Apollo Quest!

They say everyone has their price, and I'm no exception. Perhaps if I were independently wealthy, I'd be less corruptible, and while I'm wealthy in friends and experiences, it's hard to buy food or pay for the dentist with those. (Speaking of which, I have a dentist appointment tomorrow. *sigh*)

Occasionally, I get requests to buy the domain atlasquest.com -- it's a gem of a domain name, as it turns out. When I started Atlas Quest, a google search brought up precisely zero pages that used those two words, one right after the other, and I was delighted to find the domain available for purchase. It only took a few months before I got my first offer from someone to buy the domain from me, but the offer was for about fifty bucks and hardly worth the effort. It wasn't even a company that intended to use the domain--they just wanted to "flip" the domain and sell it to the highest bidder.

Every few months, I still get one of those offers, and I've always ignored them.... until now. It seems that a World of Warcraft (WOW) has some sort of extension or something (I don't really get it myself since I don't play) that they call AtlasQuest (or AQ, for short). Notice the lack of a space between Atlas and Quest. Not exactly the same way I spell it, but close enough. I first noticed them a few years ago and found it mildly amusing at the time.

The latest offer I got was from them. At first I blew them off, like I've always done, but apparently they really want that domain name in a bad way. And apparently, making games is a heck of a lot more profitable than letterboxing is, because they offered me--well, it seems wrong to mention specifics, but their offer had five digits (and that's not including the pennies) WHAT?! "I'll think about it," I told them. What was really going through my head was, "Hell, YES!" Sure, I'd need a new domain for Atlas Quest, but a rose by any other name is still a rose, and Atlas Quest by any other name is still Atlas Quest. For that much money, I'll be happy to use a new domain!

So negotiations ensued. First, I needed a new domain, and finally settled on Apollo Quest. This has a couple of benefits. First, I can still sell the AQ patches I have. Thankfully, I had only used the AQ abbreviation on the patches, so all of the ones I've already sold will not become obsolete. Second, it still keeps the "spirit" of the original name, switching out one character from Greek mythology for another. And, it's still easy enough for people to spell. (A lot of those creatures from Greek mythology have bizarre names that are very difficult for most people to spell or even pronounce!)

Unfortunately, the domain apolloquest.com is owned by one of those domain flipper companies, so I needed to negotiate with them to get the new domain. (They were trying to sell it for $1,200, but I got them to agree to less. Still highway robbery if you ask me, but who am I to complain--I'm selling mine for tens of thousands of dollars!) It'll take about a week before that domain is officially transferred into my name and the IP address is fully propagated, but it's in the works.

Once I get the apolloquest.com domain name and it's all official, I'll move Atlas Quest to the new location, then start redirecting traffic that does go to atlasquest.com to apolloquest.com. I'll keep atlasquest.com through the end of April so people have plenty of time to learn about the new domain name and have time to adjust links on their own websites as necessary.

The first day of May, I'll start the process of transferring the atlasquest.com domain to AtlasQuest (without the space). I don't know how long it'll take them before they actually get their own website set up since that's not in my control, but any link that points to atlasquest.com will likely break at some point during that first week of May.

And that's it. Except for the name, absolutely nothing else will be changing. Marjorie will still be our chick of choice, wassa will still be a webmaster, and cheese racing will still be allowed at letterboxing events.

And welcome to Apollo Quest!

The Virtual Demotion

I haven't been looking forward to this latest update because I know it's going to tick a lot of people off, so let me apologize in advance. Virtual 'boxes' have long since lost any connection to boxes as we know it, and I've finally reflected that fact in the database and the code base. In a nutshell, they've been demoted. They are no longer boxes, in name or function.

For a long time, I didn't care that virtuals (in my opinion, at least) were being run into the ground. I didn't do them, so I didn't really care. Whatever floats your boat. =) Eventually, however, their proliferation started causing a couple of technical problems that made me sit up and take notice. The two big issues:

* The enormous number of photos being uploaded into the system were taking up an incredibly large amount of limited disk space. I did a couple of delaying tactic, such as deleting decorative photos that were included with clues and limiting listings for virtuals to one person per day. Those were just stall tactics, though, not permanent solutions.
* Because it's actually quite easy to solve all (or nearly all) virtuals, it had some unique issues when it came to developing database queries. For those who had found more than about 50% of the virtuals listed on Atlas Quest, it caused an excessive number of slow database queries. Since the other types of boxes didn't have those kind of find rates (nor the sheer number of finds involved), the problem doesn't show up with other box types. It was a problem unique to virtuals, and I didn't have a good solution to it.


