Posts by tgreer

Yes I know, I've been trying hard. I've got 8 bad reps for typing in one week.

Keep trying! In any case, I'm sure many of us appreciate the effort.

http://www.tgreer.com/ReversePolishNotation.htm

lol i gave you some good rep that time lemurexplosion. You actually managed to type fairly properly :)

Pot. Kettle. Black.

I would not. I would pay a nominal fee for a truly ad free Daniweb. That would mean no IntelliTXT corrupting my posts, no blank spaces where ads would be (so I'd have a real Quick Reply box back), etc.

That is totally unrealistic, however. Not enough people would pay enough money to equal or exceed ad revenue. Dani would have to maintain two sites, in essence. Not going to happen.

So we each have a choice. I like Dani, I like Davey's blogs. I'm curious how the site will develop, so give feedback. But I can't/won't moderate again, nor participate in any of the development forums, because clarity of expression and the nature of peer-to-peer community assistance is compromised by IntelliTXT. I won't have words put in my mouth when I'm trying to help someone. That's my choice, others feel differently.

My point is: I doubt things will change in regard to the types and amount of advertising here. Speak your piece, but then realize it won't change, and decide if you can live with that or not.

P.S. Your typing is improving, jbennet, but sentences end with periods. Also look into "apostrophes".

The norm for HTML email is to use embedded style attributes in each tag.

<p style="font-family: Verdana;">...</p>

The problem is that the moving ads are brain interrupts.

They yank your eyes off the text you are trying to read, because the same type of stimulus could be an impending collision or a bee about to sting.

Require all ads to be still lifes.

That's by design. That's how ads work, and why ads work. Your request is tantamount saying "Ads should be required to not be ads." I hate ads enough to have chosen to run an ad-free site. The consequence is a small site with very little traffic. So be it; I'm fine with that. Daniweb is a different animal, and simply would not exist without advertising, and advertising is inherently distracting.

If a particular form of advertising is so out-of-balance in relation to content, or interferes with how you'll participate on Daniweb (such as how I feel about IntelliTXT, which has killed any technical participation from me) you should speak out, but for better or worse the choice is Dani's, and she's chosen IntelliTXT and moving ads. Rather, the advertising industry has chosen, so that's we we see here.

A bigger font, against a white background, tends to make the font look "lighter" in color. Smaller fonts look darker, so are more legible. If you're going to up the point size, which is fine, try making the text a shade or so darker.

Leading (space between lines) is also important to readability.

Note: I've worked in printing, and typography, and font technologies, for many years. For these types of issues, I recommend The Complete Manual of Typography.

Online, I recommend A List Apart for style advice. Notice they use a smaller font, but they use black (not gray).

Nice to know at least I've been consistent on this one.

I notice also that we've lost the username/member profile links on the blog entries. So now at first glance we can't see who wrote the blog, how many views it's had, if there are any comments or not... I'm baffled at how this is making the site better.

Ok, fair enough. I don't agree that removing useful information and requiring an extra navigation step to see it enhances the user experience, so count me as 1 vote in favor of putting the stats back where they were.

Ok... so, umm, on the HomePage. Featured Blogs. Where have the blog posting stats gone, and are they coming back?

Is your post a response to the issue? I'm talking about the default Daniweb home page, not the Blog home page or the Member Blogs page. Nor am I talking about guests... I'm not sure we're communicating.

You changed the homepage. Featured Blogs are now missing some useful information that was there previously.

Rouge ads don't match the color scheme.

Daniweb home page. Featured Blog Entries. Displays title of the blog post and the first few opening words.

The typical blog tidbits, such as "Comments: 1" has disappeared. This gives someone like me, who has already read the blog, no incentive to click it again. At the very least, I would like to know how many comments there are, without needing to navigate further.

It used to be there, now it isn't. I'm giving the opinion that this is a bad thing, please put the info back!

Seems some tidbits disappeared from the way blogs are presented on the opening page. I miss "number of comments" - it's a quick way to see if a blog posting is hot, if it has new comments, and if someone has replied. Otherwise, it's just "hmm, I read this one already, so no reason to click through."

Re: IntelliTXT. You asked me very politely to stop complaining about it, so I did. If you want to re-open the issue, however, I'm certainly willing to discuss it again. Ready?

