goo.tc

Scott Hardie | August 1, 2006
Welcome to the new site! Here's the place to discuss today's launch, which was fourteen long months in the making. It's a pleasure and relief to see it live at last. Later today I'll tell the story of how the conversion happened and why it took so long, but for now I want to open the floor to user discussion. What do you think of the new place?

If you encounter any bugs (nothing exposes a site's glitches faster than publishing it), please mention them here or email me. My day today is devoted to goo.tc.

Erik Bates | August 1, 2006
[hidden by request]

Scott Horowitz | August 1, 2006
Agreed, though it's going to take a while to get used to it

Jeremiah Poisson | August 1, 2006
I like the new look. I feel as though I have much to explore. It's an insperation for me to get working on a redesign of my own.

I'll keep a look out for bugs as well as getting to my long over-do FIN post.

Sites looking good! I better get back to work though :)

Scott Horowitz | August 1, 2006
Can you explain the new scoring system also?

Michael Paul Cote | August 1, 2006
Wow, what an eye opener first thing in the morning. Looks great! Still checking things out. One thing that immediately jumped at me was that my pop up blocker nailed the "correct answer" portion on the goo game. Other than that, no probs yet. Nicely done, Scott.

Scott Horowitz | August 1, 2006
I also gotta know where you came up with the name "Exquisite Corpse"

Scott Hardie | August 1, 2006
Thanks, all. I'm excited too.

Scoring system: Last round, someone (Russ Wilhelm I think) earned a Golden Imelda on something like the 20th goo, meaning that he had a lock on victory for almost the entire rest of the round. Zero suspense, almost no chance of others winning. Maybe that's a bad example because in the final few goos, someone else did pull ahead, but it bothered me that someone could win the round right out of the gate. The new scoring system is an attempt to alleviate that. You only have to guess 70 goos out of the 100 in the round in order to advance to the Elimination Round, where everyone has an equal chance. You can now miss a week or two and still have a healthy shot at winning. It takes the strategy out of the scoring system, but I like the simplicity of it.

Pop up blocker: I'm working on that thing now. In Firefox, the popups activated by links work, but not the popups activated by a form submission. I'm moving the guess form into a link-activated popup window to accommodate that. Maybe that defeats the purpose of having guess confirmation; we'll see.

Exquisite Corpse: When I browsed a friend's LiveJournal and clicked on the list of blog entries by her friends, it was a disharmonious jumble in chronological order, each entry having nothing to do with the one before it, not even written in the same voice. I thought of that when I programmed the Recent Posts page, which became the most prominent page of the new section, and kind of liked the thought that I was building some kind of Surrealist game. I originally called the section "Cadavre exquis" but sometimes I have to reign in my pretension, so I changed it to English. Still weird, I know, but better than "Blogs" or something generic.

Aaron Shurtleff | August 1, 2006
I like it so far, Scott! Looks awesome!

Exquisite Corpse sort of reminds me of the song "Exquisite Dead Guy" by They Might Be Giants! :)

Found a minor bug. The link to the Gaming calendar doesn't work.

Scott Hardie | August 1, 2006
Thanks. I think I fixed the Firefox guess-form bug. It's not the most elegant solution for guessing goos, but it will work for now.

I have temporarily removed the link to the calendar until I can fix the logic. It depended on you being logged in, which isn't a trustworthy system, but then only a half-dozen people could actually access that page anyway so the logic doesn't have to be sound. I'll have a fix soon.

Scott Horowitz | August 1, 2006
Anyone else thing "goo.tc" sounds metrosexual????

Lori Lancaster | August 1, 2006
[hidden by request]

Lori Lancaster | August 1, 2006
[hidden by request]

Megan Baxter | August 1, 2006
It looks great!

Exquisite Corpse is a neat idea - I'll definitely read what people already have to say. But I already have a too-often used Livejournal, so I probably won't post here myself.