To be perfectly honest, I'd be just as happy to stop support for virtuals completely, but I know quite a few of you are big fans of them, so I haven't. I thought about moving them to a completely separate website, which is actually quite an appealing idea to me, but creating a new website from scratch would take a lot more work than I wanted to handle. So I went with the solution that I'd move virtuals into a category of their own, completely independent of boxes, trackers, events, and groups (which were the four official "categories" of "stuff" I supported before). Now there's an actual virtual category, rather than just a subtype of the box category.

This change has several important ramifications. I'm building this code from scratch, so it's rather primitive at the moment. A lot of features that were designed to work explicitly with boxes such as tags, ignored boxes, box comments, and so forth--they don't work on virtuals anymore. That's the bad news. Eventually, I'd like to implement some of those features, but it takes time, and it's not going to happen overnight.

Of course, to support virtuals at all, I really needed solutions to those two big elephants in the room, and a number of changes are directly related to fixing those problems. The first--images for solutions will no longer be hosted on Atlas Quest. Instead of uploading images, you'll just create links to images elsewhere on the web. (And no, uploading images to the Photo Gallery and linking to those will not work--AQ will reject those links.) Existing images can stay on Atlas Quest, but all new virtuals will require externally hosted images. This should help cut the number of images being uploaded dramatically.

The slow queries problem I've attempted to help solve by reducing the number of tables in the database that need to be joined. Most of you are probably rolling your eyes thinking, "What's that mean?" What this means is that series of virtuals will no longer be supported. (Existing series have been split up into individual listings.) Since almost all virtuals had clues and solutions hosted on Atlas Quest anyhow, I've gone ahead and made that an official rule. All virtuals listed on Atlas Quest must have a clue and solution listed. (Any existing boxes that did not have a clue or solution listed have had their status changed to unavailable.)

While I'm certain that a lot of these changes won't be popular, there are a couple of silver linings for you virtual aficionados. =) Since the original concept of solving passkeys one letter at a time has largely gone extinct, you can now just type the passkey rather than set it one letter at a time. (Which, truth be told, is actually easier for me to implement and maintain anyhow.)

Additionally, now that virtuals are in their own separate category, I got rid of stuff that wasn't particularly applicable to them. For instance, a planter, author, owner, and carver seemed a bit of overkill for a virtual box. Has there ever been a planter who wasn't the author? And the vast majority of virtuals were images stolen off the web so listing carvers doesn't seem particularly necessary. (And even if someone is using hand-carved stamps, would you actually be using someone else's hand-carved images? Probably not a good idea....) So there are only two names associated with virtuals--the person who first listed the box (the "creator") and the person who maintains the box (the "owner").

Likewise, the status options have been simplified as well to two different choices as well--active and unavailable. While technically, I suppose the "unknown" option could be used, it seems almost ridiculous to apply it to a virtual. And the distinction between an "unavailable" virtual and a "retired" virtual seemed like a line so thin, it hardly seems worth quibbling about. So the status options have been narrowed down to a format more suitable for virtuals. Plant dates are no longer used at all--it should always be the same as the list date--so it seemed like an unnecessary redundancy to support both a plant and list date. You don't even have the option of entering it anymore.

And there's one other relatively minor change which, I suspect, might possibly anger people most of all--you will not find your virtual plant or find counts anywhere on Atlas Quest. I suspect that part of the reason that virtuals have gone downhill over the years is that it was easy to list and find virtuals faster and faster and people could rack up large numbers very quickly. Had more effort been put into quality rather than quantity, I might never have needed to demote the virtual. If you want to keep score for yourself, that's fine, but you won't find a virtual Hall of Fame anymore, and your virtual counts will not be displayed in your profile. We've always said it shouldn't be about the numbers, and now it's not--in both words and actions. (I will admit, part of the reason for this change is that it takes the database a really long time to count up the tens of thousands of finds some of you folks have picked up. But I like the principle behind the change as well.)

