<?php
$today = (int)date('Yz');
    
srand($today);
    
$files = glob('*/*/thumbs/*.jpg');  // your folder structure goes here, my new one is like 2018/september/thumbs/*.jpg
$file = array_rand($files);

// open the file in a binary mode
$name = $files[$file];
$fp = fopen($name, 'rb');

// send the right headers
header("Content-Type: image/jpeg");
header("Content-Length: " . filesize($name));

// dump the picture and stop the script
fpassthru($fp);
exit;
?>

Embedded like this:

<img src="oftheday.php" alt="[img]">

(If you need to display EXIF information or link to the original image, see this script instead.)

Since it was surprisingly difficult for me to find, here is LimeChat 2.26 on SourceForge. It’s not the last version that can run on PPC, but it’s what I could find an active download link for. I might sift through the Wayback Machine if need be.

Runs great on my G4 with a quick setup.

May is Gopher month, and Pituophis, a project I hadn’t worked on since last year has finally gotten some of the treatment it deserved. 1.1 is now out with a bunch of changes.

I’ve refactored a ton of stuff, changed things around, etc. etc., and on top of that wrote a graphical Gopher client (in 200 lines!) to demonstrate it. Long timers may remember this essay I wrote on the Somnolescent blog mid-last year; while this doesn’t implement all that desktop integration stuff I’d love to see in a Gopher client eventually, it does implement the tree view part, at least partially. Consider it a proof of concept. Maybe not the most pretty looking thing in the world, but decently functional.

It doesn’t stop there though, as I caved and cleaned up Gophew a whole bunch, which is a couple of scripts for hosting a search-enabled server. It’s running on the new and rejuvenated Somnolescent Gopher server as we speak.

Looking forward to doing more with this protocol soon. It’s good to be back.

Updates to the blog!

First off, a WAP version of the Patio is now accessible here. Put simply, it uses a lightweight variant of XHTML designed for earlier mobile phones and cellular networks. It uses this WordPress plugin.

And also, the Patio itself has gotten a fresh coat of paint with that sweet, sweet Aero flair. I came across the theme on an archived version of the WordPress theme index, though you may still find it here. (Good luck finding it through much other means, as browsing WordPress’s theme index for anything but new, overly modern stuff is rather difficult past Twenty Ten.) I tweaked it just a little bit, and man is it looking spiffy, complete with working Start menu.

I like it. It strikes as just enough to have that early personal weblog feeling to it while being distinct. And really shiny. I’m not sure if I’ll keep this look, in case I come across another theme that matches the general feel I’m trying to accomplish with this blog, but it’s likely going to stick around for a while.

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.

Start Page

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.

Known extensions added

More extensions have been added; these are now editable and render without Apricot asking to make sure:

• phtml (an alternative, lesser-known extension for PHP)
• gophermap

Additionally some fixes were made to accommodate for gophermap being, well, not an extension.

The Great 2010 Migration

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.

in/ renamed

The in/ folder has been renamed to pages/. AutoSite will prompt to convert a site with the old format.

Build panel updates

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.

Quickstart

A new Quickstart dialog has been adding to hopefully make the AutoSite Method™ (patent pending) seem less daunting to first time users.

Removed features

Please pay your respects for:

• Pack installation, which was introduced in RC1. Although the feature worked, it made AutoSite unable to launch on older versions of Windows due to using a shell32 interop to extract archives. Although it may come back in the future, it’s disabled for now for the sake of compatibility.
• Legacy AutoSite build support. This was a tricky decision but I decided that it’d be for the better to streamline the build process, and it relied on a pyinstaller-based binary anyhow.

AutoSite Core on Visual Studio Code

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.

whoops I did a sketch.

I have now fleshed out the Windows Media Player section, available here.

• 6 additional visualizations (making a total of 16 packs)
• 183 skins (making up a total of ~314mb), including Beck
• 12 plug-ins

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.