And I'm very glad to have the goo game back. I'm on a month-long hiatus, since I'm almost finished my Master's (except for the conclusion. It hates me), and I won't start looking for work until mid-September. Perfect!

John E Gunter | August 1, 2006
Well so far, the site looks good. I haven't had any bugs as yet, but I'll be sure to let you know if I run into any. Not sure I like all of the color combinations that are being used, but that's just personal preference. Well that and some of the darker colors make the text a little harder to read, but I'm sure that's mostly due to an age thing! LOL.

Just have to figure out where everything is, now.

Scott Hardie | August 1, 2006
goo.tc (domain name): For a while now, I've been sick of having such a long domain name and an even longer email address; it was a headache. When I booked a hotel by phone this spring the connection wasn't very good, and I had to spell out "w-e-b-m-a-s-t-e-r-at-c-e-l-e-b-r-i-t-y-g-o-o-g-a-m-e-dot-com" verbally so the clerk could hear me. When I began planning a new site last summer, I sought out traditional domains that were shorter, but my top choice, goo.com, was owned by a cybersquatting firm that had held it since 1998 and it apparently had never been anything but a losing prospect for them. I submitted the form offering a few hundred for it, but it auto-replied saying they wouldn't even entertain offers for less than $50,000, let alone accept. Fifty thousand! For a prospect that loses them money year after year they have to keep registering it, while people like me with an honest stake in it are left out in the cold. I hate cybersquatters. I wrote back offering a few hundred more than my first offer saying it was likely the best they were going to get after all these years and that I'm running this out of my own pocket as a personal web site, but they never answered. When I discovered that Turks & Caicos Islands do not restrict their country's top-level domain, and that goo.tc was wide open, the choice was easy. Given the choice now, I'd choose goo.tc first. My only problem is that it reminds me of goatse – and trust me, if you don't know what that is, you do not want to look it up.

Lori's goo form problem: Fixed. My new db-query system emails me with the precise problem so it's a lot easier to fix.

Deer Park: I'll check it out, though I'm not sure I should support pre-release browsers. Whatever, I can do it. I'm dreading proofing my site against IE7; I've used it a little but every site I visit looks like a hurricane blew it apart. Either Microsoft is going even further away from css standards, or they're now so strictly supporting them that commonplace code won't work any more. I have to say, as a web developer, there is nothing I hate more than browser incompatibility. In the year 2006, why is it still a problem? It seems to be getting worse, not better.

Megan: Glad to have your full attention for a month and a half. :-)

Color combinations: I like them all except the hot pink of the general-use pages, but even that one has grown on me the longer I've used it. I tried diverging away from it but didn't like any other tones. I might also turn up the darker background tones; my monitor is on near-maximum brightness and I forget not everybody likes to have their retinas burned.

I sure hope I can adjust the system clock with php, because it's off by an hour and I don't see a setting for it in my hosting account options.

Scott Horowitz | August 1, 2006
How is the total user rank computed? I figured Amy would be higher than me considering she has more goos and most posts?

And about the clock, check the daylight savings stuff.

Dave Stoppenhagen | August 1, 2006
Great new look

Steve Dunn | August 1, 2006
Wow, what a surprise. I usually resist change, so give me some time to get used to things. I'm glad the game is back, though, and I like the new format. Notes:

1) Shouldn't newly updated TC threads bump up to the top of the page?

2) I've never been clear on the purpose or politics of the "friends" function on this site. I don't know any of you people except through this site, and I'm not sure I've ever had a conversation with anyone that wasn't related to this site (this is the definition of friend?) Clearly, I need to recruit my friends and family to register so I can have a noteworthy network on the graphical representation, which by the way I cannot find.

Scott Hardie | August 1, 2006
Scott: Total userrank is the sum of the other five userranks. As of right now, your new blog give you 6.67 points, same for Lori and Aaron. You'd be #8 without it. Perhaps the sections shouldn't be equally weighted, but it will even out before long. It's still more fair now that earlier in the redesign, before I decided to "democratize" the movie reviews and your TMR userrank was based solely on the Oscars contest.