For the most part, virtuals are completely hidden unless someone explicitly chooses to participate in them by joining the Virtuals group. I've already added anyone who has solved or listed virtuals in the past, so most of you shouldn't need to worry about this. (I've also included it as a Miscellaneous Preference.) The virtuals board has also been moved into this group as well. If you are a member of this group, you'll see a "Virtuals" link under the "My Page" menubar option, and that's your link to all things virtual.

And, all of the code related to virtuals is completely new. I've done quite a bit of testing on it, but there is a LOT of new code being used, and it's almost certainly going to have a lot of bugs in it. Please be patient with me--I'll fix them as quick as I can.

I think that covers most of the issues regarding virtuals. If you have any questions or comments, please post them to the Virtuals board. If you just want to chew me out for these changes, I'd rather you not--it's unlikely to do any good--but I suppose you can do that too.

Now Aren't I Clever? =)

I know some of you stay up all night, just wondering, "What is Ryan doing?" Well, let me tell you about some of the exciting things I've managed to complete tonight.

Ever since I set up Another Long Walk on Blogger as a "custom domain"--that is, it points to my own domain name rather than a generic name that looks like http://mysubdomain.blogspot.com--I've wondered if I could get the rest of my blogs off of blogspot.com hell. Okay, maybe hell is too strong a word, but whenever I see a blog that uses that as the domain, I think it looks just a little bit tacky. Like wearing a thong to Taco Bell. There's just something that says, "I'm cool," by hosting one's thoughts on your very own domain name. Domain names are cheap--I get mine from GoDaddy for about ten bucks each per year. Less than a dollar per month. All thing considered, it's a cheap way to look somewhat professional on the Internet.

I've been using http://atlasquest.blogspot.com for my letterboxing blog, which works, but like I said, I think it looks tacky. I could have moved it to one of the many atlasquest.XYZ domain names I do own--atlasquest.biz, atlasquest.org, atlasquest.mobi, and probably a few others I've forgotten off the top of my head, but those aren't atlasquest.COM! It's just not the same....

So I've left it at http://atlasquest.blogspot.com all this time... until now! While figuring out how to host my Another Long Walk blog at http://www.anotherlongwalk.com, it seemed like I could tweak the directions a bit to have my blog point to http://blog.atlasquest.com. I wouldn't use www since that's used for the main Atlas Quest website, but wouldn't it be slick if my letterboxing blog were hosted at http://blog.atlasquest.com? Yeah, I thought so too.

But I was scared to make any changes to the DNS settings. If I screwed something up, it could take AQ down for days! DNS settings are not my forte, and they're awfully temperamental. Since DNS entries propagate through the Internet relatively slowly, even if I fixed the error quickly, the incorrect entries could linger for days in some systems making AQ all but inaccessible during that time.

But I really, really wanted to use http://blog.atlasquest.com, so I decided to test changing the DNS settings with a website that wasn't mission critical--my RyansATotalGoober.com website. I tweaked some DNS settings to redirect the blog to blog.ryansatotalgoober.com, and.... it didn't work. Took me the better part of a half hour, but finally figured out that a missing period was causing the trouble and got the changes to take. (However, depending on how much that DNS setting propagated, some people might see an error if they try that URL at the moment.)

Now that I knew the correct way to set DNS settings, however, I decided to try it with the real blog on a real domain--atlasquest.com. I added the CNAME setting, pointed blog.atlasquest.com to ghs.google.com, crossed my fingers, and clicked "Save Changes."

Then I logged into Blogger and told it to change my blog into a custom domain, pointing to blog.atlasquest.com, crossed the rest of my fingers, and clicked the button to save changes. I got a message saying the changes were saved and my blog was successfully moved.

I went to http://blog.atlasquest.com.... and it worked! There was the blog! This blog! Woo-who! The old location at http://atlasquest.blogspot.com will redirect to the new location. And now the blog is hosted within the atlasquest.com domain name. Sweet. The best of both worlds. =) The blog is actually hosted on Google's web servers--I basically just direct any traffic to the blog to Google to handle as needed. All other traffic stays on my own server.

