Good news everyone! A new (user-visible) feature! Story images!
Okay, so trying to find an acceptable 64x64 pixel icon for each story got old pretty fast. There never seemed to be enough of them and they didn't always fit the article correctly. But with today's news sites wanting lots of eye candy, most articles already have at least one relevant image of the story. So we'll just make a small thumbnail of that!
You can change the quality of the thumbnail using the "Story Image Style" in your settings page. Or you can opt to keep the icons or disable the images altogether. If you have a high resolution screen (e.g. Apple's Retina displays) with a pixel ratio greater than the traditional 1:1, you can select one of the "High Resolution" options to get a sharper image.
Video streaming sites, such as Netflix and Hulu, have traditionally used non-free plugins, such as Flash and Silverlight, to perform DRM functions. Interest to move these services to the new HTML5 video tag, however, requires a mechanism to handle the DRM naughty bits. The W3C EME specification describes such a beast, but involves a non-free CDM binary.
Here is Mozilla's take on the matter.
Ever revisit a popular story page and wish you could easily distinguish the new comments from the stuff you've already read? Well, now you can!
New comments are now shown in blue, while old comments are shown in gray. Simple enough, right?
Not everyone is a web developer; and those that aren't sometimes forget the raw HTML syntax used to format comments. For these poor saps (and perhaps for lazy web developers as well) Pipecode now includes an optional WYSIWYG editor.
To use the editor, simply make sure that both the "Enable Javascript" and the "WYSIWYG Editor" checkboxes are enabled on your settings page.
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter
installed 32 solar panels to the roof of the White House. These panels were mainly used to heat water and were removed in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan during roof repairs. In 2002, George W. Bush added solar panels
to a maintenance shed on the grounds to help heat the pool.
For the last few years, President Barack Obama has been
promising to install photovoltaic solar panels on the White House roof. Although the system was initially planned to produce approximately 19,700 killowatt hours of electricity per year, the
final system was scaled back to a mere 6.3kW system. The new system, however, is finally complete and providing power to the high profile residence.
Good news everyone! I hacked away enough at the code base this weekend to make it mildly presentable. Weighing in at 814 kB, the download shouldn't stress your connection too much. :)
So, if you are interested in installing it yourself, go to
http://pipecode.org/ for the installation instructions and the download tarball. The
GitHub repository has also been updated.
As a promotion and a small thank you to the contributers, I am pleased to announce... a free USB drive sporting the Pipedot logo! Although this site is still pretty small, a dedicated few of you have really stepped up and helped submit stories, post comments, and moderate. If you have received an email from me about a drive, simply respond with your shipping info and I'll send you one!
The drive is a
modern all metal design with a convenient ring handle. The capacity is four gigabytes and comes preformatted as FAT32 - but otherwise blank. The drive is bootable; and I've used one this week to load Ubuntu 14.04 on a few computers. With a
14.3 MB/s average read and 2.6 MB/s average write speed, it's not going to win any speed competitions, but it sure looks sexy.
The Debian project has adopted a
code of conduct for participants to its mailing lists, IRC channels, and other modes of communication within the project. The main points of the code are:
- Be respectful
- Assume good faith
- Be collaborative
- Try to be concise
- Be open
How much do you trust popular websites to maintain your data and online privacy? In
this week's poll you can rank them using the
Borda Count voting method.
Instructions:
- In the box next to each item, put your choice of rank. The site you trust the most earns a "1", the site you trust just a bit less gets a "2", a site you trust even less gets a "3", etc. So "1" is the site you find most trustworthy.
- You don't have to rank all 8; you can just rank the ones you have an opinion about. But since there are only 8 choices, you can't input a number higher than that (ie, it's impossible to rank something 9th place in a contest with only 8 places).
- Simply be careful not to duplicate numbers!
Have fun!
[Post edited by zafiro17 2014-04-28 13:54 to clarify the instructions.]
Plenty of updates this week! Nearly every single source file and database table was modified this week to help further the
distributed goal of the Pipecode project. More information on this will be given over the following weeks as more functionality gets merged to live.
- Comment Reply Notification - You now get an internal email notification sent to you when someone replies to one of your comments.
- UID to ZID - Usernames and Identification are now shown in an email style format (username@pipedot.org)
- Clickable Bare Links - Bare links will now automatically be wrapped with the correct HTML tags to make them clickable.
- Consistent Newlines - Posts with blockquote/ul/ol/li/pre HTML tags should now have better newline handling.
- Servers upgraded from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS.