As for how userrank itself is computed, it's a little complicated and I'll write a technical explanation soon, but basically it's a pyramid in which the individual accomplishments made by many people at the bottom are worth more than those made by a few people at the top. Originally it was strictly a point-for-percentage system in which I had a TC userrank of 10 and Anna had a 7 and everybody else was 1.5 or less, and I knew I had to calculate it based on a curve instead. I'm proud of the way it turned out, especially in the TC userrank, because I think it "feels" very much like a fair representation. Numerically speaking, Erik has written half as much as Jackie, but it "feels" like he's written about three-fourths what she has, and their userranks reflect that feeling, at least to me. I hope you think so too.

In conclusion, don't pay too much attention to the total userrank, since it's prone to imbalance between sections, especially while XQC and TMR have yet to fill in with user-submitted content. Instead, pay attention to each of the five section userranks.

Still working on the clock problem.

Thanks for the compliments, Dave and Steve. It's been a great day today, savoring the fruit of so many months' labor.

TC threads: The Current Discussions page is supposed to sort from descending order of last update, and seems to work for me. Other pages, like the archive, might sort differently. Is it not working right for you?

Friends: It's just for fun, no real purpose. We had that colorful chart back in 2004 that showed how people connected to each other, and ever since I've wanted to do it electronically. If I was crazy, as in move-to-a-remote-cabin-in-the-mountains-and-begin-mailing-bombs-to-university-professors crazy, I'd program a dynamic version of that old colorful picture, but I don't even want to think about the levels of logic necessary to rearrange that thing on the fly. I couldn't even get this one to sort by descending order of relationship importance (family then friends then acquaintances) without needing some Advil, but I'm happy with it sorted randomly.

As for making it show Friend Activity in each section, that was inspired by Netflix and could be implemented much better than it is, especially on TC, and I'll probably adjust it as the weeks pass and I see it in action. To me, the real point of the system is looking at a user's Friend Network and seeing what other users they know. To find yours, Steve, click on your name on this page then "Friend Network" on the right, or just follow this link. Unless you had that beer with Anthony, the only people I know you've talked to independently of this site are Anna and me, both in the comments section of your own site if memory serves.

And since I know some people won't fill in their connections, I'll do it myself manually as needed. I had to guess on a few to get it started, primarily the Miller family, Bob and Jacque and James. Can anyone tell me their correct relationships so I can fix that?

Scott Hardie | August 2, 2006
So much for fixing the clock. I can't set it using PHP because I'm running an older version. (No way I'm upgrading any time soon; I'd fix bugs for a week straight and still not find them all.) I asked my host if there was an easy way to change the server clock such as a site configuration setting, but it seems I'm out of luck. So, I guess my site is going back to central time. I'll make code adjustments this weekend to accommodate that, and timestamps are going to be a little weird until then (like today's Cinema goo saying it was published on 7/31). Hey, on the bright side, this will give you an extra hour to guess tiebreaker goos each night.

Jerry Mathis | August 2, 2006
Scott,

I like it! Great job man!

Jackie Mason | August 2, 2006
[hidden by request]

Kris Weberg | August 2, 2006
Well, this is just smooth and new and shiny.

Very awesome stuff, Scott.

Scott Hardie | August 2, 2006
I have more people to thank. This has been worth it.

Still, I gotta say, this server clock problem is pissing me off. I can deal with the incorrect time being displayed on TC comments, but it didn't publish today's new goo automatically at 11pm or 12am or 1am. When I manually activated the script a few minutes ago, what did it do? The clock being off was such that when it published the goo, it did so as a Recent Goo instead of a Current Goo, exposing the answer. Wtf? Thank goodness this wasn't during peak time and I could fix it unnoticed. I have some major work to do tomorrow evening I think.

