We are doing a test of Google Ads on the site. These are only going to stick around if they generate enough revenue to be worth it.

Feedback is welcome.

Google Ads

We've made an update to MemeStreams that hopefully improves the look of the site. There are also some security fixes in here, as well as some new features which should help us fight spam more effectively going forward. In addition, Acidus contributed some improvements to the MemeBox to make it easier to sort and keep track of new messages. We'd also like to thank Eric White for some HTML input that helped us improve the look of the site and Terratogen for some graphics work.

As always, let us know if you discover anything that isn't working right...

(Safari users may find some color misalignment. We're going to address that in a future update. We wanted this out and we decided to optomize for FF and IE for the time being. Safair literally displays some colors differently in some contexts.)

Yes, we know the Inbox isn't lighting up when you have new memes. We should have that fixed up soon. Fixed!

When I woke up this morning none of my domains were resolving. My websites, including MemeStreams, and email, were down. Ironically, GoDaddy told IDG on Friday that they don't need to apply DST patches to their machines because they are located in Arizona. I'm not sure why lack of DST patches would cause such a total outage. Its possible that there is another explanation, but regardless, this outage adds to other concerns about the reliability of GoDaddy has an operator of critical infrastructure.

The time is now 1:16 PM Eastern Daylight Savings Time (newly adjusted), on Sunday, March 11, 2007 - and it appears to me that none of my dozens of domain names registered and/or served at GoDaddy.com are working.I strongly suspect the problem is related to today's change to Daylight Savings Time. A recent story in PCWorld described some concerns that had been raised about GoDaddy.com's readiness for the time switch.

Slashdot coverage of the outage.
Update:Godaddy was DDOSed!

GoDaddy outage impacts MemeStreams

Rather than being a liability, however, social networks can be used to personalize and tailor information to individual users, and drive the development of new social search algorithms.... Digg can create personalized front pages for every user that are based on his or her friends’ readings. This will finally free individuals from “tyranny of the majority” which results from viewing a common global front page.

We've been doing that since 2001.

Social Networks and Social Information Filtering on Digg

For the parser bug that has been screwing up "quotation marks" and hrefs in forwarded posts. Please let us know if you run into any further buggyness...

Thanks very much to Acidus who took time out to dive into some hairy code and find this bug. We're sorry for any inconvenience it created.

Our recent update went out with a bug that sometimes cropped up when replying to posts which resulted in a 500 server error. This bug has been addressed. Please let us know if you see anything odd with the site.

Image posting has been re-enabled! Post away. We've tested on IE, Firefox, Safari, SideKick and Nintendo Wii, and the feature seems to work on all of these platforms. We still have some bugs we're still tracking with the most recent update, but we should have those cleared up over the course of Sunday...

We've temporarily disabled image embedding because we discovered that it causes a serious problem with an oddball build of IE6. We'll have it working again shortly. Please bare with us. If we were a real software company and we got paid to do this stuff we'd have a QA lab and set a test cases that discover these things before we ship, but this is a nights and weekends project with a few developers and so sometimes we miss a beat and it can take us a bit of time to catch back up. We'll having everything working shortly.

This comes with several improvements to the way messages are edited and displayed. In addition to inline display of images using the img tag, we have also added the HTML tags u, center, and pre, in addition to the already existing support for b, i, and a. blockquote can be used as blockquote, bq, or quote. When pre is used, any HTML tags within are escaped, so you can now display snippets of code and other previously impossible text without losing formatting. For instance, here is an example of an image tag:

<img src="http://kradmeme.local/meme_tail.gif" alt="Optional description">

Image tags can be justified left or right using the align attribute so text wraps around them, such as the image in this post. All implemented tags support standard HTML attributes to the degree we support the attributes.

When posting, the interface now displays error messages in realtime about formatting problems above the edit window. Eventually we will have this functionality include better information about to what types of HTML is allowed and how it can be used. In general, the system will display posts better and more uniformly. It is no longer so ridged about spacing after quotes, posts will now display properly regardless of if you have a newline after a quote or not. Characters such as > and < can now be used in posts without being part of an HTML tag as well.

Any Google/YouTube/Revver videos that are primary links will be displayed automatically at the top of the post. Videos can also be displayed inline with a tag like this:

<video url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2f4heaG288" alt="Optional description">

We will add other video services as we become aware of them. Let us know if there is a service you would like us to support.

We would like to single out Acidus for praise. His help made this update happen. We are very excited to have him actively involved with MemeStreams developlment. His work is present in several aspects of this update, such as the on-the-fly picture resizing and the realtime post validity checking. Be sure to tell him how much he kicks ass. We have never worked with anyone better when it comes to web security and javascript.

Be sure to tell terratogen he kicks ass as well. For years now, he has been providing us with with all our graphic design needs. You can see his work in the site's logo and the various graphical icons used throughout the site.

As always, if you encounter any problems, let Rattle or Decius know. More information and site updates are on the way.

MemeStreams Update: Now More Sexy!

I just posted a minor update to MemeStreams. There were a number of circles in MemeStreams that were broken. Many did not have names. These have all been deleted. If you did not have any circles before, you now have three: Co-Workers, Friends, and Interesting People, which are the same three that new users now get automatically. If you had circles before, your circles should not have changed. Please let me know if you observe any problems with these changes.