That being said, it is now 2009, and I have a whole list of things I want to get accomplished right now. My wife is in Russia for two weeks, so I now have no excuse for not doing any of it. My first priorities are my abandoned Android application and whatthefuck.com.

ElJay is going to see a new release in a few days fixing a lot of the difficulties people are having. There's a 25% reduction in memory use, a huge increase in speed and responsiveness, and seems to take care of much of the network connectivity issues people have been coming up with. Once that's out, work will begin on a new application that posts not only to LiveJournal, but any LJ-based site, Movable Type, Wordpress, or Blogger site. It's the number one feature request besides specific LiveJournal stuff, so there will be some parallel development. I will likely be maintaining both applications separately, so those who only use LiveJournal don't have to learn a new tool, but both applications will benefit from the use of some shared code.

The old wtf has been running quite well lately. The number of exceptions being passed back to me have dropped considerably, and people seem to be using the site without too much difficulty. I have a huge checklist of crap I need to finish before I start mail bombing old users, but I have to say, things aren't bad right now. What's coming? Mostly style and behind the scenes changes. The code needs to be cleaned up quite a bit, as there is something like three years of start and stop development in there, and it needs to be tightened up a bit. Data management and cleanup needs to occur, as some older board posts are missing and/or corrupted, due to an old bug. The mobile site at m.whatthefuck.com is going to be filled out with some of the user options and an email notifier, and promoted to a top tier service out of wtf. Some basic blog functionality is going to be added as well, due to popular demand, and support for it is likely going to be rolled into the above "new blogging application".

From there? Who knows. I have big plans for 2009. As for the freebies? "Things I Hate About You" is going to get some social features, comments, and Facebook integration, TwitterGrowl is going to get a GUI, and is going to get a new storage engine and a new home site.

Things that aren't free? Well, you'll see. :)

I decided, for some reason, that my first application was going to be a LiveJournal client, that is, an application that enables easy posting to a LiveJournal blog. I would be able to work with simple HTTP requests, design a simple but effective user interface, play with threads a little bit, and touch the Location Manager (GPS/Tracking) if I was lucky.

I was.

I'm happy with the final product, and it's modular enough that I can add to it later if I wanted to, or fork it to a generic blog posting tool if I felt crazy enough. You can log into your LJ account, select user pictures from a live gallery of all of your user icons, dynamically retrieve your location from GPS or fuzzy tracking, add moods or your current music. It's remarkably complete for a few days of work, and I think I want to add the ability to attach photos later on, as well as limit to certain friend groups or post to other communities. Trivial tasks in the long run, but I wanted to get it out there as soon as possible.

Click through if you want to see what it looks like.

When I can, I will put in the names, email addresses in the to, reply to, and cc headers, and the source IP address, if available. Unfortunately, most of the source IPs are invalid.

I'm installing it now to see how well wtf runs. I'm very interested to see how well it works.

I'm excited. :)

I would say it's a natural progression.

Okay, I suppose that isn't saying much.

I do have to say this. I started out building on top of a courier/postfix based system, and ended up rolling my own on top of qpsmtpd, and will be writing a custom IMAP daemon for the newly-created system. The first version is very basic, but there are so many neat things I can do with it.

The new server with a terabyte and a half of space is heading to the data center this week, but if this works how I hope, there may be a few more servers heading over there soon enough. FreeBSD and ZFS is pretty much admin-heaven. PostgreSQL is a wonderful thing as well.

It's odd that no one has created a decent gallery application in Catalyst yet. I'm torn now between just moving to Flickr and paying the money, or writing something that I can use. I have the server space, what's stopping me?

Oh, right, time.

The new site still doesn't have much for content, and much of it is recycled from a failed attempt at caring in 2003, but there are some changes in the works that required me to at least make a site framework. I'm still downloading IE6 to test it, but it naturally works fine in Safari/Firefox/Chrome.

I gave in and used tables, since IE6 CSS is so odd when doing absolute positioning. If anyone checked out Things I Hate About You recently, you'll notice that it works fine in IE6, but that's only because of some major changes in CSS. I wish there was more of an effort to rid the world of IE6. IE7 is still bad, but it's at least manageable.