I like the colors too, Jackie. It really bothered me that I was a professional web developer but my personal site was plain as plain could be, black text on white. This is my effort to strike a design that's both pleasing and simple enough to accommodate lots of different kinds of pages, not that I'm talented enough to have come up with this design myself anyway. But I like it.

The TC header was the hardest one. For a long time I used a beautiful photo of the sky, but the blue didn't match the page. I would have loved to have a blue nighttime sky full of stars because I think it would suit TC well, but I couldn't find one with the right tones. I went through a good dozen more before I finally settled on this one. A lone flower doesn't say "community" to me, but it does say "tranquility," which is (imo) TC's best quality.

I'll refrain from clearing discussions for a few days to see if I can replicate the problem with the Current Discussions list. The hardest bugs to fix are the ones you know happen but that you can't replicate on your own computer.

It's been a wonderful four-day weekend finishing and publishing this beast of a site at last, but I'm due back in the office in a few hours – which ought to be around 4:30pm, February 7, according to the system clock. Anyway, I won't be back until tomorrow evening. Have a great day.

Scott Hardie | August 2, 2006
Btw, I think I fixed the discussion-sorting thing just now. It was sorting by the wrong field, and I hadn't been able to see it because of the unique configuration of discussions that I hadn't cleared. Anyway, if that didn't do it, please let me know.

Michael Paul Cote | August 2, 2006
So far everything looks and acts great. Pop up problem fixed. Are you going to keep the gaming calendar or get rid of it?

Scott Horowitz | August 2, 2006
I gotta say, Scott. When I knew the game was coming back, I didn't expect the overhaul that you did. Kudos to you. I think you should hire an intern though, you don't have enough time to do all this.

One little complaint, when you do the goo confirm.. Can you add a back button if you want to change your answer instead of closing the window? Just my opinion.

Scott Hardie | August 3, 2006
Group calendar: I'm torn, mostly because I don't know about my own future with you guys or with gaming in general. But, that's not really a conversation for TC. I had planned to leave the last calendar working so there wouldn't be a disruption, but that plan didn't turn out so well. I'm working on restoring it.

I was happy to announce the August 1st date, but I regretted it almost right away. Partly that was because of the precise timing of the event; people would wait up till 12:01am that morning for the goo and I wasn't ready to launch until daylight. But mostly it was because I feared I had given away the surprise. Long-time users by now should see this sort of thing coming from me: Disappearing for a couple of months, promising a game's return on a convenient date, and boom there's the new site. I had planned to launch on January 1, and my participation dropped off throughout December. I don't mind saying all of this, because it was such a tribulation getting this thing finished that if I ever consider rebuilding from scratch again, shoot me.

I don't mind adding a back button, but what about just right-clicking to go back? If that is insufficient I'll add the button. The game rejects any guess entered after you have already made one, so it's not like people could cheat by going back.

I think I understand the server clock problem, but fixing it is going to be a major undertaking this weekend. I'll have to publish goos manually until then, so don't go waiting for 12:01am if that's your plan. It appears that every timestamp in my database is off by an hour; it says the goo game started at 11pm on February 22, when the first goo was actually published on February 23. I can write a script to add 3600 seconds to every timestamp in the database and then again to correct the timestamps since the launch of the site, but I want to be very careful when I do it because there are so many things it could break. The site might be offline for an hour or so on Saturday while I fix it.

Scott Hardie | August 3, 2006
I have completed the first of a few very long blog posts before it devolves into gripes about dumb TV commercials. If you want to know about the long history of how goo.tc came together and see the version that was abandoned last winter at 95% completion, read all about it.

John E Gunter | August 3, 2006
By the way, not sure if I came across as not liking the new colors on the new pages, for those who have visited my site and all of the pages on it, I use quite a bit of color, I'm just having a harder time reading the smaller dark text on the dark colors. It's an unfortunate thing with getting older, your eyesight makes it so you can't read small type very well in the dark, unless you're using some kind of reading glasses.

