20080805 - Code Move
Did you know I have a feature that will serve a static
image for sites like MySpace? I don't really flaunt it--for good reason. This update
finishes this feature. Actually, I had it done months and months ago, but had never changed
the feature over to use the new Engine code (the programming objects responsible for creating a
statbar). Someone asked about this feature and I had to perform a code move to get the rest
of it working.
So why don't I tell people about this feature? Since I don't want to
slam Groundspeak's servers any more than necessary, I configured the Statbar Modifier to update
the static images only once an hour. You can't get an instant statbar out of that because
the static image, being what it is, bypasses all the Statbar Modifier code.
Anyone can ask
for a static image, but if you want to update it to some other statbar design, you'll have to send
me the new link so I can plug it in. Since I don't want to create user accounts and all that jazz,
that's the only secure way so someone else doesn't update your statbar to something else.
20080613 - Maintenance
When looking through the error log, I saw an error
when requesting some statbars from gc.com. I wonder if this is nearing the tipping point
for the number of statbars requested every minute?
Here are some stats from the server
logs:
3.277 GB transferred in the last seven days
6.5 million statbars served
An
estimated 30,000 statbars served per day since the beginning of May?
The most popular statbar
Interesting. And all this without advertising! See? If you have
something people like, they'll eventually come without you having to contribute to the
rampant online advertising monstrocity!
20080501 - Information
I'm ashamed to say I forgot about this page and
continued updating the Change Log page. I added the rest of the news.
20080429 - Information
I checked the server logs around this day.
Did you know, since its creation, the Statbar Modifier has served over 5,300,000 statbars?
To say the least, I was surprised. I wonder what this means for bandwidth?
20080429 - New Feature
I added a color picker to the Background Options
section. You can now pick your text color without having to know HTML.
20080227 - Code Move
I moved some code to the test site. This
features updated header links so you can access this page. After seeing a post
in a Netherlands forum asking for my email address, I added a direct link to my
gc.com profile's contact page to the site's home page.
20080226 - Bug Fix
After the new code move on Feb. 20th, I noticed
there were some errors creating statbars, especially for people who
have not had statbars through the Statbar Modifier before. I
traced it back to the point it requests the statbar graphic from
geocaching.com. Something about the connection produced an
error less than 1% of the time. I had to spend a lot of time
testing a way around this. During my testing, I saw some
people are using my testing site (it's the "logo" folder, whereas "statbar"
is the main site) for their statbars, which isn't a good thing.
Anyway, I moved over the new code and that cleared it up.
Code is weird some times.
20080219 - Animated statbars
and large animations
I'm not yet publicizing the fact I can
create animated statbars. That's still a long way from being
supported 100% and I still don't know if I can do it. I was
asked to put a really nice animation on someone's statbar.
After spending more than an hour with it, I decided to deny the
request. The original animation was a hefty 374KB and 71
frames. I spent a lot of time shrinking it and playing with
the settings. I got it down to 24KB, which was really good.
Feeding that into the Statbar Modifier, that produced around a 140KB
statbar. Most statbars I serve are 10KB or less.
Including that statbar would take more time for someone to download
and it would quickly eat into my bandwidth (I provide 100% of the
funding for this and refuse to use ads).
I didn't like to
deny the request, but couldn't come up with a way to reduce the
statbar size any more than I had. Therefore, this was the
first denied logo.
20071231 - Animated statbars, stable version!
I
finally created a stable version of the animated statbar code.
There is still a lot to do if I want to build an animated logo into
every variety of statbar. But, first, I have a few other
things to experiment with.
20071225 - Animated statbar progress
I finally
completed a dirty version of the code which will support animations.
There are still a lot of stuff I have to work on. For
instance, the code is completely incapable of resizing animated
images before it begins. You can only have the animation on
the left and cannot use a logo on the right. Stuff like that.
But at least the proof of concept works!
20071218 - Code Roll-up
Someone asked if I could
include animations in the statbar. In order to do this, I will
have to edit the code a lot. Therefore, I'm sending the
current stable version of the code to the main site before I begin.
20071108 - Bug Fix - Accordion on Firefox
There
was a bug with images loading in the accordion on Firefox. I
completely fixed the problem with this release. If people
haven't noticed by now, for a page that can have more than 500 logos
on it, it loads really fast. That's because when I originally
created the site, I anticipated this problem and programmed the
accordion accordingly. Basically, it will only load images
when you click to expand another part of the accordion. It
took some good scripting for that to happen and I'm proud this has
worked so well.
20071101 - Added waymarking.com stats
In case
someone wanted to add waymarking stats to the statbar, I added that
capability.
20071026 - Bug Fixes
Just your normal bug fixes.
I also fixed a sizing issue when a negative width is used with a
negative background indent
20071016 - First version of statbars with backgrounds
I came out with the UI that lets you create statbars with
backgrounds. Yeah!
20070911 - Customizable statbars!
I rewrote the
statbar engine to allow for statbars with a background. Since
the program is still consuming the gc.com statbar, I had to make
that transparent. This is the alpha release.