xerol.org Feed - Site News

Changes!

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:15:19 MST

Today I'm implementing some of the long-planned features of hDot. First off you'll notice the vastly changed front page. This is the first step to allowing paid accounts.

The "my profile" block on the right now shows your daily bandwidth usage. All current accounts start with a 100MB daily quota, which goes up by 100KB every time someone views a page on the account. Hotlinked images and all file downloads will use up the quota. This is to bring more traffic into the site. Basically you'll have two options if you're a high-bandwidth user - Use hotlinked thumbnails to bring traffic in, or purchase additional quota.

The quota increase is permanent, and after a couple of weeks will be reduced to an amount based on your account level. Basically if you bring a lot of traffic into the site one time, you'll have a better bandwidth cushion for life.

Once all these features are implemented I'll be rolling out a paypal system for purchasing storage and bandwidth. Read on for an overview of available plans.

New Feature: Daily Toplists

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 07:29:23 MST

I've added a new feature to the sidebar, daily toplists. These reset at whatever midnight server time is until I can figure out a way to do a rolling 24 hour block without taking up 4 billion rows of database space.

Note: The links at the top of the sections point to pages I haven't written yet. I'm working on a revamped listing system which will integrate searches, clean URLs, and filtering. This may take a few days.

Temporarily Disabling Comments

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:19:20 MST

I'm temporarily disabling news comments due to a spam leak. Should get them back up by the next time I post news.

Site Maintenance

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 10:14:16 MST

I've got some minor backend changes to make that may require the site to be down for some periods of time over the next 48 hours. I'm starting with a backup of everything so worst case scenario anything you upload over the weekend may disappear.

Final Stages of Refactoring

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 11:01:12 MST

As you can probably tell, the site looks a little different now. I'm finishing up refactoring the code, and putting in some minor design changes to respond to criticism and suggestions I've received over the last few months. The header bar is half the height, and I've adjusted the ad box accordingly (I should be able to bring in a bit more revenue now that there's another slot).

Topic-specific Feeds

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 17:06:00 MST

I've added topic-specific RSS feeds to the site. These are accessible by clicking on a topic icon (see upper-right of any story) and can be used to filter by specific news. This is especially helpful for people who want to follow the work I'm doing with MAGFest video. That feed can be found here.

Complete rundown of feeds:

Multi-thumbing and important account changes

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 02:27:45 MST

I'll preface this by saying that no existing links should break. That being said, some existing links may break, albeit unintentionally.

I've laid down the groundwork for creating multiple and custom thumbnails for uploaded images, but it'll be a short while before that's actually in. I had to modify the databases which may have brought some thumbnails down for a short time.

New Colors

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 00:24:12 MST

I think I'm finally satisfied with a color scheme. If anyone has any suggestions let me know.

Since I've finally finished with that, I can make some new fitting icons/images to go around the site. Also I will be changing the file link images and thumbnail colors soon. Instead of having a single choice you'll get to choose when you upload, and fairly soon I want to allow multiple thumbnail sizes and adding thumbnails to images already uploaded. Soon, not now. Now I sleep.

New Icons

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:16:24 MST

I've added some navigational icons to the upper left. Still working out some CSS issues (namely why I can't get the background color to change on hover) and will probably tweak the icons a little when I have more time. Also I know music.xerol.org is empty/broken, I'm still working on that.

Sessions

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 18:55:48 MST

I've changed around the session code on the site a bit. If you have login problems or issues anywhere else on the site please contact me. Info is at the bottom of every page.

New layout

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 21:29:09 MST

I've made some significant layout and CSS changes, and I'm working on moving entirely away from a table-based layout soon.

File Info Images

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 12:12:47 MST

These provide a shorter way to link to files (in BBCode at least, the HTML has some extra attributes to keep it compliant) and a much better presentation on whatever site you're linking files on.

Main Page Open

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:10:34 MST

I'm moving a lot of the non-hosting related material to the main page, http://xerol.org/. The only posted items that will appear on hdot now are those from the "news" and "site news" categories.

Updated download arrow.

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 10:36:48 MST

Yeah this sure is "news". Actually I just wanted to remark on the relative difficulty of making an icon look good at 16x16. Obviously fewer and more contrasting colors are better, but using Inkscape it's hard to avoid the temptation to use a lot of gradients. But anyway, to the right here is the icon in large format (since I was shrinking it down I didn't really care about lining up the outline exactly) and the SVG.

Direct Download Links

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 10:01:07 MST

I've added some direct download links to the recent/popular files blocks on the main page. I'll be adding these to the other file lists soon and also making a custom icon (this one is temporary).

Reversi

Mon, 05 May 2008 20:33:20 MST

http://games.xerol.org/reversi/

A massive game of Reversi that anyone can play. Click on a green tile to make a move.

Acroblast and the Broken Login

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 23:40:28 MST

I know the login is broken, use the login page instead for now. It's got to do with Acroblast (which is also broken, but for a different reason - it's not finished) and will be back to normal once the game is running.

Clean URLs: Part One

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:44:47 MST

I have clean URLs working for images and files (basically only in f.php and i.php, which now show up/link as /file and /img respectively), and news (viewstory.php and topics.php, /news and /topic(s)). There is some basic functionality in /user (formerly viewprofile.php, which still needs some cleanup). I have a lot of tweaking to do before profile/my account pages work properly, but the old links still work (and probably always will) so I left them in for now.

h.xerol.org will be broken soon.

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:12:35 MST

Due to some complicated problems with mod_rewrite and making clean/trackable URLs for images and files, I've decided to ditch the subdomain. It will still be there, and it will still work, but everyone is encouraged to use http://xerol.org/h from now on. All on-site URLs will be converted to the new clean format, although the old ones will continue to work indefinitely.

Digg, Facebook links; Statistics

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 01:16:28 MST

I've added Digg and Facebook sharing links to news stories (as you can see with the camera post) and also a stats page, which isn't complete yet, but I have to wait for enough data to be generated to make sure the other graphs will work.