Comments on: Is the Hut running?

By: Adam

Adam — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 07:06:09 +0000

Hey!

Both seem to be up and running, El Jefe!

Adam – former breaking chimp#47

By: Jerry

Jerry — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 11:53:02 +0000

I put in the code to tell the upstream servers to reload the poem even if they have one cached – and IE 8, at least, doesn’t seem to heed that instruction.

By the way, IE 8 does a reasonably good job rendering the old blog. Now that I have it installed, I don’t have any way to test the site with older versions.

By: Carol Anne

Carol Anne — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 07:57:37 +0000

On the behavior of IE as regards refreshing the poem … it depends on how the thing is configured. At work, some central server caches all Web access. No matter if it’s a blog or other site on which the subject matter changes rapidly, if someone, on any computer tied into the system, has accessed the site within the past 48 hours, what will come up is what the site was when that previous user connected. Reloading the page does nothing.

However, with IE at home or at Cornhusker’s place, the page is updated when I access it, and it will reload without a problem when I use the refresh button. When I ask for a new poem, I get one.

Of course, if you find a work-around for when the viewer doesn’t have the latest Flash player update, then Cornhusker won’t know that she ought to update the Flash player on her computer.

By: Jerry

Jerry — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 20:42:33 +0000

Also critical is NOT playing the banner animation every time a page is loaded. Internet Explorer is actually much better about this right now than other browsers. That’s not really a good thing; I have no control over the behavior in IE, and it even caches requests for a new poem, so on IE you still just see the one. I ask for a new poem, IE says, “this request is just like the last one, I already have the response tucked away,” not considering that the same request could get a different result. There is probably a way I can set something in the request headers to make it ask again.

One thing about this project, I’m learning a lot.

Also, I need to figure out how to most gracefully handle the case when the reader doesn’t have a new enough Flash player. There should be a way I can substitute the old school HTML one-poem system similar to what it there now.

By: Jerry

Jerry — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 20:34:06 +0000

The actual animation is just something I whipped up so I could tell that the Flash animation was playing. The final title animation will be better, and will include Half-Baked ideas. (Needed: typewriter sound effects.) I figured out how to do the first part of the title animation this afternoon, but it won’t appear over there for a while.

What I really want to do: a full-window Flash animation as the background to the blog. I’m thinking lava lamp. (Long story about lava lamps and Flash. Have I told this one before? It’s a cool story.) Alas, I don’t think my flash background will work reliably – unless I do the whole damn blog client in Flash…

By: jesse

jesse — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:15:25 +0000

I tried earlier this morning from your earlier entry on how does it look, but it wouldn’t let me in.

Now however, I can link in to both no prob.

The construction site looks fine on my linux box running firefox. The animated banner is working.

As a whole, I like unbusy blogs, and the old MR&HBI did that, and I have no problem with the new site. The new site is nice and unbusy at the moment. I like that the peoms are constantly changing, I think that is a plus. Unless there was something wrong with my browser, the old site had one haiku at link in and it stayed that way.

I don’t like that the animated banner disappears and one is left with no title at all. And hey, why short shrift to the half baked side of the title? Where would we be without half baked ideas?