Then I went into Atlas Quest to update my blog settings to the new location. The setup was complete. My job was done. =)

Disaster Planning

I got an AQ mail yesterday from someone concerned about disaster planning on Atlas Quest. What would happen if  "the tortuga loses his shell" or "just decides to throw in the logbook." The question might seem impolite, but it's a good question, and it's not something I talk about often.

My "throwing in the logbook" isn't very likely. Frankly, this is the best job EVER, in my humble opinion, and since I'm not independently wealthy, I do need a source of income. While it's possible I might spend less time developing or improving Atlas Quest in the future, I have absolutely NO incentive to throw in the towel. Even if I found full-time employment working 9 to 5 at a corporate job, I could still keep AQ running with a very small amount of effort. Development of new features would probably grind to a complete stop, but the site would certainly keep on kicking. =)

More likely risks could include legal woes. What if some idiot hurts themselves, then decides to sue me? It might not be fair, but it could happen. In fact, anyone that plants a letterbox could, in theory, be at risk of legal woes when things go wrong. Anyone getting hurt might blame the person who planted the box, or what if it's mistaken as something dangerous and police and bomb squads are called out? Legal woes have put businesses out of business in the past, and I suppose, in theory, it could do the same to Atlas Quest. That would most likely be a slow-motion disaster, however. The legal system isn't known for working quickly, and it seems unlikely that I'd be forced to shut down Atlas Quest quickly or unexpectedly. Heck, even Napster found a second life after being shut down.

And the biggest risk of all--which will happen someday--is if something were to happen to me. Death, dismemberment, severe strokes, or any other countless number of possibilities could take me offline permanently. Short term, nothing much will happen. If I walked away from Atlas Quest today, it could be several days before anyone even noticed. The site could probably run for several weeks completely by itself without any trouble. To keep Atlas Quest running, basically three things have to be done:

1. Someone needs to make sure to renew the domain name every year.
2. Someone needs to make sure to pay the website hosting fees when necessary. (It's currently set where I pay those costs every six months.)
3. Someone needs to keep an eye on announcements from the web hosting provider and Atlas Quest about changes to the system that might affect the continued running of the website.

Wassa already does that third task when I'm off hiking. It rarely amounts to much. A couple of years back, I was forced to move Atlas Quest to a new IP address which caused some problems. Right now I'm getting nightly notifications about the site running out of disk space, so I try to figure out ways to cut the amount of disk space being used or pay up for more. So Wassa could step into that roll pretty much immediately. In fact, I sometimes think he's actually looking forward to the day. ;o)

The ownership of Atlas Quest.... seeing as Amanda and I aren't married, I think legally speaking, the website would be inherited by my mother. I know she'd have absolutely no interest in running the website, however, and would happily give Amanda control over it. Which, seeing as Amanda is a letterboxer, uses the website regularly, and has been very supportive of it, makes a heck of a lot of sense. =) I should probably draw up a will stating as much, but admittedly, I haven't. (Not yet, at least.)

Unfortunately, Amanda doesn't have the skills necessary to actually run the website herself. I would think Amanda and Wassa would need to work out some sort of agreement about keeping the site up. Since Atlas Quest actually IS profitable, there's certainly a financial incentive to at least keep the website running, even if active development comes to a screeching halt. I doubt Wassa could make it a full-time job like I do--he probably has more bills than I do that involve things like kids, college, mortgages, and such that I don't have to worry about--and while AQ is profitable, a corporate job is even more profitable. So I don't imagine him quitting his day job to work on AQ full time. Nor anyone else for that matter. Any additional development would largely be on a volunteer basis.

Ultimately, I'd be thrilled if Atlas Quest earned enough money to pay competitive wages so that it would be easy to find someone who could continue working on Atlas Quest as a full time job. It might still get there someday. Even in this terrible economy, Atlas Quest actually has earned about 20% more in 2009 than it did in 2008. It's a little too early to tell how 2010 will do. January was down year-over-year, but February was up. *shrug* I'd be absolutely thrilled if it earned enough to pay a competitive wage compared to working "for the man." If it did, someone like Wassa could very well take over and make this a full-time job for themselves. Until then, it'll largely end up being run on a volunteer, part-time basis.