Regarding the "member profile link", the main idea is for me to see WHO is writing this (horrible / brilliant, pick one) blog. It seems the best way to handle that is just like it's done everywhere else on the site: the member name. Click on it, you are taken to their profile.

Member name / link to profile on Featured Blogs.

Fair enough: if you don't pay attention to anything you type, then neither will I. Think it through.

OED: Oxford English Dictionary

its: possesive form of "it"

it's: contraction for "it is"

http://www.elearnenglishlanguage.com/difficulties/its.html

I: personal pronoun

i: not a word

I'm talking about featured entries. Reading a particular featured blog, there is no information about the author, no link to their profile.

It's just nice to know who I'm reading. It would be nice to click their name and see their profile, perhaps visit their website, see what threads/forums they're involved in, and so on.

Edit: wow, it took over a minute to post this little reply. I see there is another thread on the long delays, but add another person who is experiencing the problem. Must be a server issue.

Exactly. So to rephrase, could/should a byline be added?

When did the user/member information disappear from the blogs? Is it up to the blog writers to provide a signature line? I don't see a member name - a "byline", on the blog entries.

You do an excellent job of keeping the forum moving. Meaning, you never say "ok, now this is good enough". Always tweaking, always testing. That's good, even if it causes some ruffled feathers now and then.

Davey doesn't really need me to tell him he's a great writer and doing very well with the blogs. He's a professional tech writer so a professional, high-quality job is expected. I'll say it anyway: the featured blogs on Daniweb are excellent.

Now the feedback/critiques:

You still haven't found the magic formula for promoting member blogs. Maybe there isn't one? Not every member has interesting things to say. However, the recent revamp of the blog home page is a step in the right direction. I think the page is a bit busy with the 3-column layout. I would prefer to see a 2-column, even if the tag cloud has to be sacrificed. I'm not sure what good a tag cloud does for a blog reader. Presumably the words of interest to me are in the blog, right? Echo my comments on the tag cloud, wherever it rears up. Useless, I think, and wasted space. I've been enduring it; since you're always tweaking the layout, I've hoped it would just disappear one day.

Quick Reply. While I don't like it, it's hard to be too upset, since the change was made in response to other criticism about ad placement. It's a good compromise and if I'm not loving it, I can …

Correction. The bug I referred to was with z-index and SELECT elements. I have no idea what's going on with your menus. Sorry!

The infamous z-index bug has a long history, and indeed it affects only IE. It isn't a problem unique to this site. It's a bug in IE that Microsoft has ignored through several browser versions.

!

I've had generally good experience with Dell equipment, in multiple companies, for high-end server equipment.

One factor to weigh is the cost of disposal: you may think owning 97 "older" computers to be an asset, but it is just the opposite. Ridding yourself of them is a major issue.

I suggest you seriously consider leasing your systems.

Color changes: trivial.

Concerns about how layout changes affect technical blogs/snippets/posts: not trivial.

Since when is calling someone "dummy" and "silly" acceptable, mature discourse?

WHILE I have read your repeated posts, you cannot DO what you ask, FOR the reasons I've SET forth.

DO you see the problem, FINALLY?

What part of this post is code? In what language? FORTH?

What you ask cannot be done, not because Dani is being lazy or brainwashed, as you imply, but because it CANNOT BE DONE. Or, as Dave puts it with commendable understatement, "it would be a tremondous undertaking". Tantamount to NSA's Echelon.

But feel free to prove me wrong. Since it seems to be such a trivial matter that you can't understand why Dani hasn't just whipped it right up for you: code it yourself.

As I said, I applaud the effort, just don't like the result. Regarding the wide blog, it was due to an exceptionally long word, a rare occurence and a horizontal scroll is the proper way to handle that.

Right. A program to magically separate the wheat from the chaff, recognizing code as I type it. Trust me, I've read your repeated insistence for this, and it continues to remain implausible for the reasons already set out. But by all means: brick wall, your head - continue.

When I view some of the blog entries, there is a horizontal scrollbar at the bottom. That screen is a bit crowded... could the tag-cloud column be thinner to make the blog entry correspondingly bigger?

Dani, I wouldn't measure success merely by quantity of posts. The blog competition, this change - all designed to get more people more active, but you have to be concerned about the signal-to-noise ratio as well.

I applaud the effort to move the Quick Reply closer to the thread. The interstitial ads and distance between the thread and the reply box were very irritating. However, the stunted Quick Reply box annoys me more.

