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#Personal, #Site Update

I started this website for a couple of reasons: the first reason was to get better at web design. I wanted to make a site that was professional and cool and looked great. I don't think I really hit any of those marks, but I learned a LOT along the way.

#Personal, #Site Update

Well, this has become less of a blog of 'everything interesting on the internet' and more of a personal blog, but oh well.
Fixed a few things with the site today; nothing major, but cleaned up some code; really just wanted an excuse to mess with stuff. You won't see any difference.
Looking for a place for my own to live; would be really cool to live on my own...
why am I blogging? It's 3 AM. I'll finish this up tomorrow...

#Indie, #Music, #Epitonic.com, #Website Review

Okay, this review article has an ulterior motive: you see, a couple years back I stumbled upon (with no help from stumble upon, at that), a little website called epitonic.com - it was chock full of indie music, with many songs available to download, and tons of info about each band, intertwining each listing with related listings, as any good 2.0 site should. It helped me check out some new artists easily and not always have the same old things sitting around. And then I forgot about it.
A while back, I somehow found it again and also found that they had a new site design - one which is strange yet, very very cool. And I found that their little playlist music player was very good at doing that - playing music. It's attractive, cool, easy to use - and never misses a beat, such as when you click on the album art to check the band out further. And then, I forgot it again.
So today I was trying really hard to remember what the site was, and finally, luckily, found it. Epitonic is not exactly something that was easily searchable on google, since so many sites are 'indie-download.com' and 'indie-indie-bo-bindy.com'. Looking for new indie music from a particular site was a bit of a bother. But now that I've rediscovered it, I ain't losing it again - now it's BLOGGED, bitch.

Source

#Site Update, #Street Team

Well, now that I have some interest in my own website again, I've decided to ask a small favor of you, my readers - and no, it's not money (but I'll take that as well ;)) I need some loyal readers to help spread the confusingly good word - make a confusingly good street team, if you will. Right now, all I have is a simple little logo for you to place on your blog, website, myspace, forum signature - anywhere. It's just copy and paste. So, check after the break if you're interested.

#Personal, #Site, #Site Update, #Vigor

Okay so I've been thinking a lot lately about this stupid website. I really liked writing here, and I think it's got some neat ajax stuff, to which I'd like to continue to develop. But my zest for cool stuff online has greatly diminished. Where are all the cool videos? The funny pictures? The deals online?

No wait, scratch that last one. I am still very much a consumer whore.

So I have decided to go ahead and re-think the focus of this blog, especially since it never really had focus to begin with. This is now a deal blog. I know there are millions out there, and I read some of the forums. But I still want to write, so, so be it.

I may still post little cool things I see online, but primarily you can count on me to bring you awesome sales on dvd's, games, computer stuff, anything that catches my eye. Let's begin. Click the permalink and continue reading, because I know that picture of the bootleg cut of Almost Famous has got you wondering...

Source

#100, #Milestone, #Site Update

Well well well! It seems this little blog has reached a milestone of sorts; this here is the 100th article to be posted! During the past few months we've discussed topics ranging from DVD Sales to Bomb Scares. There have been two new editions to the writers (knit_vicious and w00t!), and dare I say it, I think we all three have grown a bit in the field of professional journalism. There have been numerous video posts, beginning with daily random videos (which simply were way too many), and now weekly random videos (which are often hard to get around to posting). There have been a few sporadic reviews thrown in, as well as some heavily commented on opinion pieces. We've had The List: cheap video games, cheap anime, and cheap dvd's. There was every SNES game ever, an amazing (albeit creepy) gigantic manequin girl pulled by about 40 people with ropes, spiders on drugs, Craig vs Wild, and Chad Vader. And the article just before this one about building your very own arcade machine.

So, although I realize 100 posts isn't really that high of a number when you are writing a blog (especially one with so much filler), I also am glad we have a fair amount of content, most of which I am quite proud of. But what lies ahead for ConfusinglyGood? Some ideas we've been tossing around include a newsletter detailing posts each week, a "send us articles" link, and a site redesign. I've got some ideas and as soon as I get some time, motivation, and inspiration, I'll begin.

So, anyone have any favorite articles? Anything you'd like to see more of? How about less? Be sure to leave a comment right below!