Course, that's why they make them! :-P

Amy Austin | August 3, 2006
Hm... macular degeneration is a bitch, isn't it, John... ;-) (Don't take that as a jab... I like "big & bright" when it comes to computer text/graphics, too! ;-D)

Like some others have admitted here, I am somewhat slow to embrace change, too. But after giving myself a couple of days to feel/sort it out, I am really quite liking it. (I did like the splashier graphics of your previous attempt, though, Scott... that was indeed a noble attempt, and I'm sorry for your disappointment/difficulties with it.) I also have my first two "complaints" (not really "bugs" -- just a couple of tidbits that I think it's too bad weren't carried over from the last format): 1) the addition of "jump to bottom" you had made when you click on discussion links was a good thing... along with "back to top" button for extra "cushiness" ;-) and 2) well, I'm not sure I remember #2 now -- it may be that it was a bit more complicated to explain. Perhaps I will try that one again later.

Otherwise, though -- I can see, Scott, that you are very much the "proud Papa" here, and I just want to tell you "congratulations" on your beautiful new bouncing baby site! ;-D (It really is quite nice.)

Amy Austin | August 3, 2006
Okay, now that I've thought about it a little more, maybe I can explain my second complaint AND offer the suggestion for improvement... here goes:

I like the "Clear Discussion" option on each page -- very efficient. However, it may actually be a little *too* efficient, if anyone was in a habit of doing something I did on the last incarnation. When I wanted to leave discussions that I had not yet joined, but might have something to say soon enough, I left them in the section below, instead of clearing them out... because if I didn't comment and cleared it, then "out of sight, out of mind," you know. This had the drawback, though, of leaving any discussions I might not necessarily be interested in joining to clutter up the space... eventually forcing a clear when enough time passed.

The new format, however, does offer a great opportunity to improve on *both* of these options (if my suggestion is well-received and easily doable, that is) -- by adding another option at the bottom (perhaps, "Queue Discussion" or "Watch this Discussion"???) that would queue the links elsewhere (right below the links with updated comments, for instance) just for easier tracking of recent discussions in which one may want to eventually comment/participate... without trying to remember them or hunt them down in the archive). Does this make sense or sound like something anyone besides myself would appreciate???

Like I said, these aren't really "bugs"... just suggestions for enhanced user friendliness. :-)

Denise Sawicki | August 3, 2006
That does sound like a helpful possible feature, Amy. Another thought could be to have two different buttons, one for "unread discussions" and one for "recent discussions" or something like that. That way if I hit "clear this discussion" on everything, I could still easily go back and see the most recent discussions if I remembered something I wanted to comment on.

Scott Hardie | August 3, 2006
All good ideas. Just added:

- The guess confirmation page in the goo game now has a back button.

- There's now a "jump to end" option for discussions. I missed this too and had planned to add it anyway. I coped over the settings from the old site, so it should already work for whoever had it before.

- There's now a "back to top" button on every discussion without pagination.

- I never cared for having the Current Discussions page split in two like that on the old site. Instead, I have created a Saved Discussions page. This way, if you think you might have something to say in a discussion someday, save it and it will sit quietly on that page, out of sight. You can always unsave it later. The major difference between that page and the Current Discussions is that every item drops off Current Discussions after a month of inactivity whether you clear it or not, so simply not clearing something isn't a long-term method for remembering to write something in it. Plus, I can see how a save option would work for other purposes as well, like if you want to make an argument involving links to several old discussions and you want an alternative to bookmarking them in your browser.

- I don't know if was annoying you, but I have a lot of people on my friends list, and that "Friend Activity" list in the sidebar was growing out of control, especially in TC. I have added a "Hide Friend Activity" option to the Friends page if you want to have a network of friends but not see what they've been up to.

- I think I fixed the server clock problems, by tweaking certain instances of code on the side to add 1 hour where appropriate. The risk is in which instances of code; for instance, if i add one hour to the timestamp when you write a TC comment, then I add another hour when displaying it, it's off by an hour in the other direction. What I'm trying to say is, I think I fixed it, but since the potential for a screwup is there, please keep an eye out for errors. Goo 0793 should publish tonight at midnight EST, and I'm going to hit something if it publishes at 1am, with or without the answer showing.

