Category Archives: Website Update

Website Changes During June 2013

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Main Site Updates

The biggest changes were adding a YouTube player to my General MIDI page that plays some videos I made while playing karaoke (has lyrics) MIDI files in XMPlay. I also added a #okwx (Oklahoma Weather) Twitter search widget to my Weather page. I sometimes wonder if my site is slowly starting to suffer from feature creep with each button and widget that gets added. I think I’m still OK LOL. 🙂

Gallery Updates

Gallery released version 3.0.8 at the end of last month which I have since upgraded my galleries to. It addressed a couple late-minute security vulnerabilities that were discovered.

Blog Updates

WordPress v3.5.2, a Maintenance and Security update, was released yesterday which I’ve upgraded my blog to. Performed my normal process of backing-up the database and file structure before applying the update.

Company of Valor Updates

I’ve been slowly going through my Company of Valor (An EverQuest guild that used to exist on the Quellious server about 9 years ago that I was the leader of.) website updating the code and correcting several issues. I think the Resources/Links page had around 50 broken links on it  😯 LOL. Some of the pages there were made 13 years ago. A lot of the pages don’t have closing paragraph tags and other such coding practices that were the norm back then. It’s kind of a low priority deal so I do a few pages a day when I’m in the mood. 🙂

Website Changes During April 2013

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Main Site Updates

Yesterday I noticed that my YouTube players on my Entertainment and NASCAR pages had quit working. They were completely blank. My guess is they finally pulled the plug on these old style players. So, I grabbed the latest embed code, using iframes, for my playlists and replaced the old players. I guess the added benefit with these newer players is that they will detect if your browser supports HTML5 or not and display the appropriate HTML5 or Flash based player. You need to be part of YouTube’s HTML5 Trial for it to show the HTML5 version, provided your browser supports it.

Speaking of HTML5, Firefox 20 added support for videos encoded with h.264 in certain operating systems (namely Windows 7 and above at the moment as the OS comes with the codec). This is disabled by default, however. You need to go into about:config and set media.windows-media-foundation.enabled to true.

Gallery Updates

April 22, 2013: Gallery released version 3.0.7 which I have since upgraded my galleries to. It addressed a couple late-minute security vulnerabilities that were discovered.

It seems that not long after Gallery v3.0.5 was released that Gallery v3.0.6 came out to fix some bugs. So, I’ve updated my galleries accordingly (actually did this a few days ago). Exact same process as before.

That’s all for now. Anything else I do this month I’ll update this post. 🙂

Website Changes During March 2013

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Well, let’s see. March has seen numerous changes to my website. If you’re reading this on my main site, you’ll notice some additional menu items: Firefox Configuration, Speed Test Results, System Information, and Winamp Info. The only actual new page is the Speed Test Results one. The others have been in existence for some time which I link to in various support forums. I made the Speed Tests page after I removed the images from my hardware page that were beside my cable modem entry.

I have also modified my NASCAR page to display the current driver standings using the data from ESPN’s Driver Standings instead of Yahoo’s. Yahoo’s page was acting kind of funky so I changed it. I also stopped pulling the data down every time my page was viewed. I run another script that collects the data and saves it to a static text file that my NASCAR page just includes. Much more efficient as the standings information only really changes once after each race.

I have also modified my MOD page to include a playlist of videos I created while playing MOD files in XMPlay. Why did I make these? A good question LOL. Just ’cause I guess. I could probably write an entire post about the tools I’ve used to generate them. But, just so you know, I used CamStudio to create the videos and I’ve tried the CamStudio LossLess, XviD, and x264vfw Codecs to make my initial capture videos. Testing the various codecs, the options within them, and how they look after being sent to YouTube is enough to drive one crazy LOL. I did a fixed region capture of 640×360 which is a 16:9 ratio and matches the default size of YouTube’s player that way you can read the text clearly.

I think that’s all I’ve done lately.

Galleries Upgraded to Version 3.0.5

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Gallery LogoOver the past couple days, I upgraded both my Gallery and my EverQuest II character’s Gallery to version 3.0.5 using these upgrade instructions. I’m not going to go into all the gritty details about propagating my code tweaks and such but did want to mention that I did make database and file backups prior to doing anything. One tip I will pass along is that any code tweaks you make within the core files, be sure to add comments like

/* mrh added/modified the following code to do xyz */

so that you can do a project wide text search on “mrh” (in this example) to find everything you’ve modified. Trust me, there’s no way I could remember what all I’ve done to however many files LOL. 🙂

So far everything in both galleries seem to be working fine. 🙂

2013 Sprint Cup Driver Standings Added to NASCAR Page

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NASCARAs my previous posts mention, NASCAR changed their website which broke my ability to get both RSS News feeds and driver standings from their site. The NASCAR.COM Driver Standings page is now generated locally by JavaScript within the browser, breaking my ability to parse the page using PHP. I have now added the 2013 NASCAR Sprint Cup Driver Standings back to my NASCAR page using the information found at the Yahoo! Sports NASCAR Standings page. It’s a good enough source for now and the site is done much better than NASCAR’s. In fact, I changed my driver links to point to Yahoo!’s driver pages as well.

If I tweak anything else on my NASCAR page, I’ll update this post. 🙂

Oh, as a side note, I unsubscribed from NASCAR’s RaceView product before the season started so I can’t use or test it now. All I really used it for was scanner audio and most of the time I used the RaceBuddy in-car camera/audio when it was available. During the Phoenix race yesterday, can’t say I really missed having scanner audio available, so no plans on re-subscribing at this time.