Category Archives: The-Spot.Network

The-Spot.Network is composed of the various websites and services created by [[Neo]] and his colleagues spun off the community base at the primary website: the-spot.net

A face-lift and an update

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It’s been right around a year since I posted last in the blog, and I figured it was time for an update, after someone commented on my How to Handle Online Harassment blog post and a code error prevented me from approving and replying.

A couple new things have happened that have kept me out of the how-to-tech world as much as I have been in the past:

First I was married around this time last year. The wedding itself was an exercise in fusing current technology with the 1940s. The wedding ceremony music was timed to the second from start to finish so it could begin on 11/11/11 @ 11:11am. (If only the sound booth guy would have followed instructions, everything would have worked out fine). Everything was instrumental, but varied from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, to Smashmouth’s Accidentally In Love. I walked out, of course, to the opening credits music from The Matrix: Revolutions. It had to be done.

The reception music was all controlled from my Motorola Atrix Android phone, using some Brookstone Outdoor Wireless Speakers, and a subscription to Grooveshark.com. A slideshow video was created using Animoto.com to add a little more flair and excitement to the otherwise dull “here’s all our photos from our entire life – YOU MUST WATCH THIS BORING THING” video. I hate those – especially the ones that require 3 or 4 songs to finish – mine was 1 song and only spanned our adult lives from just before we met up to the wedding. You can view it below (if you have Flash):

The decorations for the wedding (if they had to be ordered) were all homemade with the materials being ordered online, and mostly from etsy.com. I made our Save the Date notifications and our wedding invitations in Adobe Fireworks, and we created a Facebook page to keep everyone up to date, and a Google Document for handling the RSVPs using the Custom Form interface.

Source: appboy.com

The second major tech-related event in my life was receiving my first iPad (3rd Gen) as my wedding gift to myself when it was released in March. I have had it with me every day, all day, and have been trying to use it as a content production device, but there are just no good apps for anything other than photo editing for my various interests. There are indeed a ton of apps out there for other peoples’ interests, but coding and photography are where mine lie, and I have yet to find a coding app that meets my three feature criteria: SFTP, PHP code highlighting, SVN control – all within the same app.

If you’re aware of any apps that contain all 3 of those features, please let me know in the comments below. I have been searching for nearly 9 months now, and have run across several that meet 2 out of 3 – and as the song goes, “2 out of 3 ain’t bad,” but since there is no file system that spans multiple apps, I need all 3 for it to effectively replace my work laptop.

I did consider starting a “working in the cloud: iPad edition” series, but I don’t have the money that someone like iPad Today has for trying and testing all kids of app recommendations, and there are already fairly comprehensive blogs dedicated to this subject, like AppAdvice.com.

In other tech news, I started backing various projects on Kickstarter.com. So far I have backed 3 projects that I considered useful or unique items.

First to ship, but the 2nd project I backed, was the SmarterStand from smarterstand.com. So far I have not engaged in 100% use of the product because I currently use a DoDoCase for my daily iPad protection. However, I foresee a future blog post here reviewing the product once I do decide to use it daily.

The first product I backed, and likely next to ship, was the popular Pebble Watch. I have been waiting for this since May 2012, and look forward to the day it actually ships. I don’t know if I will get involved in writing any applications for it, but I do plan to test it both with my Android phone and my iPad.

And most recently, a product that hasn’t even met its funding goal yet: Light by Moore’sCloud. If you’re reading this before 12/21/2012, please pledge to back it also…not because of the Mayan Calendar, but because there are 25 days to go (at the time of this post) and they are only 26.3% funded. It is a mobile-controlled (iOS at the moment) lamp that runs LAMP, with an app for controlling the color, timers, and wifi for alerts & additional functionality. It’ll match any part of an image for color choice, as well as cycle through other custom choices. You’ll have to watch the video on their page to get all the details of this beautifully designed product.

And finally in other news, as I mentioned at the start of the post, I was forced to update the blog in general because I had a legit comment on my How to Handle Online Harassment blog post, and I needed to approve and reply to it. In doing so, I removed several plugins, updated several more, and decided to go with the “twenty eleven” blog theme from WordPress this time. It’s simpler, and now my blog works with the WordPress iPad app.

In updating and replying to the aforementioned comment, I noticed that someone cited my article in their own article back in April 2012, along with many other sources. Their article was titled “Social networks: the rise of online harassment“. This marks the first time I’ve been cited in something as a “source” instead of as a link. So, thank you Anna Maria Alba for considering my blog post, and its comments worthy of citation.

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Thoughts on tsn, and possible changes

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Credit: Paul Mutton

I’ve run an online community for nearly a decade now – and many spin-offs and other projects & even job opportunities have been the result of what I’ve learned while working on my websites.

I started everything when I was 18, with the help of a few friends in the college dorms at ETBU back in 2001, and from there things grew exponentially by word of mouth, until at its peak we had most of Nacogdoches High School in Nacogdoches, TX on the website. There were users in  about 7 different countries, all over the United States, and it was the start of the Social Networking concept.

Myspace came along, and then Facebook, and now things have slowed down quite a bit, as everyone has grown up and moved on with their life. The site is still home to a dedicated few that host their Journals there (which we started before the invention of blogging software).