I registered the domain name back in March, thinking of something completely different, but decided to make it a little more community driven and fun. That, and I wanted to see how long it would take. Part of my continuing experimentation with cute elements and jQuery, this adds a few effects, some stateless connections, and was also written completely with Catalyst. It took four days of an hour or two a night, with posts, votes, authentication, and RSS feeds.

Not bad.

I'll probably be adding things to this site slowly, to see how well it extends. It was kinda fun to create this without having to worry about eight years of legacy, like the rewrite of whatthefuck.com into Catalyst. This was just doing-it-as-I-want. I may use this as a test bed for a Facebook application as well.

It's still pretty broken in IE6, but it's low on my priority list. I may just redirect people to a browser download page. :P

Let's see what breaks. :)

I've been involved with the development, support, and administration of running various web sites for the last ten years or so, and yet, I've never been a part of a site that has run any kind of advertising campaign. Doing things for yourself changes some of your views on internet advertising, as it's one of the few ways you can reliably generate any income. People, for the most part, do not want to pay for anything they do online.

Most of you know that I run www.whatthefuck.com, a free content and networking site that was content and networking before it was cool. I had two major issues during the life of this site: first, a lack of time to properly maintain it, and second, a lack of ability to monetize the domain properly. I created the site with a friend when we were both just out of high school, and it was created in the same line of thinking as the old school BBSes that we used to run and sign into daily. Because of that, it never really occurred to use to try to make money off of it, and when it finally did, the economy was running down the drain.

Over the last year, I've been rebuilding the site piece by piece on top of the fantastic platform of Perl, PostgreSQL, Catalyst, and DBIx::Class. It "relaunched" last November, very quietly, to see who would notice. Those who were still sticking around noticed immediately, as the site worked, worked well, and was still speedy. The first mission was accomplished, and the last year has been me working on it in my spare time to restore the feature set that was original envisioned back in 1999.

The difference between 1999 and 2008 in terms of the web is like comparing video games from around 1994 to now. In 1990, a sole shareware developer could crank out fun, easy to play games as shareware for $20 and make a killing. Now, you need a few million in the bank, and a team of artists, designers, modelers, and marketers to publish a video game.. and there's no guarantee that it'll be a hit. You can't throw together some basic HTML, add a few tables and server side form processing, and call it a success anymore. You need transitions, glass effects, AJAX, Web 2.0, blah, blah, blah.

(Sometimes, this goes overboard, like in the case of Ruby on Rails developers. This is why a simple service like Twitter is still having issues -- overdoing something simple, creating a platform you just can't extend.)

To bring this long story back to the ground, the next big push out from wtf is the free e-mail support that users enjoyed back when whatthefuck.com launched. Back then, it was essentially three things: a mailbox viewer, a simple mail viewer (no MIME! wtf?!), and a message composer. Yeah, there were mail folders. Sure, later on, we added an address book, but that's as fancy as it got. Eventually, the whole system collapsed under failed hardware and too little space. Now, no one is going to care about a mail service unless it -- at the very least -- does real time folder management, tagging, dynamic resizing, MIME decoding, spam filtering, and live updates. That, and 20mb per user doesn't cut it anymore, but there's no way we're going to give out 5gb at this point. Even with a minor increase in allowed space, I have to buy a lot of hardware to support this endeavor, so I have to come up with a revenue source.

Enter advertising networks, and this morning's research.

I've hit a bit of a breaking point, though. I tried to put Google SiteSearch on wtf a few months ago, but Google blocks wtf from making any requests. Apparently, we're on their blocked/forbidden list for a violation of their policy. The only thing I see in there that could potentially be a policy violation is 'excessive swearing' due to the domain name, but that kinda sucks. I've seen sites with Google ads that were doing far more subversive things than our forum.

I just wanted to see if I could get an ad up anywhere else. Turns out, I can. Now, I go look for another advertising network that doesn't have adult ads, while still allowing a domain like whatthefuck.com.

Now that I know I need to move forward, the next question is 'How?'.