It's fine for dashing off quick, thoughtless messages, but for those who actually think about what they post, and like to re-read and edit as they go to check for typos, errors, and clarity of expression, it's a non-starter. One is essentially forced to click an extra button. For those users, it won't spur more posts: "I can either shoehorn a message in here, or click Advanced Reply... oh, forget it".

For those who block ads, the space next to the Quick Reply appears as empty whitespace, which makes the Quick Reply seem even smaller still, plus it screams "it should fill this space"! However, I understand that you really can't cater to users who block your ads.

I believe this is another quanity vs. quality decision: while it may trigger more impulse posts, it presents a barrier to larger, more meaningful posts.

P.S. Blog entries now have a horizontal scroll - your column widths need to be fine-tuned to prevent that.

I read you loud and clear Dave. No problems. My comments are directed to "iamthwee", who seems to think the only barrier to creating a client-side, cross-browser, code-sensing, auto-formatting heuristic AI with sub-second response time is my presence and Dani's weak-minded susceptibility to influence. Strange, then, that it hasn't been created on any of the thousands of other technical forums that have neither impediment.

Color-coding/synatx highlighting a specific language is not a huge task, and in fact the forum already supports this. However, a client-side script that would run in real time to scan every post and recognize "code" in several languages and automatically format it is a wildly impractical notion. IDEs are able to accomplish this because the user specifies the language, and by comparing each word with a syntax dictionary. That just isn't feasible for a forum, unless the user defines that part of the post containing code, and the language of the code. This is exactly what the forum already supports. If a user refuses to use that system, then the appropriate response is for a human moderator to step in - rather than to lobby for an impossibly massive solution to a relatively small problem.

The more I think about it, the better it sounds. It just needs some beta testing, and now that tgreer's gone there's no one here to brainwash dani.

If you think your solution is viable: a massive, multi-language aware, client-side language parser/colorizer, and if you think I ever "brainwashed" Dani to do or not do anything, and if you think she doesn't still solicit my opinions and advice about certain aspects of the forum because of the mutual respect we hold for each other, despite our disagreements, then you are just as deluded and immature as you've always been.

I never said otherwise. Dani has indeed responded, at least to those issues she feels worthy of a response. I only clarified because of the past knee-jerk reactions, such as moving entire threads out of the public eye because of a few late posts about ad-blocking.

I'm a published haiku, senryu, cinquain, renga, tanka, and haibun poet (Frogpond, Tanka Splendor, Lynx, Modern Haiku, plus school textbooks and poster series). Let me correct the notion that haiku are 5-7-5. While it's true that Japanese haiku follow a pattern of "sound parts", those do not correspond to English syllables. Japanese is not a syllabic language. Also, English syllables vary greatly in duration. The 5-7-5 notion was never universal, and has been discarded by contemporary English haiku poets.

The three-line convention is often followed to convey to the reader how to read the poem / where to pause.

Focus instead on the conciseness of the imagery and wording. A good haiku should shift focus in the poem, through juxtaposition of color, season, space, sense, or other natural elements. Here's an example senryu from one of my haibun. Note how "space" changes from the abstract, to the concrete:

space between
storyteller's hands --
children's wide eyes

May I suggest that the poetic form "renga" is very well-suited to an online forum. Instead of trading haiku, why not try a renga? Each poster links to the previous poem. The links are subtle. Here's an example, placed in code tags to help preserve the formatting. Good luck and have fun.

[B]lost and found[/B]
a renga
by Layne Russell and Thomas D. Greer


    *
 *polo!   *polo*
    f   i r*  f   e
       *marco!*     l*    s
  *polo*
                              [I]1:tg[/I]


stars of Sagitarius
sink behind the mountain
                              [I]2:lr[/I]


at this …

That is simply the code provided by ContextWeb to generate their ads. The poster is complaining that the code sometimes fails. That's all; no one is posting anything in this thread about circumventing ads. The criticism is that there are too many ads, sometimes literally running solidly across the page, that the ads are not relevant to IT, and that some of the ads are in fact flyover ads which obscure content.

If I'd already given up all hope, I wouldn't be participating in threads like this. I'm still hoping that Dani, a very skilled programmer, with whom I've spent many a pleasant hour conversing and debating, will step back into her role as main site administrator. I respect Davey as a writer and greatly enjoy his blog postings, but when the administrative reins were put in his hands, the culture changed. I've no doubt that his decisions are "good for business", as such, but have had a negative impact on the make-up of the moderation staff, the overall quality and nature of postings, and therefore the overall sense of community. Daniweb is currently on the path of becoming just another overly monetized, ad-heavy tech forum filled with unanswered or poorly answered posts.

