Dollars Chat

What does it have to do with me? Well, I made the cool avatars that you’re already (if you’re not, get moving) using. But this wasn’t enough, so we though we’re going to give you even more.
*APPLAUSE*

We are going to make more (yes, more) cool avatars and you are going to choose what’s next. Your favorite anime waifu? The most badass video game character? The dog-belonging-to-the-secondary-character-that-was-in-one-chapter-

of-that-one-manga-you-don’t-remember-the-name-of-but-probably-dealt-with-high-school-students? Just post your suggestions in the comments and we will check them and see if they’re viable to become Durarara-like avatars. Please note that the subject must not be too complex (not because I’m too lazy, but because the graphic style isn’t suitable for complex designs). Also note that the chat is still in sort-of-beta, so there may be bugs or or traits to be improved. Enough chitchatting (did you get the pun? :D), we want you to comments, so post feedback about the chat (what is missing and what could be improved), suggestions about the next avatars to come and your opinion on this project. Thanks for the attention.

Disclaimer: FoOlRulez is in no way affiliated with Ryohgo Narita, Dengeki Bunko, ASCII Media Works, Brain’s Base, Dullahans and/or Vending Machine companies. It is indeed affiliated with me, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this post, you dummy. Also, we won’t  really do any avatar about that dog-that-was-in-[...]. That was a lie.

Here are the avatars.

http://foolrulez.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/tanaka-taro.png

http://foolrulez.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/setton.png

http://foolrulez.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/kanra.png

Don’t worry, Saika will be coming soon.

Some people might argue that GIMP as an open source alternative is just as good, but most people who have had in-depth experience with Photoshop know otherwise. It’s the usability and lots of small yet crucial features that makes Photoshop the favorite among scanlators. Some groups even go as far as requiring their editors to use Photoshop. While GIMP certainly will get the job done, it will do so by consuming a lot more time, and time is a precious good when a single manga chapter averages out at 30 pages and involves a lot of routine tasks to be carried out.

CS4, the currently latest version of Photoshop, already brought a few great features. The support for hardware acceleration based on the graphics card not only improved the performance, but also allowed better preview scaling and most important of all (at least for scanlators), preview when using clone stamp right on the drawing cursor. While content-aware scaling is a cool feature, I personally almost never use it.
So what’s so special about CS5 that I dedicate an entire blog post to it? Watch and be amazed…

What does this mean for scanlators? You might already know that FoOlRulez puts a lot effort into editing, not only translating the text in the bubbles, but also replacing sound effects, however large it might be, with understandable English equivalent. That requires something we call redrawing: large chunks of what was japanese sound effect text have to be replaced by what we think might have been the original picture behind the sound effect. That, sometimes, takes a lot of time, depending on the size and the content to redraw.

See what my point is? Exactly, this time-consuming part of editing might be shortened a lot, if the feature shown on the demo video works as perfectly as we all are hoping it would.

Stay tuned and just maybe, FoOlRulez might be able to churn out fresh scanlations at an even faster pace, at the same high quality standard.

EDIT: If you need a fix for Opera crashing, follow this link.

What’s happening is the classical OS changeversion problem: the software is not compatible anymore and needs to get updated. Of course, there’s no update when the OS was released just 5 days ago. Surely there will be one for each software pretty soon, but now this is just making my computer a bit too sensible.

The problem: 64bit. There’s software working only on 32bit, such as MultiClutch and PlugSuit, two very important pieces of software for Mac users. Multiclutch has also an extra problem, as it seems the libraries that it uses are not available in 64bit, which means it will take a bit before…

Wait a second, Safari is having problems: the page hangs, all links/buttons become unusuable at times. Writing this post is really becoming hell.

As I was saying, MultiClutch’s author is in troubles because he doesn’t have an easy fix for that piece of software.

This is all for today from the war zone, and I recommend you: wait a month after an OS is released, so the software can get updated first to match the new requirements. Else you’ll have a brick like I have now.

…the publish button is not working. What the…

…Alright, now I am on Firefox… trying to push on publish…

I keep having this problem, and it’s a double sided knife.

• You can’t wait for the package and you’d like to do something else to kill the time
• You can’t do anything because if you leave home and the delivery arrives… you’ll rage.

It’s far too bitter to wait without doing anything.

Right now I am waiting my copy of Snow Leopard to arrive. You know, the new version of the Mac OS. There should be some heavy improvement, and of course I can’t wait to install that on my MacBook. The shipping of Snow Leopard really became a mass phenomenon, everybody is blogging about it. Most likely because the OS costs only 30 euro for everyone and just 9 euro for who bought their Mac this summer (just like me).

It’s debateable if it’s a good thing that Apple sells this kind of software: many say it’s just an update like Windows Service Packs, other say that it’s incredible that Apple is going to sell an OS for just 30 euro (don’t forget, for Apple 30euro=30bucks). Even who’s still on Tiger can, in fact, update to Snow Leopard, as it seems. Ah, only Intel users. It’s still the feeling we’re just getting an update. Apple says that the costs are just for shipping as well.

