now that the chaos has calmed down, I can clearly see the suckage is coming from those two files. >_>

It seems strange (and almost flattering) to see hits coming from Web sites in Germany, France, Italy and know they’re using my eFiction skins. Seems even stranger when I look at my inbox and see all the requests for custom layouts and advice on how we did some things.

Part of me really is amazed by the reaction, but the other part of me keeps thinking “What in the world have I gotten myself into?”

Anyway, yeah… hack attempt. Last month, a guy in Italy released a full disclosure of eFiction’s security vulnerabilities and how to exploit them. I mean right down to the scripting they should use. Fake gif images, SQL injections, and remote scripting — oh my. So I had several hundred attempts to find “suntzu.php” in my non-existent author image folders, plus attempts to create directories, strange e-mails apparently generated by my script, and more. Lets just say the archive only looks the same. On top of the security patches Tammy released, I damn near changed the archive’s entire file structure.

All while trying to get all this homework done. XD I’ll say one thing, if those people did any service it was teaching me how to multi-task better. Though I just wish I could whittle down the modification requests, layout requests, and question e-mails so I could do a new layout for my blog and get the Christmas layout done for the main site.

My new layout is giving me all kinds of fits.

LOL Yes, another. XD This layout was just temporary until my photos came back.

Anyroad, I’m attempting to pull of a really cool CSS trick where I make it look like I’m using frames when I’m not. The middle area is supposed to scroll while the area outside is supposed to remain static. I even created a nice mouse-over navigation… though I couldn’t make it anywhere as sophisticated as the first time I saw one like it.

I have the layout working. In Firefox at least. I found out only after I’d lost my temper that IE doesn’t support fixed positioning. >_>

I searched through Google and found a few different work-arounds and I managed to get it looking a little better. Not great, but a little. The whole thing came together just as fast as my old Poison Paradise layout and I love it just as much. Which grates at me because Poison Paradise worked on everything, this thing won’t work on IE.

…. and I just realized that I really need to get working on my homework, but this is far more interesting. ^^;;

I’ve been trying for a while now to come up with a new layout for Stone Circles that I actually like. No luck. Frankly, aside from my Nadesico layout for the domain, I really haven’t felt very inspired at all.

I just attempted a Wonder Girl layout, but it came out looking really lame. What I wanted to do was have a nice, comic-book looking picture of her on the side with a nice, thin sidebar, then a title box, and then a mouseover menu with little comic book speech bubbles set on a rollover, and then the text area. In my head, it kicks major ass. In PSP, though… it looks ugly. Really ugly.

I’ve filled my notebooks with sketches of what I want to do, from the basic layout, to the finer details. Still can’t get the idea to jell. I want a challenge – something fun yet harder in terms of design. I can see the layouts I want to do in my mind, but I can’t seem to make them come out and play. My current blog layout litterly created itself in the span of a few hours, but now I can’t seem to come up with something in the span of months.

Blah, I guess that’s why I’m going to college. ^_^;;