#Site, #Update, #Navigation, #Categories

Another small change to the site - you can now see all articles (the main page), or sort them by type - article, review, or opinion piece. Navigation, however, is pretty messed up, and atm I don't have the energy to mess with it. You can find links near the top for the separate categories.
What say ye? Does this help organize content, or make things more confusing?

#Comments, #Site, #Updates, #Now With More Confusingly Good Than Ever Before, #Subscriptions

We've been working very hard to make the site as user friendly as possible, and for us a large part of this is the comments. Here are some new features recently implemented that might make using the site a little better.

-Subscriptions! You may have noticed a small link near the comments which reads "Subscribe to comments". If enabled, when a user posts a new comment to an article you are subscribed to, an email is shot out to you telling you about it. This email is sent only once until the article is checked, so you don't have to worry about getting a lot of emails if there is heavy commenting on a particular article.

By default you are auto-subscribed to an articles comments when you post to that article. This feature can be changed by going to control panel>article subscriptions.

In article subscriptions you can also view your subscriptions, with the option to remove individual ones or all.

One more new feature is a pretty experimental one, and might change a lot over the next few days. When a comment is posted that is over 750 words in length, it is cropped when displayed, showing only the beginning of the comment. The rest of the comment can be viewed by clicking 'expand comment', and can be collapsed again. It seemed that large comments made it difficult to navigate through the article. Another idea was to make the comments have their own little scrollbars.

Comments on these new features are greatly appreciated; tell us what we can do better, what doesn't work well, and what doesn't work at all. If there is an error, please comment on what browser+version you are using and any text the error might say. We have debugged in FX 2.0 and IE 7 so far.

There are some test comments at the end of this article to demonstrate how the new cropping of comments works.

#Now With More Confusingly Good Than Ever Before, #Site, #Update, #Comments, #Comment This!

Well, the good news is that the commenting system is pretty much done. The bad news is that I lost roughly 13 hours coding it. But I think everyone will enjoy it. Some features:

Completely Ajax
For those that don't know, Ajax is Asynchronous Javascript and XHTML. It basically means I can change elements on a page without a hard refresh. All of the fading effects and "instant" things on this site use AJAX (well the fading is just JS but what it gets from the DB is AJAX).

Login and Post
If you go to an article and aren't logged in, you can still comment; simply type your login info into the appropriate boxes, fill out the comment, and hit the submit button. You will be logged in and your comment will be added.

Error Checking, So Much Error Checking!
Here's how this works: the form can tell, on submit, whether your login is correct, whether you filled out the comment at all, and if you've commented in the last 2 minutes. (Unfortunately, it sort of breaks when a comment is made just before the hour turns. You may have to wait 5 minutes in this case).
When you try to submit, it will give you messages to the right of the comment text area, informing you of what is happening. Up to three messages are displayed at once, and the older messages fade out.

Last, but not least...Live Preview!
The other admins at the site are probably not too impressed with this anymore (we use it in the add article section), but new users might be interested to know that when you type a comment, it's basically what you see is what you get. A new box will display below the last comment on an article as you type. On submission, this preview fades away and you "real" comment is placed on the page in real time. I think Kotaku has something like this but it never seems to work. And, in case you were wondering, yes you CAN use BBCode in comments. It might not display properly in the live preview, but on submit it works itself out.

I have tested this in Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.0.0.1. The ONLY error I have encountered (well, after fixing all of the others), is in IE7: if you login and post a comment and try to click post again, it will for some reason break and you will be taken to a blank page. If this happens, simply hit back. This is only after logging in and trying to do a second comment; this will not happen once you log in or go to another page. IE simply doesn't give enough error reporting to figure it out right now.

If you have any other problems, you can let me know in the comments of this page (unless they don't work entirely for some reason, in which case you can reach me at d3vkit [at] gmail [dot] com).

Sorry for the long sort of personal post, but I am very excited to have this done, and done well!

#Knit_Vicious, #Moderator, #Site, #Updates

Well I've talked a friend of mine into blogging here, so we'll see if maybe we can get some REAL content added now.
So you can now blame two people for all the ills of society, me (d3vkit) and Knit_Vicious, our newest (and only other) member of everythingamazing.net (which is still looking for a better name). Edit: A better name has been found: illuminatingletters.com Edit 2: Now confusinglygood.com