It’s a half way that doesn’t let anyone foulmouth Apple without the question if Snow Leopard is really an OS for 30 euro, but after what they did with the iPod Touch and iPhone software version 3.0 (pay for updating to the new version with near to no interesting updates), I think Apple should give Snow Leopard to EVERYONE for 9 euro.

But, they know that if the user pays, he feels he’ll get more care, and that at the price is so low everyone will upgrade, Mac haters with a Mac excluded. Double reverse thinking. Good job Apple.

Well, honestly I am a megalomaniac, and all the most famous websites have an URL shortening service for their own service. Since (one day) FoOlRulez will be the biggest website evar, I thought… why not adding the short URL service early? Doing it was far harder than thinking of it.

You know, we aren’t using a LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) server, but an Nginx powered server (LNMP sounds gay tho). This means most of the software needs some fix to work correctly, though it will work much faster. This means YOURLS, the software I intended to use, needed some fix as well.

For this fix, I had to find a solution, and I have found it here: 使用 Yourls 强化你的短网址系统 – Showfom’s Blog.
I have no idea what that URL says… but hey, I found the fix to make YOURLS work!

if (!-f $request_filename){
set $rule_0 1$rule_0;
}
if (!-d $request_filename){
set $rule_0 2$rule_0;
}
if ($rule_0 = "21"){
rewrite ^/([0-9a-z]+)/?$ /yourls-go.php?id=$1 last;
}

Gibberish? No this is the code you need to make it work in your Nginx installation! Paste it where you need it. If you don’t know how comment here and I’ll explain a bit further.

Anyway, this made everything work… a bit of styling of the homepage et voilà!

http://foolz.us

It works! I can’t believe it myself!

Let’s go a bit more indeep with YOURLS. This is a very complete script to make your own URL shortener, by:

• Lester Chan / @GamerZ on Twitter
• Ozh RICHARD / @Ozh on Twitter

I think they’re the same who made a few of the plugins I use in this WordPress blog (yeah they are). Anyway, this script is powerful enough to not leave you dry mouthed: you get an API to use the URL shortening service on your server from anywhere, the admin menu lets you control the tidbits you need (ok, most of the controls are via code, but it’s easily done with the explanations), the code has explanation for most of the lines – I in fact edited it to fit my needs better.

Best part of all, it comes with a WordPress plugin, that hooks to the shortening service and makes a short url for every post: even this one post has a shortening url. Then you get automatic submission of the post to Twitter after publishing. The button to submit to twitter on the top is my creation by using the functions (wordpress hooks) that YOURL for WordPress provides.

The need: showing two posts on the same level from two different categories and divide one of the two categories in its sub-categories.

The result: a homepage that shows all the latest posts from any category without the need to reload (AJAX used) and two features, simmetrical.

I wanted to make the editing of this theme as easy as possible, which means I have created a (kind of big) theme options page so anyone can fix the theme at own need. Hide the title, display ads a bit everywhere, change the captions: you can do all of that through the theme options.

I suggest to use with this theme WP-Pagenavi and Get-the-image plugins. Even though it’s not absolutely necessary, they make this theme look way better.

The features:

• SEO ready
• Options page
• ADs/HTML spaces via options
• Switches for showing or hiding parts of the website
• All the captions can be edited via control panel
• AJAX for loading categories
• jQuery for moving effects in home page
• Threaded comments
• Two functional tabs in home (they’re sidebars, use the white spaces with useful widgets as applications!)
• Search (yes, it’s a feature)
• Sidebar in posts/pages
• Control panel button in the footer
• An extremely cool diamond whenever something is being loaded via AJAX!

Missing:

• Archives
• The top white bar: that’s not part of the theme, it’s our website framework. ¬.¬

Demo you say? There’s no demo as for now, it would take many hours to create a decent one. You can see this very website, but ignore the top white bar (that’s not part of the theme). I’ll add here pics of the not active features:

Big options page, but with explanations.

Hide the tabs you don't need.

Up to 9 categories listed

Show the title/subtitle/ad or all of them together!

The theme still doesn’t have a whole help manual – you shouldn’t need it. Please, post here suggestions and bugs, so I will be able to fix them and release the (epic) version 1.o.

As for now, here’s version 0.8.2:

Not available for download.

-Release notes:

0.8.2
Fixed a bug making the middle tabs not work if the categories selected weren’t exactly 8.
Added page browsing links in case WP-Pagenavi is not available.
Added a system to fetch images also without Get-the-images.
Added a system that shortens excerpts that are too long. It still needs to be refined on the numbers. Useless when the excerpt has new lines in it. It elegantly deactivates if the user added his own excerpt.
0.8.1:
There was a bug in the “features/paged.php” file, an extra “endif” making the theme not work.

