The Shoutster Blog

Spreading the Word

Charles — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 06:48:05 +0000

Alright, so the site doesn’t work without users, so now our next job is to get some users.

How should we do that? Well, in the past, usually it was a cult following from a group of people who browse specific websites. They’d come onto Shoutster, head over to their favorite site and blab all day long about the strangest things.

Most likely I’ll work on that again in the near future. I have a bunch of friends from SDN (student doctor network) and I may host a “interview advice” chat over there in the near future. People there like getting advice from people who are not themselves and got into good med schools, despite the fact that everybody has their own way of doing things.

Sleepy time for me. Au revoire.

the little dude smilies!

Jing — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 08:31:04 +0000

Exhibit A. Old-school AIM Smilies

Exhibit B. Shoutster Smilies

My Love – Hate Relationship with CSS

Jing — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 23:45:30 +0000

Essentially, we are giving Shoutster a facelift…for a project done like four years ago (stone ages in today’s internet age) — and a site that you’d never want to “W3C validate” — because it just might crash their server ;p This is mostly due to the fact that the website was not done using any external stylesheets, so everything is “in line.” For all those non-web techies out there, this may seem trivial or completely Greek. Essentially, it just means that a bunch of code was copied and pasted many, many times across separate files. Now, our job is to somehow clean that up (minimize the copying and pasting by putting key elements in just one central place) . Oh, and make a completely new skin (along with cute icons) too..

After several reverts back to the original site and to the new styled site and back to the original … I think I finally managed to put up a new skin without having Shoutster break (also known as “retaining functionality”). Many thanks and dear support from my partners, Richard and Charles, who remind me of the importance of incremental testing ;p

The Breaking of the World

Charles — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 08:54:44 +0000

So, I’m not sure what happened earlier, but touching things in Shoutster seems to break everything constantly! It’s like the code structure (from 4 years ago) is a final stage cancer patient ready to go, and we’re prepping it for the Olympics. Needless to say, Shoutster’s backend is beginning to show it’s age. Which reminds me, to those of you who don’t know already, Shoutster was a project of ours back from Richard and my Sophomore year of college at UC Berkeley. It had a little cult following of a few hundred users back in the day, mostly from http://www.hardforum.com, http://forums.stangnet.com, http://www.feoa.net, an ice skating forum, and a few others.

Then, one day, we broke it. We don’t know what happened, but it just stopped working. And then we had midterms and we had to leave it dead for a week. And then we tried to fix it again, but were distracted by finals. So yeah… now it’s 4 years later and we’re resurrecting the poor thing from the grave.

Fortunately our badass sys-admin, Alexey, had this beast chugging on a lot of lean and hardy backend code. Considering we’ll be popping this thing back out again in a week or two, the system will soon be put to the test.

A Shot in the Dark

Charles — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 09:36:47 +0000

So I’m trying to get this darn blog to spit out separate RSS feeds for Jing, Richard, and myself. Heaven forbid there be an easy and publicly known way to do it. The way I see it, I think I can probably just have each of us post into a different category and then construct the standard WordPress RSS feed category url. That might work. But I just have a bad feeling about this in general!

There seems to be information about this scattered throughout the web. The post with the most potential tells me that I should tack on &author=# to the standard feed url. That would make it… http://shoutster.wordpress.com/?feed=rss&author=0? That seems to work…

But now comes the parsing bit to stick in on the page… hrmm. You know, I could probably do it client side with javascript, or I could straight up use Magpie and plug it in via PHP. I’m not sure which would be easier.

Either way, it’s time to hit the sack!