STATUS, Keendex, utilities, and some other junk

Post by **Kisai** » Tue Apr 16, 2002 12:23 am

Current Keenspace status: Stable (watch this jinx it)

Last few problems: Database corruption, bad superblock(disk error), someone trying to be overly creative and put quotes in their user info.

last crash caused by: something beyond our control.

Keendex: http://cerror.keenspace.com/keendex.html
For all intents and purposes this replaces http://www.keenspace.com/list.html and http://www.keenspace.com/datedlist.html untill either those lists start updating again or otherwise.
You can choose from Alphabetical, By update time, and by number of comics. Consider the "number of comics" field beta-quality, for it only counts comics that store their comics in the /comics directories like autokeen wants.
The remaining fields, (Webrating, Style, Content, Description) can not be set yet, I'm working on that.

If you have a keenspace comic, you can get "last keendex scan" check at http://cerror.keenspace.com/cgi-bin/checkkeen.pl and request site diagnostics if are having a problem (do not request diagnostics if you are not having a problem.) This utility is new (has existed for only about 4 days) and is now beta-stage. It does not change any user data, only tells you what keenspace knows about your account. (This is not it's permenent location either, don't bookmark it.)

In other news keenspace has been stable for 3 days and 16 hours, let's hope it stays up(watch this jinx it.)

Do not contact nate or gav about problems with the keendex or the utilities, they are my inventions, and are thus my problem if they break.

Zuri · Post by **Zuri** » Tue Apr 16, 2002 7:42 am

I dunno how usefull this is to note, but I was cruising the keendex and checked out my listing ( Shifters: http://shifters.keenspace.com) . It lists my first comic incorrectly, in fact the comic it lists is non-existant.

I haven't checked many others, but if mine is wrong, the possiblities of others being wrong is good I would think.

Might want to have a peep at that.

Sss · Post by **Sss** » Tue Apr 16, 2002 7:51 am

You are not alone my friend! My first comic is @ 20020203.html not 20020210.html! I put up a redirect page just in case though

Reinder · Post by **Reinder** » Tue Apr 16, 2002 9:04 am

Both the first and last comic date for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan are wrong. The first is 20000701, the last, at the time of writing, is 20020416.

Oddly, I suspect that the number of comics mentioned on the list, 1073, is about twice the real number - I don't update more than once a day:)

Post by **Kisai** » Tue Apr 16, 2002 10:46 am

Like I said beta quality...

Here's the formula for those interested...

The First Comic is the OLDEST file in /public_html/d
The Last Update is TODAY's comic, but it gets the date from the NEWEST file in /public_html/d

If it fails that, it trys the newest file in /public_html

If you have ever regenerated your archives, you may have confused it.

The count itself is just how many files show up in /public_html/comics If you have multiple comic images per day, then this will probably be inflated. (It was either count /comics or count /d's files, of which some people didn't use autokeen, but still used /comics)

So if you have severak comic files per day, this actually reflects the accurate number of comics. If you are doing something odd, like breaking each panel up and having that as a separate image, then it will be counting those as separate comics too.

I think I'll add "Override first comic" to possible keendex options. (It would still have to be in /d though.)

Joshnickerson · Post by **Joshnickerson** » Tue Apr 16, 2002 12:13 pm

Shouldn't comics that start with "The" be placed in the letter category that the next words starts with? Such as "The Sporkman Chronicles", is listed under "T". Shouldn't it be listed under "S"? Just wondering.

Post by **Kisai** » Tue Apr 16, 2002 12:28 pm

Well unfortunately, that's a limitation of the server. If I try to load up the entire 5551 comic database into memory to sort it, it runs the server out of memory (to do the same thing in IE it takes 250MB of ram) and crashes... potentially bringing down all of keenspace.

How the current alphabetical separation is done:

Creates listing file (say A section)
Writes header
goes through every single comic looking for comics that begin with A
when gone through all 5551 comics, writes footer, then repeats for B section.

I could have the script do s/^The// to the title name, but then it will delete the The off the title name. I have an idea to fix this that doesn't involve actually sorting the list, but I'm not sure how well it will work (save the original title, let the script strip A/An/The from the title, and then when it writes the entry, use the original title.) I don't know how much more time it will take to do this (hopefully it doesn't add more than 5 seconds to the overall script.)

Post by **Kisai** » Tue Apr 16, 2002 12:51 pm

Fixed it, it now filters out A An and The at the beginning of titles in the alphabetical set.

Saganaki · Post by **Saganaki** » Tue Apr 16, 2002 8:53 pm

One little nit-picky thing about the actual site. I personally find it difficult to read the information on the site, mainly because the contrast caused by the table's cell padding makes the blue text difficult to read. At least, I found it to be that way when I looked at it.

Post by **Kisai** » Wed Apr 17, 2002 7:42 am

Noted...

For some reason I picked some aweful colors, it won't be permenent, but the problem is mozilla and IE show two completely different things (Mozilla shows black borders, IE white, Opera doesn't draw blank cels.)

I'll work on this, all the keendex pages use the same style sheet, so alternative (or even user-defined) stylesheets can be applied.