Features (as for now):

1. Display of two category groups.
2. Automatic image insertion.
3. Threaded comments.
4. Javascript dropdown categories for the two main groups.
5. Sidebar on the bottom, hidden sidebar on the top, left side on single posts.
6. Ad space… somewhere.
7. Compatible up to WordPress 2.9 beta.
8. More stuff I can’t recall.

Will I release this? Maybe, but first I have to create an options page in order to make it practical, as as for now it’s useful only for FoOlRulez. It’s a very atipical theme, and I am not sure many can use it.

I’m sorry for Internet Explorer users, but I couldn’t try the theme on IE because I am at the moment on a Mac. I know about one issue with the comment numbers per each post, and I’ll fix it soon.

Please, enjoy it’s speed and use. Comment and tell me the issues.

FoOlMatik is the name, and the reason for the name is simple: it does absolutely everything automatically, as long as it doesn’t fuck up. There’s not much to automate, but that little, helps a lot.

Honestly, I am always much in a hurry, and I applied the theme to FoOlRulez without too much betatesting, which means you’ll see this theme change day by day in order to get to completition. There are quite few tweaks I have to apply, I want it even more automatized (there’s even a thing I have to edit MANUALLY THROUGH CODE which is not really adapt for such theme).

First highlight of the theme: releases are divided from posts. Which means that if someone starts posting a lot, the releases will still have their place in their corner, and by clicking the MORE RELEASES button, you’ll get a COOL dropdown function that will show you many more releases. The normal posts get more highlighting, it’s obvious, we want you to read them.

On the top you get the usual menu, but there’s also a new one: for now you see Twitter there, with a dropdown too, but really soon I’ll add FaceBook functionalities (in a darker blue button!) and integrate FoOlz.us. You’ll be able to twit from there, as well as add us to your facebook fanclubs and so on, that kind of social network stuff.

There’s a new comment system, completely revamped.

The sidebar is not on the side anymore, as it’s on the bottom. This way I can save a lot of space and show much more info on the home page of the website.

And much more! You’ll see wonders in these days. Slowly you’ll notice.

What’s Alexa? It’s the most recognized website analytics founded by Amazon, that collects data through a toolbar installed by the users. The website gives how many visitors approximately visit certain websites. The truth: Alexa is not reliable at all. There’s no real use for having Alexa toolbar, beside a few tools to get to know the fame of a website from unreliable data. The most of the users of Alexa toolbar are developers, which makes the public using it a niche. What’s more, Alexa is available only on IE and Firefox, that together cover 87% of the users, but still leaving out the people using more exotic software – that usually are the most experienced users.

Now, FoOlRulez has always been in rank 160.000 and 230.000. It’s pretty unreasonable for my point of view, because there’s lots of websites with less visitors than us being in top 50.000. So, I decided to use Firefox on FoOlRulez.org, and see how big of a difference it makes.

They say Alexa is just that fragile. Then, I want to break it.

So I bought a short url domain: http://foolz.us. Most likely it does not work yet.

Random logo I made in 5 minutes.

Have you noticed websites like techcrunch having tcrn.ch as short url for personal purpose: I am trying to pull the same thing, not like I have any use for it, but just to experiment something new for the wonderful price of THREE DOLLARS. And what would you think about extra subdomains like cant.foolz.us… that as for now won’t work of course.

So I started testing a few piece of software (rather, scripts) yesterday. There are some that you can buy, but FoOls is cheap, so we work on open source. All of these need a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP… the most standard web server).

The first one I tried is rather simple to use and really anyone would be able to use it. Shorty needs just the database and a folder on the website to work, no further setups. Too bad that this comes with a price: the features are really limited, and only the administrator can use it. This is the ideal for who wants a really simple and quite solid system on the own website, but it’s good for nothing for someone who needs to implement it around the website, and let it be used by the public. What’s more, the updates are dead since 2006.

So I declare this script DISCARDED.

The next one I checked is TightURL.  Honestly, I dislike this kind of website from the beginning, and I never understand why so many open source websites have to be just HTML skeletons, as they make harder to find stuff. But over this, this script is surely better than Shorty, full of customization… via coding, making it good for use only to experienced developers. Now, I could work a bit and modify it so I could implement it, but how many headaches should I have over this? We’re bloggers (scanlators), so the most we want to retouch via coding is the style of our website!

Since I am kind of lazy (and scared) to go edit the code, I declare this script DISCARDED.

Another script I tried is Yourls. The webpage this time is that of a standard help for WordPress, which is nice, very human. This script seems to include what the two listed before have and more: it’s quite easy to use, the setup is nothing different than Shorty, yet, this time I can decide if I want a private short linker or a public one. The interface instead is still only text: it’s just an example over which one can style his own website, which is perfect, bloggers like to style the themes. The rest is taken care of through an admin panel, which gives pretty much all the control you need, unlike Shorty. But that’s not all: there’s an API that lets you implement the script anywhere from your website (think of having it automatic for twitter), and even a WordPress plugin able to give a short link to every post.

This is why I will use this last script, so, at least for now, it’s APPROVED.