But I find myself less and less interested in keeping up with it – and it’s a little sad after all thoughts I’ve posted on it, the ideas that others have contributed that changed the course of my life, all the long nights writing code, and just many days at work coming up with ideas & features. That huge time investment is also the reason I’m not all that crazy about re-investing so much time into getting it going again.

The site was cutting edge for its time, and we were on the forefront of the popular technologies before they were popular (video casts, podcasts, internet radio, blogging, social networking, etc). It was quite literally The Spot you wanted to be, and we put a lot of effort into making the atmosphere of the community match that branding.

These days I’m interested in learning new things (as many of the old things I’ve built most of my sites around are being phased out). Myspace is all but gone from the minds of many internet socialites, and Facebook is reaching its Myspace pinnacle. In another 2 years, it will have gone by the wayside just as Myspace did. Twitter is also growing much faster than it expected, and as it keeps evolving out of what it originally was by adding new features, the simplicity of its design will live on, but in another application most likely.

As such, I’m considering finally implementing a domain I’ve held on to for a long time – the-blot.net, and the-blot.com – which were originally intended to be a one-stop blogging service where you can post to any of your blogs, and also read from any of your friends blogs all in one place. That idea was solved in part by Google Reader and Ping.fm’s posting abilities.

So instead of making it just about your blogs, I am going to grab the alpha version of the Diaspora project and start up another social networking site to see what kinds of technology are being implemented in the next generation of social clustering sites. I’m going to have to build a new Linux server & redirect my domains, as well as compile their website codes, so all of this could take a while (as I have to salvage several different computer parts for the server). But as I transition to new technologies, I’ll keep track of the changes here, just as I did when I upgraded the-spot.net from the early days of the static html tsnII to the cutting edge dynamic tsnIII back in 2004.

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Hamachi Web Status Images

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Update…

Unfortunately, LogMeIn figured out they forgot about that page, I guess when people started reading this post and hitting it on their servers. They have removed the text status as well as all the others, and I can’t figure out why they would do such a thing.

I’m also not sure what they’re offering as an alternative either. So if you know, please leave a comment below. Thanks.

Depreciated Process…

A while back, I started a project called tsn.lcl or tsnlocal, but gave up on it when my electricity bill hit $400 in a month.

Today, I decided to fix up the domain name and get it back on the internet – at least to remove it from GoDaddy’s Parking Page – where they’re making money, not me, off of it.

When I got it published I noticed that none of the Hamachi Web Status images worked anymore, and that the link to such an image, redirected to their login page for your Hamachi Management Dashboard. However, upon further investigation, I found that there was not only an Image version of those status instances, but also a text version.

I really wanted to show the online status of all my machines again, so I wrote my own php script to parse that text data, and created some simple images to show on the website based on the returned status.

So here’s the code so you can do the same thing…

The PHP Function

{code type=php}<?php
function hamachiImg($ip) {
$url = “https://my.hamachi.cc/status/text.php?$ip”;
$status = file_get_contents($url);
$status = preg_replace(‘/\d*\.\d*\.\d*.\d* /’, ”, $status);
$image_url = “./images/$status.png”;
return $image_url;
}
?>{/code}
This code creates a $url variable with the address to the text status, based on the $ip that is passed to it. Then it requests the data, removes the ip address and the trailing space, leaving only the status text. On the server, I have a collection of images with the 4 different statuses as their file name, and with that an $image_url is created to be returned.

The 4 possible statuses are:

  • – online
  • – offline
  • – unknown
  • – error

The HTML Code and PHP Function Call

Once you have your php function in the page (I stuck mine before the first <html> tag), you can use the php function to insert the image url when you pass it an IP…
{code type=html}<table>
<tr>
<td style=”width: 100%”>[[Neo]]:</td>
<td style=”width: 100%”> <img src=”<?php echo hamachiImg(’5.37.117.104′); ?>”></td>
</tr>
</table>{/code}
hamachi-exampleOnce you’ve done that, assuming you have entered a valid hamachi IP address, the results should look something like the image at right.

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Integrating Google Connect

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I’ve been part of the Google Connect beta since shortly after it came out – but it wasn’t until recently that I actually implemented it on my blog and the parent site, www.thepizzy.net. So, if you read this (and I know there has to be at least 4 other people in the world that do), go ahead and hit the Join button on it, and let me know y’all are out there. (it helps to know one is writing to an audience instead of providing technical articles to the etherworld.)

You don’t have to worry about spam or anything – I don’t like it either.

In other news, I’m also working on a tutorial entry that describes how to get data from a Google Docs Spreadsheet. Normally, I wouldn’t worry about trying to release this code, but since it was such a pain for me to figure out (like the UT3 Server setup), I’m sure it’s a pain for others to figure out as well.

The code creates a secure-authenticated session to Google Accounts, and then requests the data from a particular cell on a spreadsheet. My code goes one step further though, and posts that data to Twitter – which means it also creates an authenticated POST request via the Twitter API.

“Why do that?’ you ask…Well, if you want to be able to update a spreadsheet from, say an iPhone or other Mobile Browser, Google Docs will not let you. But I’ll explain more in the coming entry. Be looking for that sometime this week (I hope).

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JavaScript, XHTML, & AJAX…again

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Cover image for product 0471777781Well, I haven’t done much that was technically inclined, except for some various coding forays into the world of JavaScript, and XHTML– consequently it led me back to AJAX and XML-Http-Requests. But I didn’t bother to post anything about that, since it was work-related, and not website-related…kind of. Continue reading →

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