Of course, Wassa is older than me. Statistically, the stifling air quality in San Jose is likely to kill him before the sweat ocean breezes in West Seattle kill me. =) I may need a different plan B someday. I'd pick someone younger than me, but--would you believe it--there actually aren't that many who are. I'm generally considered a youngster by most people's standards. As I get older, though, it'll become easier and easier to find people younger than me qualified to keep Atlas Quest running. =) Ideally, I want whoever takes over from me to be able to keep things running for at least a decade after I'm gone, and then whoever steps into their shoes would be in charge for at least another decade after they're gone, and so forth.

While I'm not exactly sure what sort of agreement Amanda and Wassa would work out to keep Atlas Quest running, I have little doubt about it happening. They both love using the site and would want it to keep running long after I'm gone.

One other disaster that could potentially hit Atlas Quest--data loss. It's possible that the database could become corrupted and there's a permanent loss of data. There are night backups that are stored offsite, so if something did happen, it likely wouldn't be a total loss of data. I'd just go to the backups. And there are multiple backups. If the last one doesn't work, I'd try the one before it. Or the one before that. Or the one on my flash drive. There are so many different backups stored in so many different places, a complete loss of data is darned near impossible. Depending on when things go wrong, it's unlikely more than the last day or two worth of data is permanently lost. If a hacker managed to get in and deliberately destroy data, they could possibly cause a permanent loss of data that might add up to a month or two. And it might take several days, perhaps even a week for me to restore the last backup depending on the situation.

So that's my disaster plan. It's rather an informal one, but Atlas Quest is still small and informal enough that an informal disaster plan seems sufficient. As Atlas Quest grows, there might be changes. As time passes, there will be changes. But as things are now, I see no reason why AQ can't continue being here for years to come, regardless of whether or not I'm in the driver's seat.

Happy trails!

It's Just One Little Button....

If you've been to a letterboxing event recently, you've probably noticed that convenient little button that allows you to record the finds for all of the personal travelers and event boxes that attend an event. There's a similar button for LTC swaps, so you can record the finding of large number of boxes from one easy and convenient page.

This is another of those examples of a feature that never seems to end. First, people requested the ability to leave a comment with each of the boxes they found. It's a reasonable idea, and I actually did implement that for the LTC swaps. Only 'private' comments are allowed, though. And as soon as I did implement that, the next feature request started coming in--"I want to post my comments publicly."

Again, it's a reasonable request, and one I want to implement, but it turns out the process is remarkable hard to implement. "It's just one little button," I'm told, "how can that possibly be hard? Public or private. Seems pretty simple to me."

This morning, I started working on this "simple" little request. About 12 hours ago. And I'm still nowhere near to being done. How can something so simple be so hard?

Options. Preferences. Notifications. As the finder of a box, you want the option to have a comment posted publicly or private. Each individual owner of the box wants the option to completely reject public comments, moderate comments, or auto-approve comments.

So already, we now have six possible combination of options that all need to work:

You: Public - Them: auto-approve
You: Public - Them: moderate
You: Public - Them: reject
You: Private - Them: auto-approve
You: Private - Them moderate
You: Private - Them reject

It's like a little battle--your options vs their options, and the lowest common denominator wins. If you want it private, the comments will be private. If you want them public, it will either be auto-approved, moderated, or forced to be private.

But since you're recording the finds and making comments on large numbers of boxes, the each box has a different set of  "their" options. You might want all of your comments to be public, but some people will want the comments auto-approved, some will want them moderated, and some of them will force it to be private. So I have to check each of the options for each box you leave a comment on.

How do I display this form? Do I tell you each person's individual settings so you know what will become of your comment--auto-approved, moderated, or rejected? Or just figure it out in the background and not confuse people with all that information.

And what if you leave some comments that you want public and others that you want private. Should I have a public/private option for every single box listed, or just one setting at the top of the page that will be applied to all of the comments?