Steve Dunn | August 4, 2006
OK, I'll go ahead and cop to not liking the dark colors. Hard to read, yo.

Not now, but whenever you get a chance, maybe an option to choose a lighter color scheme? I know a lot of blogs have this option, so I hope it wouldn't be too hard to program. I find it difficult to read the dark text on the dark blue background on TC.

Scott Hardie | August 4, 2006
No problem, I can brighten them. Let me take a poll: What percentage of the maximum setting is your monitor's brightness? Mine is set to 100%. I'll take what seems to be the lowest and try to adjust for that. Are there other difficult color pairs besides TC, perhaps the dark purple of general-use pages like the Options menu?

Anna Gregoline | August 7, 2006
My monitor is crappy at work and I have trouble seeing the dark text on the blue - maybe if the text on these pages was white instead it would be easier?

Amy Austin | August 7, 2006
I was kind of thinking about white text, too...

Scott Hardie | August 7, 2006
I don't like these new colors much, and I'll probably continue to finely adjust them, but do they make it easier to read now?

Steve Dunn | August 8, 2006
Yes, much nicer now.

John E Gunter | August 8, 2006
Yes, even my geezer eyes can read the darker blue entries much easier!

Thanks Scott!

Anna Gregoline | August 8, 2006
Still not GREAT at work, but what at work is? Better, thank you.

Amy Austin | August 8, 2006
Yes -- better, thank you.

Aaron Shurtleff | August 9, 2006
Aw! It's horrible now!

I kid. It's lovely!

Not that it was bad before, of course! ;)

Adrianne Rodgers | August 12, 2006
Didn't know about it in any of its previous incarnations....but I'm psyched I found this place!

Erik Bates | August 12, 2006
[hidden by request]

Lori Lancaster | August 12, 2006
[hidden by request]

Adrianne Rodgers | August 12, 2006
This is kind of funny actually;......I read about it because somebody was complaining about the Heather O'Rourke goo. Thought the clue was mean, it seems, but then again this person was a crazed fan. I checked out the clue, laughed at its lack of meanness, then said, Heeeeyy, this place looks nifty!

Scott Hardie | August 12, 2006
Welcome, Adrianne. I like your second photo just fine. :-)

I get that kind of heat from people online once in a while, when they're upset about my goos of their favorite people. Sometimes the clues are genuinely offensive and I deserve the criticism, but the clue for Heather O'Rourke? Seriously? I thought I showed restraint with that one. That's like the time I was told I would burn in hell for "looting" Lee Miglin's memory with his similarly fact-based goo.

Adrianne Rodgers | August 13, 2006
Yeah, long before they started whining about the goo, I got the impression that whoever it was was kind of.....crazy. They talked about Heather's death as "stolen innocence." It's an extremely tragic thing, but it was an intestinal obstruction. 'Cause, you know, no one was ever garrotted on Christmas or anything. And frankly, the majority of the celebrity's probably wouldn't be offended by the clues about them. But people seem to think it's oh so awful whenever it involves someone who's no longer alive, yet they overlook the fact that a few of the goo-ees would, in all probability, agree with the clues. I can almost hear Kurt Cobain saying pshaw, you got that right. (Though maybe not in those exact words.)

Scott Hardie | August 13, 2006
Should I mention it when I make little additions here or there? A lot of little things got put off at the last minute so I could publish, and now I'm going back and adding them. Off the top of my head:
- the option to "hide" a TC author who you don't want to read
- the ability to delete XQC obsessions
- a list of upcoming goos at the bottom of the Current Goos page
- a nav bar across the top of the homepage if you're logged in

I also reversed the "Hide Friend Activity" option so that now you have to activate the option to see it. It didn't look good and I'm not prepared to hack apart the shell to find a proper place for it, at least not at this time.