Huh.

Right now, I use a Lenovo/IBM ThinkPad T61 14" Widescreen edition, with a Core 2 Duo at 2.2GHz, 2gb RAM, a 100gb drive, and DVD-RW DL drive. The screen resolution is a comfortable 1440x900, I have some wireless, and life is good. I'm also running OS X 10.5, licensed but violating EULA, because it's one of the greatest operating systems we currently have available. There are a few little issues with running Leopard on this machine. Most things work, but I don't currently have a driver for the built in ethernet, the machine won't sleep if I have bluetooth enabled, the machine won't wake up if I enable the PC card slots, I can't control the brightness of the LCD, and when the laptop runs out of battery, it shuts off instead of going to sleep.

There are a few people working on two of the issues, namely the brightness issue with the Intel X3100 graphics controller, and a driver for the Intel 82566M Gigabit Ethernet controller. No sense in duplicating their efforts. The only kext I've ever written was a small driver to enable the tablet serial port on the X61 tablet that I had before this, so people could use TabletMagic and get full tablet functionality in OS X. Ethernet driver creator, I am not.

But, hey, I give you one little turd to make your life easier, and you may even find it useful if you're on a real Mac. This little package, 'sleep_monitor', installs a LaunchDaemon and a binary on your machine to keep track of how much battery you have left and put your machine to sleep at a certain threshold. It's a simple idea, but most Mac authors would charge $20 for the privilege. I give you it for free, but you don't get a GUI. Sorry.

When you install the package, it immediately starts. It will wait until you have 4% of your battery remaining, and puts your machine to sleep. On my T61 with the 4 cell battery, that usually kicks me into sleep when I have about 5 minutes of use left in the menu bar, and that will give me many hours of sleep to find an outlet to charge things up. Want to change the threshold? Edit /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.abstractwankery.sleep_monitor.plist and change the second ProgramArgument to the percentage you'd like to kill out at. Have an 8 cell battery? 2-3% is fine. Have a nearly dead battery? Maybe 15% is more your thing. Leave the % sign out of it, it will only cause problems.

SleepMonitor 0.1
Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5

Granted, a few things have been fixed. The SMS posting service makes it really easy to actually post remotely, as none of the S60 clients are very good, and the Java clients really suck. They don't seem to be down as much, and the speed isn't terrible. Rumor has it, they're getting rid of Ruby on Rails, which just makes me jump with glee.

Since then, for posting, someone put together an AppleScript called Tweet, which allows you to easily post to Twitter through QuickSilver. It works well for me, I just hit Command-Space, hit period, type my tweet, tab, then tweet it. It sounds complicated, but it's really easy to deal with. I like it, and it was easy as hell to do.

Then, there's the feed problem. RSS is too slow, I don't want it cluttering up Google Reader. Twitterrific still isn't working for me, as pretty as it is. There are two Dashboard modules, and neither of them work well, and silently fail at that. What I really wanted was something that would just post tweets to Growl and be done with it. I found something, but it was a Ruby script with manual configuration and little extensibility. I didn't want to screw with it, so off to /dev/null it went.

Hey, there's a point.

In the end, I wrote a perl script called TwitterGrowl to do exactly what I want it to do. To make life easier, it relies on the Twitter login information in your keychain to log in, and prompts you to create one if it doesn't find anything. It reports when there's a login failure, or Twitter goes into Suckfest, or when a system maintenance issue is posted. Better yet, I packaged it up into an easy to use, double clickable application. Pop it into your Applications folder, drag it to your Login Items, and it'll go into the background and sign in when you log in. Easy as pie. All of the required modules are in the application package, and you can feel free to browse the source by viewing the package contents and heading into the Resources folder.

So, now that I have a steady "works for me", would anyone else like to give it a shot and see if anything breaks? Comment here with any issues or comments you find, and if no one posts, it either works great or I am a total failure. :)

TwitterGrowl 0.1 (Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5, Universal)

Yet, I never do.

I've been on LiveJournal for seven years, and I bet I have at least four of those a year on there, too.

Sorry about that.