Once all that is figured out, AQ needs to send out notifications to the interested parties. Some people want to be notified of all finds, even if no comment is left. Some people only want to be notified if there's a comment included. So AQ needs to look up the author, planter, owner, all carvers, and all contacts for each box you found--regardless of whether or not you left a comment--and AQ mail all of them (if you left a comment) or some of them (if you did not leave a comment).

It's enough to make my spin. It's spinning right now, in fact. =)

And, if I don't write the code well, it could cause the find report to generate hundreds or even thousands of hits on the database, causing the submission to appear "stalled," which might cause someone to submit the form again--just in case--making the problem worse and generating multiple notifications and comments for the same box.

So when I first created that "record finds" page, I took the easy way out. You could record finds, but no comments. At the time, comments didn't really seem that important anyhow. We're talking about personal travelers, event boxes, and LTCs. Typically, they consist of messages like, "That's a great stamp!" or "Thanks for the LTC!" or maybe "I really enjoyed meeting you at the event!" It's not really particularly useful information. Compare to the types of comments you might see on a traditional boxes such as "The logbook is full and needs to be replaced" or "The stamp is missing." That's the sort of information future finders of the box may very well want to know. It's a source of information, rather than the complimentary salutations of the non-traditional boxes.

So I took the easy way out. I just didn't support comments on those pages.

Eventually, I added comments to the LTC swap, but only allowed private ones. That was remarkably hard to do in itself, so I wasn't especially excited about the prospects of doing the same for the event finds. But even that still doesn't reach the ideal that everyone really wants to see--comments, with the option to make them public or private.

But this morning, I woke up, and was determined to get this ideal done today. Ate some breakfast, then got to work. Stopped long enough to eat some cold pizza from the frig for lunch. I'm at my mom's house and she made spaghetti for dinner (and cookies for dessert!). But otherwise, I've been working. Working. Working....

And twelve hours later, I'm nowhere close to being done. Things are so wrecked on my development machine, I don't dare upload any minor bug fixes or tweaks since there might be code that's no longer compatible with all of the other code currently on the live site.

I'll get through it--eventually. I decided to go with the "simplified form" where you specify the private/public option that is applied to all of the comments you make rather than allowing you to pick them on a case-by-case basis. I figure if you really wanted to make some comments public and some private, you'd just use the Record Finds page twice--one for each option.

And I have finally managed to get that unwieldy beast partly under control--the comments are being correctly logged and stored into the database. The part that still does not work is the notifications. I've been thinking about possibly making some shortcuts there. Maybe I could just notify the owner, rather than all "interested" parties? That would certainly make some things a lot easier. I'm rather dissatisfied with the AQ mail notifications of box comments as it is, and wonder if I should create a "Box Comments" page that allows you to review the comments on all of your boxes at once, allowing you to delete or approve them as necessary. Link to that and be done with it. I could even make a list of  "Recent Finds on My Boxes" that people can link to, and stop sending AQ mail notifications for finds without comments. If you want to see who's found your boxes, you'd still be able to look it up easily. And then I when a comment isn't left, I don't have to figure out which "interested parties" should get the notification and which ones should not.

But the I think, "But a lot of people won't like that." No, they won't. They like being notified every single time someone finds one of their boxes. Immediately. Even if there's no comment with it. It's purely selfish motives that make me think this way. "It's easier to code. It's easier to maintain. It gives me more time to play FarmVille." (I'm just kidding on that last one--after I reached level 70, I rarely get on FarmVille anymore.)

Anyhow, if you've ever wondered why I didn't do something so "obvious" as allowing people to leave comments on those pages of mass find recordings, that's the reason. It's hard! Brain-numbing hard. I figure I've already committed too far to stop now, so I'll carry through with something. It may not be perfect, and it may take several more days of work, and it might make me cry, but eventually I'll get something done. It may not be everything you want, but hopefully it'll be better than before. Options and preferences really muck up a lot of otherwise beautiful code.


I'm sometimes rather resistant to adding new options and preferences, and that's largely the reason. It makes things more complicated. Unless a sizable number of folks are actually going to use a certain preference, I often don't consider the effort involved worth the headache.

In somewhat related-but-not-really news, I started reading a book yesterday called Don't Make Me Think. Seems strange that I'd end up doing so much thinking today.