All borders now set to black and consistant between IE, Mozilla and Opera

_________________
Kisai
<a href="http://cerror.keenspace.com/keendex/ind ... >KeenSpace Sortable Comic Index</a>

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Kisai on 2002-04-17 09:03 ]</font>

Zuri · Post by **Zuri** » Wed Apr 17, 2002 7:56 am

Just out of curiousity,

Will a sample thumbnail be included in the dex at some point? Either entered by us or something we put in a specific directory or whatever?
It would be nice to see a sample of work in a comic before going to it.

Agreed that the colors are kinda nasty. Perhaps something more like the forum colors? I have no idea what the new keenspace pages will look like, but it should probably match, eh?

_________________
~Purrs
**Zuri**
Werewolves, Vampires, and Puppet shows! <A href="http://shifters.keenspace.com"> Shifters: The Beast Within</A>

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Zuri on 2002-04-17 11:02 ]</font>

Kevin Wolf · Post by **Kevin Wolf** » Wed Apr 17, 2002 4:52 pm

On 2002-04-16 01:23, Kisai wrote:
Current Keenspace status: Stable (watch this jinx it)

JINX!

Seriously, Keen appears to have overcome its brief flirtation with stability.

Post by **Kisai** » Wed Apr 17, 2002 11:05 pm

Well you have three choices:

80x80 (6400 pixels) - fits nicely in current table format

200x40 (8000 pixels) - can replace or complement current comic name(probably should be complelement, appear above or below title)

or
88x31 (2728 pixels) and placed in it's own column.

Or something like the above three.

The conditions are, however:

Images must be gif , png or jpg and non-animating
Images must also be under 10KB, recommending 4KB and fit one of the three dimensions specified.
As a kinda-neat trick, the keendex pages support alpha blending if you use png files with alpha channels, but it only works on IE5.5/6.0(PC) 5(Mac) or later, Mozilla, Opera 5 or later and WebTV.

I haven't added this feature YET, so if I get feedback on what style (or if you don't like any of those styles, say so) is prefered, I'll hardcode that style in. I want pages to be consistant.

80x80 is the standard Tinami "preview box" size. 200x40 is the standard medium-banner and 88x31 is a "button"

I'm trying not to do anything that would force the tables to be too wide for 640x480 screens, so 468x60 ads for the tables are outta the question. I know most people use 800x600 or better though.

Oh and, I'm aware that keenspace is down. I can't reach anyone who can do anything right now. Total uptime would have been around 5 days, which is consistant with the ... ahem crashing schedule. The server is unreachable (no ping, so it's probably frozen,) so that means the comics aren't being updated.

Seven3 · Post by **Seven3** » Thu Apr 18, 2002 11:19 am

If you're going to do that, then what's the point in having <a href=http://gear.keenspace.com/guide.html>the Guide</a> as well? It seems kinda' redunant to me.

Is there any reason why it couldn't pull the discription and image (or at least tell the 'dex where to get a smaller one) from the news box? In the future the 'box could even be used to set the rating, content, and style.

Post by **Kisai** » Thu Apr 18, 2002 12:57 pm

<a href="http://gear.keenspace.com/guide.html">The Guide</a> , <a href="http://framed.keenspace.com/topten.html">Damonk's Top13</a>, <a href="http://www.topsitelists.com/bestsites/k ... >Keenspace top 99</a>,<a href="http://nice.purrsia.com/">The Nice</a>, the drop-down's and the newsbox.

All different forms of cross-promotion, of which all of these are either hand-picked or machine organized. They also fall short in a few places:

Hand-picked organization falls apart in maintainability, The guide, the dropdowns and Damonk's top 13 all require hand-editing html or javascript, and are subject to the maintainers schedule and lifespan of the their comic interest.

Machine-organized eliminates the maintenance problem but introduces staleness, and abuse into the mix. The top 99, Bigpanda, and other top or voting lists lend themselves to abuse or "ballot stuffing" and require the users to actually click on something to register their ranking. The newsbox puts a picture on everyones page that has it, but is subject to "optionality" and 5551 comics have to share the time-space of that area. There are 86400 seconds in a day, that means that the newsbox would have to flip an image every 15 seconds for everyone to be seen in one day, and if the server goes down, all those scheduled for that timeslot get missed, and only people actually loading a page every 15 seconds would ever be able to see it.

The keendex is an attempt to bring the best features of the top lists, guides and drop downs together in one database and consistant style.

Future features that I'm working on now:
Sample image/Banner image
Entries for the webrating/content/style columns.
Description
Override for first comic page and date.

Future features that have been discussed and "that's cool let's do that" type of quotes came up:
Automate dropdown maintenance and better dropdown system.
Easier to sign-up newsbox

A search engine was planned, but the current stability of keenspace has put this idea on the backburner untill we can gaurantee that running such a system won't crash the server.

(But in order to make a search engine, one must have a database to search through.)

Seven^3 , there is never enough redundancy in cross-promotion. Frequency of maintenace, and ease of use will determine how useful something is.

My original plan for the keendex was to include such information about the comics, originally I started by using my own judgement, but after realizing it would take over a year to enter all the information by hand, I changed my mind, dumped all the information I put in and am now creating the scripts that will allow the authors to enter the information they want.

There is no such thing as an abuse-free system, so many of the tags that originally were in the system have been changed to OR'ed switches. So something can not be both it and it's opposite. Everything that goes in the style column is a OR switch(It can be this OR this OR this, but not All of this.) and everything that goes in the content column is a on/off switch with a few exceptions.

I'll also accept suggestions, since the original set of tags were based only on what was found in the A section.