You can now grab the absolute latest AutoSite development build on AppVeyor. This has the latest features/fixes/bugs but does not represent the final RC. Everything that is included in a regular GitHub release is included here, including Core and Windows 10 metadata.
Feel free to grab a testing copy of RC3 and let me know what you think.
23 days without a devlog! But rest assured that RC3 is coming along, and it could be one of the largest RCs yet.
A basic startpage has been added for when no sites are open. This replaces the “create or open a site folder” message in earlier versions:
It displays the Create or open a site folder option alongside your recently opened sites. I wouldn’t consider the design finalized just yet, but it serves its purpose.
More extensions have been added; these are now editable and render without Apricot asking to make sure:
Additionally some fixes were made to accommodate for gophermap being, well, not an extension.
Visual Basic 2010 Express Edition is now being used for development, stepping up from 2008. For the foreseeable future .NET Framework 2.0 will still be targeted, though 4.0 is a possibility should the need arise.
Fun fact: did you know registration still works for 2010 Express? It does! No need for registry hacks to keep the Express trial period from expiring.. at least while it’s still up.
The in/ folder has been renamed to pages/. AutoSite will prompt to convert a site with the old format.
A button for running a Sanitary Build has been added to the right of the regular build option, which is now captioned to make it stick out more.
A new Quickstart dialog has been adding to hopefully make the AutoSite Method™ (patent pending) seem less daunting to first time users.
Please pay your respects for:
I’ve gotten AutoSite Core to run as a task in Visual Studio Code. If you’re into that, have a peek at this wiki page.
I have now fleshed out the Windows Media Player section, available here.
I’d also like to note that most of (if not all) the skins do indeed work on WMP 12 and Windows 10, though it’s not immediately apparent. Just go to View > Skin Chooser while in the Library view.
Download and enjoy. Greetz to windows-media-player.com and this archive.org collection for making it happen.
I’ve been working on a revamp of my site! In doing so I’ve been practicing some PHP; one thing I wanted to do was have a randomized image on the homepage that would change every day. Looking around online I didn’t find many drop-in solutions I could just stick on the page, so I pieced together my own; and PHP actually makes it rather simple.
<?php
$today = (int)date('Yz');
srand($today);
$files = glob('photography/*.jpg');
$file = array_rand($files);
echo '<a href="[#root#]photography/"><img src="' . $files[$file] . '" alt="Picture of the day" style="border: 3px solid #444"></a>';
?>
To explain, $today is set to the current date in the Yz format which is in the form of year and day in the year; for example, if today is 4/6/2020, it would come out to 202097. Tomorrow, it’d be 202098. That is converted from a string into an integer with (int), as it is going to seed PHP’s random number generator with srand(). Otherwise, the output would be random on every refresh.
glob() is then used to get all the jpg files in the photography directory and store that as $files. array_rand() is used to select one item’s index value at random from that array. The filename as $files[$file] is then concatenated and printed into the HTML with echo.
If desired, you can display other information about the image as well later down the page. I’ve done this to show the date the image was taken. This too is fairly simple when you get down to it, provided that your image does have this in its Exif metadata.
<?php
$exif = exif_read_data($files[$file], 'IFD0');
$takenDate = strtotime($exif['DateTime']);
echo date('F j, Y', $takenDate);
?>
exif_read_data() is used to read this information. The DateTime IDF0 attribute is fed into strtotime() so it’s understandable by PHP and then echoed out as a new human-readable format with date(). And that’s about it!
Here’s a place with some more Exif information in case you’re into experimenting. Also check out the PHP documentation.
Photography page has been updated with new shots: new stuff starts on the second row. Here’s a sample:
The first version of dotcomboom (the site) was brought upon the world in March 2018.
May saw the iconic(?) graph paper look (something I “borrowed” from the earliest site of an old acquaintance from earlier long-winded group stuff back in 2016 and 2017) ditched in favor of some public domain photography from a content producer I used to watch, and shortly there-after run through a program to make it all pixel-y. Also introduced was a project I had done in node.js called Neohitz, hosted on a site called Glitch, that sought to replace the image-based hit counters and modified date indicators everyone else on my old webhost was using with something more “modern”; that is, if you consider document.write('blah') modern. The jukebox also got removed by the 11th.
Some work was done separating the main navigation from the more minor stuff.
This stuck around until June, when it was tossed for no CSS at all, and very(!) shortly after that, an orange take, which also got restyled shortly afterward.
July saw the introduction of my personal favorite layout of this time, one that I’d use elements for many months to come. I’ll note that this was around the time I began to write and use what would become AutoSite Legacy, then just called AutoSite.
Going into October, I pulled a 180 and moved the whole site to a Bootstrap template for the meme.
Later in October, I came back with a new version of the previous layout. The banner at the top cycled randomly through screenshots of The Powder Toy with some JavaScript.
This would be the final layout on my old web host.
dotcomboom.somnolescent.net launched as The Snake Shack (with a rather embarassing intro text) in December. This version of the site stayed until March or so and can still be accessed here if you’re brave enough.
July saw a comeback of the earlier layout with a new theme, featuring a hue-adjusted version of the old banner and Hypercard snakes (graciously ripped by mariteaux).
This lasted through October, when the site got another overhaul with the water.css framework.
That brings us to today:
Pages have been added, and things have been tweaked with since, with the blog being formally launched in late January. As for the future? Anything can happen, so keep your eyes peeled.
Here’s a collage I did of the sites in the xxiivv webring. Screenshots were taken and downloaded using this script I hacked up:
import requests
import json
import time
with open("sites.json", "r") as read_file:
sites = json.load(read_file)
x = -1
for site in sites:
x += 1
print(x, site['url'])
try:
r = requests.get("http://image.thum.io/get/noanimate/" + site['url'])
except:
time.sleep(2)
r = requests.get("http://image.thum.io/get/noanimate/" + site['url'])
title = ""
try:
title = "_" + site['title'].replace('\\', '')
except:
pass
with open('images/' + str(x) + title + '.png', 'wb') as f:
f.write(r.content)
They were then fed into this collage maker script to produce the output. Some sites displayed as blank; the only way to work around that would be to use thum.io‘s /wait/ feature; unfortunately that’s only for their registered plans. It still came out neat and I now know of a quick way to make collages.
I’ve implemented a new thing that’ll be coming to RC3 pertaining to escaping attributes and conditionals. It’s ultra-helpful for documentation, as I have had issues before in trying to keep samples from being processed by Apricot. To escape, you’d add $ to the start of it.
$[#content#]
$[path=index.md]Escaped conditional[/path=]To compare, here’s what you would’ve had to do before:
<span>[</span>#root#]Ich.
4/6/2020 – hahaha future dcb here! this broke my photography page that uses php so I removed this. sorry!
Yes, modified dates in AutoSite now! [#modified#] will spit out a date according to your system locale settings. I’ve been using this currently on my site.
There was a bug where if you had AutoSite open on a second monitor (or even just a higher-res display) and closed it, then reopened AutoSite where that point was not a part of your display setup, the window would be stuck off-screen with no easy way to bring it over. This drove me mad so I fixed it. 8)