And in completely unrelated news.... I've heard nobody complain about the "shadows" on Atlas Quest bothering anyone today. Is that because I toned down the shadows, or because y'all got tired of complaining about the shadows? =)

Psst! Need a stamp?

I know where you can get one.... the Stamp Exchange! If you need a stamp for a letterbox or got a little too carried away carving stamps and have more than you can plant, list your stamp requests and offers on the Stamp Exchange. Premium members have been kind enough to kick the tires and list a few entries to get things started, but it's now open for the rest of the world. =)

You can find a permanent link for the stamp exchange under the 'Toolbox' menubar button.

Enjoy! *hitting hat*

April Fools, on February 11th?

A few of you noticed the premium member hats theme up this morning, but when you tried to record finds on unlisted finds, it didn't work. Sorry about that! If you're interested in the whole convoluted mess, it started last December.... I was updating the code on Atlas Quest to display themes on the correct days throughout 2010. Some themes never have to be changed--holidays that are always on the same day of the year such as Christmas, Valentines Day, or Independence Day. I like those themes because it means no additional work for me every year. =)

Other themes need to be moved each year. Think Easter or Thanksgiving. So every December, I sit down and figure out where each theme is supposed to show up for the rest of the year. Sometimes there are conflicts I need to work out--this year, for instance, Valentines Day and the first day of the Chinese New Year both hit on February 14th. Which theme gets precedence? It's sometimes gets quite complicated. It usually takes me a full day to get it all worked out. I decided the Chinese New Year lasts a whole year--as long as I get that theme up at some point during the year, it's fine. =) Valentines Day doesn't really move around, so I'd let it keep the 14th, and push the Chinese New Year theme to the 15th. Except.... Well, drats, the 15th is President's Day. And the 16th is the discovery of King Tut's tomb. I wouldn't be able to fit in the Chinese New Year until the 17th. Hmm.... Well, I could put it up for the Chinese New Year's "Eve," and give it the 13th. I liked that idea, and that's what I ran with. =)

Last December, I also made the decision to randomize the premium member hat theme throughout the year. Never to show up more than once in any given month. So I wrote a little program to randomly choose several days throughout the year for the 'free listing day.' It popped out as February 14th. Well shoot, that's not going to work. So I backdated it to February 12th which was the closest date that didn't conflict with an existing theme.

All was well.... until a week or two ago, and I realized--I really need to create a Winter's Olympic theme. I didn't have any last December to worry about, but I went ahead and created one last week. The Winter Olympics starts tomorrow, February 12th, which now conflicts with the premium member theme I had selected last December. NO PROBLEM! I'll just move up the premium membership by a day and open up the 12th for the Winter Olympics theme. After all, 'free listing day' can be ANY day of the year. No restrictions where that one could land.

So I updated the code so free listing day shows today and the Winter Olympics theme tomorrow. Except.... I forgot one small detail--the code that actually allows the premium membership functionality to work. It was still set to work on February 12th, and I forgot to update THAT code to today.

So, for the first 11 hours of today, the free listing part of free listing day wasn't working. Sorry 'bout that. I put the blame squarely on the Olympics. =) I feel a little bad about that, so I updated the code that provides the premium membership functionality so it'll work today AND tomorrow. You won't see the premium hat theme tomorrow--the Winter Olympics theme will go up tomorrow--but the functionality for 'free listing day' will be extended through the end of day tomorrow (Friday).

In other news.... I spent much of last night updating the look of my blog. What do you think? =) Any guesses what part of the country the image across the top of the page is from? I started updating my Another Long Walk blog for my upcoming thru-hike, and since I was learning how to make various changes to it, I decided to update this blog at the same time. I like the new look. =) I was never particularly happy with the old look--the pages were always too narrow for my taste, and the header was awfully hard to read against the original map background I had been using. I find this layout.... liberating.

Hugs and Notes

If you've logged into Atlas Quest lately, you may have noticed a "hug counter" in the top-left corner of the page. I got in my head the curious thought about how many times my posts have been hugged, and decided to run it through the database to find out. =)

I'm not sure if I'll keep that number in the corner permanently or not. On the plus side, it doesn't really displace anything of "real importance," but on the minus end of thing, it serves no functional purpose either. What's your opinion? Keep it, or cut it?