IntelliTXT is just the first example. What other bad "management level" decisions, open to no debate, with no regard for the impact on the community, await? The ads here are past the point of "in your face", with IntelliTXT, the ads are "in your mouth". Dani at least ran a trial, and bent over backwards to try to answer the objections IntelliTXT generated. When it became apparent that many of the most qualifed, most active moderators/members still objected, she consented to not use it, even though she herself had no objections to it. I find that very commendable, even noble. However, when the decision was put in Davey's hands, it became a "business decision", and the fact that …

I disagree with you about it being the best or even better than many other forums. I post frequently on about 10 programming/web dev forums and daniweb ranks low in that regards.

What sites? I came here from Tek-Tips, because at the time Daniweb didn't use IntelliTXT and Tek-Tips did. Now that this site is polluted with it too, I've been searching for a site that won't trash/spam your posts with "in-text advertising".

I've looked at Experts-Exchange, and didn't like it. Again, the ads: IntelliTXT, and popunders, in particular.

A few years ago, I was active on codetoad.com, but found the overall quality poor. Well, that isn't quite fair. What I mean is that there were a lot of "askers" compared to very few "answerers". I don't mind answering questions, but I want a site where I can learn, too.

The prevailing forum culture, particulary with vBulletin-driven forums (which I myself use), seems to put ad revenue, and SEO-nonsense, as top priorities. People pick a forum topic because it's "hot" and they think therefore they can get lots of traffic and revenue, rather than because they have anything to say about the topic itself.

So, I'll give Daniweb this much: a lot of work goes into the content, and historically there have been very knowledgable folks here. The culture is changing, though. I think Daniweb is at a crucial moment, and I'm interested in seeing which way it goes.

IntelliTXT hasn't replaced any of the other forms of advertising Daniweb currently uses. So claiming "it's better than other types of ads" isn't particularly relevant.

What the "debate" over IntelliTXT reinforced, to me, was the profound change in tone and style here. The friendly Daniweb I knew and loved would never make "management" decisions that would cause valued moderators to leave. It would never make a decision that would dramatically lessen the quality of responses in the programming sections. The old Daniweb valued posts for their quality of response, professionalism or knowledge, moreso than the revenue they could bring.

The old Daniweb would never reverse a decision that was already made based on thorough discussion, or retract concessions which were made in the spirit of cooperation and balance.

So while I'll honor the request not to re-hash my objections to IntelliTXT, which are by no means unique, the whole story isn't being told. Daniweb has lost a great deal, I think, with recent "management" decisions - more than just "some mods" who've left for so-called "personal" reasons. When I stopped being treated like a respected moderator who did much to build up the Web Development sections, and started being treated like a number on a balance sheet, it was time to step down.

Well, actually - my reasons weren't "personal" at all. My cat didn't die or anything like that... my reason for stepping down was quite public, and at least one or two others have the same public reason: this forum's use of the IntelliTXT advertising system. I think the digest's summation of all these moderators with "personal reasons" is a bit of spin control.

Oh well, nevertheless, I continue to wish everyone well.

I agree with t. But the constructor doesn't do the creating. It does the initializing. Since the poster asked for a more "specific answer" (she since edited that out of her post), I clarified.

I wasn't arguing with you, but object instantiation, and object initialization, are separate (but related) things. The "constructor" is called during initialization.

Any thoughts? Sure... good luck? Have fun? Err,... what's the question?

Nope. The constructor is the method that is called when the object is initialized. You can have multiple constructors, each with different signatures.

The object is instantiated when you "create" it. After instantiation comes initiliazation, which is the job of the constructor.

In that case, I wrote an article that addresses PDF hyperlinks:

Can a PDF submit to itself? Can a PDF open a new window?

I'm not a lawyer, so this is not legal advice but "just some guy talking": if you uninstall the software that came with the book, you can sell it for whatever price you can get for it.

Most of the story is told here, which is the "About Us" link. You won't be told how much ad revenue the site makes, ever. First, because that's none of anyone's business (including mine), except Dani, and secondly, because divulging such information violates Google's TOS.