Here’s the font that is used to create those default ProBoards buttons. It took me ages to get the information to locate the right font, I searched Google for hours, checked forums, and asked a few Yabb people, and finally ended up getting it.

It’s actually an easy font to find if you know the name :P.

Here’s a link for you to download it…

ocraext.zip

To duplicate the ProBoards buttons, use white for the text, then apply a 1 px black border around it.

So, I have finished it. Would have posted this yesterday, but I haven’t been able to upload the files to the host, something wrong with the FTP, so I downloaded a program that uploads via SSH using Putty.

Anyway, here it is, comments and suggestions would be appreciated please.

http://proboards.pixeldepth.net/Button_Generator/

So like I mentioned in my previous post, I would give myself a challenge to see if I can create a decent ProBoards Button Generator application so that users who want to create the default ProBoards buttons can do.

Here are some screen shots of the application so far, it’s took me all day to do this. It’s very close to being finished, I need to fix one problem with generating the download for the file, and then do a bit of clean up with my code.

If anyone remembers the Yabb Button Generator, you will know that it is helpful for creating ProBoards buttons, as they are indentical (v1 buttons from Yabb). Problem is, the generator no longer works, the website still exists, but you can not get access to the generator, it appears to have been removed.

http://www.buttongenerator.org/

The script to generate the buttons is in Perl, coded by Christian A. Erös (aka cae), and I have not found another button generator that generates the ProBoards style buttons.

So apart from manually creating them by joining the letters together (or getting hold of the font to generate them), a lot of people are out of luck. So I thought I would have a go at creating one specifically for ProBoards in PHP.

I’ll keep you posted how I get on with it. I really should be doing other things, but I like a good challenge

Spotted it 2 days ago in the dashboard that WordPress have a new release for 2.1. I don’t think I will rush to upgrade this time, usually I am keen on upgrading and getting the latest release, but considering there doesn’t seem any security issues and that I have made custom changes to the PHP, I think I will wait for a while.

We’ve got a new bugfix and security release for both of our actively maintained branches of WordPress. Version 2.1.1 includes about 30 bug fixes, mostly minor things around encoding, XML-RPC, the object cache, and HTML code.

Since the end of January, I have been monitoring how often BigWetFish (my web host) goes down. To do this I registered at a website which monitors it for me, and they provide various statistics which you can view below…

http://www.siteuptime.com/statistics.php?Id=48510&&UserId=62030

So it seems they are maintaining a 99% + uptime, but the amount of outages so far seem rather high. The true number isn’t even 12 from what you see on the stats page, it’s more like 17, as I didn’t start the monitoring till the end of January.

Ah well, it’s not too bad, am pretty happy with the host to be honest, had no real long outages, which is good.

One of the things developers want is a way to perform cross site XMLHttpRequests, I am one of those. At the moment the best way to perform cross site requests via Javascript is to send a request off to your own server where there is a script sitting there waiting for your request that then goes off and performs it for you and returns back data. It works, but you need to do a little bit of work.

I was looking around the Mozilla Wiki, and it appears that Firefox 3 could support cross site XMLHttpRequests.

Cross-Site XMLHttpRequest allows a web page to read information from other web servers using norm XMLHttpRequest. In the past this has not been permitted since the other server may be sitting inside a corporate firewall or may be a server where the user is logged in.

To solve this problem it is suggested that the accessed server can signal back to the browser that it is ok for other sites to access certain pages on the server. Firefox checks for this and only returns the response to the page if the server explicitly allow.

The main concern at the moment is security. This month there is going to be a review for the feature to address the security issues. According to Jonas Sicking on the mailing list…

For Firefox 3 we’re planning on adding support for cross site
XMLHttpRequest. To make sure that this new feature will be as safe as
possible we are planning on holding a security review for the feature this
coming wednesday (2/21) at 3pm PST (11pm GMT). We’ll go through both
security issues in the feature itself and potential security issues in the
implementation design.

The idea of the meeting is not to solve every concern that we can come up
with, but rather try to come up with an extensive list of possible security
problems that we need to check the final implementation for.

A background document that contains an initial list of possible security
issues is available here:

http://wiki.mozilla.org/Cross_Site_XMLHttpRequest

I had a quick glance at the background document, and it appears that domains will use some sort of xml file, a bit like the cross domain policy file that is currently used. So I assume you will be able to specify what domains can make cross site requests to your domain.

So yeah, good things coming, shame other vendors aren’t as keen.

Just spotted this…

http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/

You’ll be randomly paired with a partner who’s online and using the feature. Over a 90-second period, you and your partner will be shown the same set of images and asked to provide as many labels as possible to describe each image you see. When your label matches your partner’s label, you’ll earn some points and move on to the next image until time runs out. After time expires, you can explore the images you’ve seen and the websites where those images were found. And we’ll show you the points you’ve earned throughout the session

Quite good, bit of fun.

I barely come on MSN now, mainly cause I’m busy. With MSN you can install various addons to enhance it, most popular one being the MSN Plus! addon which adds a bunch of features. While I was on MSN yesterday, I decided to have a look through the preferences of MSN Plus, and I noticed that the plugins (scripts) are coded in jscript (IE’s version of Javascript, basically the same). I’ve had it installed for a long time now, so am not sure when MSN Plus had a scripting engine implemented.

But yeah, anyway, I had a little go at it, not something I will be learning (need to learn the functions that MSN Plus supplies to you via scripting), but it’s pretty cool.

Here’s the link to the manual, it’s well documented, so if you have good knowledge of Javascript, you can jump straight in and create cool addons for MSN.

http://www.msgpluslive.net/scripts/browse/index.php?act=view&id=13

Been having to do quite a bit of mod-rewriting lately, but sometimes I forget some of the flags, and what regular expressions can be used. It annoyed me that I would have to go looking through references, I wanted some sort of cheat sheet, I didn’t need full explanations. After a little bit of searching, I came across an image that was a cheat sheet. I have bookmarked it, but thought I would post it here in case anyone else would like it…