brentashley

What the freakin goddam hell is up with the twats at siliconvalley.com who after *at least* a goddam month STILL haven’t got Dan Gillmor’s pages coming up without this error:

I saw it the FIRST DAY. I opened my debugger and found the problem with the function initMenus() apparently not being defined before it is called.

I could have told them right away, told them EXACTLY what the problem was (as could anybody with just a smidgen of javascript experience), but NOOOOO, I figured I’d cut them some slack and let them get their kinks figured out. Well, it ain’t happenin’.

As Ace Ventura would say: “Loo-Hoo…Ze-Herrs!!!” Tech credibility down the shitter.

Oh yeah, send me a comment, and when I’ve decided to stop sitting on the fence and take a definite side on this issue, I’ll notify you right away.

After enjoying free blog hosting at Manilasites for a year, I’ve decided to bring my blog inhouse. Nothing at all wrong with Manila or Manilasites, I just want to have complete control over the storage and lifetime of my content.

I’m going to leave my Manilasite in place for historical reference (there are quite a few other blogs and google entries pointing to it) and refer people to my new blog here at http://brentashley.blogchat.com.

You’ll notice, though, that I’ve carried my archives forward too.

Francois-Georges Cloutier sent me an email about my JSRS browser rpc library. He pointed me a site he did last year using some similar RPC stuff. Wow. This Parillusion site is some of the keenest DHTML UI I’ve yet to see. IE4+ only, but way, way cool.

Hey! Did I not just say it was way, way cool?!? What the heck are you doing down here reading this paragraph? Fer pity’s sake, click the dang link with all speed, get in there, maximize, minimize, explore, scroll, play about. You’ll thank yourself.

Back to making money, feeding the family. Critical fixes being shoved into zip, no updates or feature bloat happening. I’ve got some ideas of where i’ll be going with this, but for the moment it’s back to surviving the dotcom depression without greeting the bailiff at the door. I’ll be online fairly regularly to answer any questions, though.

Roland says:

Brent has updated his Manila site to put the BlogChat window at the top. Cool! Please share the code, Brent!

Here you go, Roland:

<iframe src="http://www.yoursite.xxx/blogchat/anybodyhome.php"
height="225" width="525">
</iframe>

NOTE: The BlogChat window that was on this page has been moved to the top of my main blog template. If you’re viewing this as a historical page, you’ll have to click on the button at the top right there to pop up a BlogChat window if I’m available.

Okay, I’m tired of being polite about it.

It’s the year 2002. Netscape 4 is a dilapidated junker, rusted through the floorboards and belching smoke. Get those damn things off the friggin road!! There are FREE alternatives available to you.

If you are a web designer, a web scripter, a website owner, a marketing person in charge of your company’s web face, NOW HEAR THIS:

If you are spending specific effort in making your website work for NS4 when it already works with DOM-compatible browsers (or worse, when it doesn’t), YOU ARE A PART OF THE PROBLEM. People are not going to drop NS4 as long as it’s being accomodated. Stop it!!!

Oh, yeah, yes I could probably make BlogChat work with NS4, but NO I WILL NOT.

Don’t get all namby-pamby on me about being inclusive and accomodating, either. I’m not listening LA LA LA LA LA.

Nice work by brennen, getting the first working Mac OS/X server running BlogChat. No active link yet, but the proof is there.

I integrated Nate’s CSS styling work into my BlogChat, looks really nice.

I moved my own BlogChat server from my home Linux machine to phpwebhosting.com. Not that my home box or connection couldn’t cut it, I’ve had up to 12 people on at once without any noticeable problems (except for the obvious problem of trying to follow 12 people in a little chat window).

Tim‘s yet another guy who’s BlogChatting.

Gonna hafta put up a links gallery. I’ll be starting a new website for this soon. Keep on the lookout for BlogChat.com (no link because it ain’t ready yet).

Blahg is the name for my blog chat app. It’s small, light, works across platforms (IE and Mozilla on Win/Mac/Linux), and is fun to play with.

I hope to learn enough about Radio Userland in the next while to build the server-side in Usertalk with the object database, but for now, it uses PHP and mySQL on the server side.

This image on the right will tell you if I’m online and listening with my master chat client.

If so, you can click it and we can yap.

You can download the source and run it on your own blog. It’s free and open to use how you like.

Oops – wasn’t deleting old posts after retention period. Fixed.

What is BlogChat?

BlogChat is a little chat room. It’s sort of a private little instant messaging system that doesn’t require an account or any special software. It is only active when the person who is hosting it is online and running the master chat application.

If you want one of your own, you will have to run the server part of it on a machine with PHP and mySql, two open source free tools that run on Windows under IIS and Apache, Linux under Apache, and most likely Mac OS/X (although no reports of that yet).

If I’m in, you can click on the status button and come in for a chat. Soon I’ll post a page of BlogChat links listing others who are already hosting this new blog phenomenon. See below for a couple of the early adopters.

If I’m not online, it’s because I’m reminding my wife and kids that I exist outside of my basement office. They might have forgotten that this week.

No more milestones. Ship time for BlogChat. Download it and have fun with it.

I’ve called it BlogChat 1.0 although I may have done so with the last release. This is the first version under the GPL.

I’ve had SOOO many people help me on this, I really honestly can’t name them all because it was such a flurry of activity I didn’t stop to gather their names and URLs. If you’ve been part of this wacky collaborative design effort, send me an email and I’ll compile a list.

Special thanks to Doc for starting the blog rolling, Eric for attracting the design community along, Tim for dropping by my office and piping the feature requests to me while I coded, Dwight for being an early supporter, and of course, Dougal and Nate for being the first to implement.

Everyone else, you know who you are. Thanks.