I'm not naming names, but if you're curious, the most hugged person on Atlas Quest has received 11,197 hugs as I type this. By comparison, I've received a lowly 4,589 hugs.

In other news, I've added a new icon to the standard list of member icons, so by trail names you'll see four icons: view profile, contact member, view logbook, and "My Notes." The notes feature isn't new--being able to read and edit them from nearly anywhere you see a person's trail name is new. Whenever you want to jot something down about this person--an address, an e-mail address, their interests, or anything else you want to keep track about a person, you can add it quickly with the click of an icon.

Happy trails!

Box Lock!

There's a new feature you can find in your preferences that I affectionately called Box Lock. Occasionally, people have wanted to restrict all of their boxes for whatever reason. Maybe Time magazine came out with an article and you're afraid of a bunch of newbie boxers damaging your boxes. Maybe there's a troll in your area vandalizing local boxes. Whatever you're reason, you want to limit access to your boxes--all of your boxes.

AQ has almost always had options to limit who can see your boxes, but to limit access to all of one's boxes could be a serious chore if you had a lot of boxes planted. No more! The box lock page allows you to set P and F-count restrictions on all of your boxes at once. You can set a minimum restriction, or you can increment existing restrictions by a certain number. (You can also set maximum restrictions, and decrease existing restrictions when you feel it's safe to allow more access to your boxes.)

You can also change specific types of boxes. For instance, you might want to restrict your traditional plants, but you don't need to restrict your personal travelers. Assuming most people are interested in adjusting the settings for traditional boxes, that's the default box type that will be affected, but it's possible to adjust any of the box types--or all of them at once.

But.... here's hoping you'll never have any use for this feature! *cheers* =)

-- Ryan

Gingerbread Barn: Part VI

Animals, animals. The book whose directions I was following only decorated the front of the barnyard animals, but I finally decided to decorate both sides so that the gingerbread barn will look good from any direction, including the back.

It may not be obvious, but these animals are the same ones from yesterday, except that after they dried, I flipped them over and "painted" all over them a second time. This time, the udders of the cows aren't quite so bright, but it's pretty much the same thing as before.

I did the back side of the sheeps as well, although this time I didn't need to paint faces on them since the faces are on the other side.

The chickens I didn't redo on the back, but I did add an additional layer of icing just to reinforce the pieces. Remarkably, not a single one broke on me while getting them off the parchment paper.

I mixed up some coconut shavings with yellow food die to make hay, then glued some into the hayloft with icing, and set a chicken on top of the hay. Looks nice, I think! =)

Now it's time for a little landscaping. I mixed up some brown icing and laid it out more-or-less where I wanted to corral the animals.

Then I sprinkled the icing with cocoa powder. A nice, earthy texture, I think. *nodding*

Time to grow some grass! I took more coconut shavings and mixed it with green food coloring this time around. Presto! Grass!

I laid out green icing where the grass should be. (I probably should have made the green icing a bit greener than I did. Oh, well. *shrug*)

Then sprinkled the grass over it. I also pulled out flower-shaped sprinkles to dot the grass. Flowers are always a nice touch, don't you think? =)

Time to build a fence to keep all of the animals from running away! First I set up the posts with pretzel sticks.

Then follow with the beams across the posts.

Time to add the animals! This particular photo is the only one I took of the shovel, which is merely a bit of Black Jack gum attached to a pretzel piece. On a completely unrelated note, if you look very closely at the neck of the horse in this photo, you'll see a small crack. I accidentally dropped this fellow while I was standing on the hard, tiled ground. The head managed to stay on the horse--which rather surprised me, to tell you the truth, but it does suffer from that small crack, and if you shake the body, you can tell the only thing holding the head on are the thick layers of icing. I put this horse near the back of the barn so the crack in the neck wouldn't be as obvious. =)

And the barn is FINISHED!

Two horses, two cows, three sheep, 11 chickens (I didn't like the painting job I did on one of them, so I didn't use all 12), happily sharing a barn with a silo. Hope y'all enjoyed it! Now I have a kitchen I need to clean up.....