OldMiner's New Writeups

December 5, 2011 (log)

2011-12-05T20:11:42Z

For those of you unaware, Everything2 came into existence because the company Blockstackers Intergalactic was formed by nate and a few others, back in the dot com days. They secured funding and put significant money into developing the software that runs E2, getting it (and its sister sites) machines, bandwidth, and taking care of its day to day needs. As I understand it, the business intent of the company was to ultimately sell the software that runs Everything2 to companies who wished to use it to run their own sites. The dot com crash put an end to that dream, and with it, any reliable funding for running E2.

Since then, E2 has migrated to several different hosting locations, but remained the property of the mostly-defunct Blockstackers. However, as has been posted publicly, Blockstackers (largely meaning "nate") are looking to find someone more capable of being involved in the day-to-day operations of the…

Rock Man (person)

2011-12-02T18:27:56Z

As an overpowering culture of the world, the U.S. is often accused of culture creep.Â Throughout the world, one can find the influence of Hollywood on local media, U.S. pop culture loanwords intermixed with local language, and U.S. brands on local store shelves.Â So it is only right that kids in the United States absorb the culture of another country secondhand.Â Of course, I'm talking about Japan.

However, this culture has always seen a bit of a translation barrier as it came over.Â Not only is there the fact that some translations are hilariously bad due lack of skill of the translater, often the folks directing the translation worry that U.S. audiences will not understand or will have their sensibilities offended by a direct translation.Â This has resulted in such oddities as the alcohol often being turned into coffee or milk, editing of…

root log: November 2011 (log)

2011-11-29T03:06:33Z

Servers Asplode!

During November we have had some severe site responsiveness issues which were capped off, most recently, by the loss of one of the three main servers that power E2.Â Although most of the hardware from that server has been recovered, its motherboard is fried, and so we are temporarily going to have to do without it.

I appreciate that having the site slow or outright unavailable can be very frustrating. I empathize. I know many of you folks feel frustrated having a site you care about unavailable and being powerless to fix it. The words of support I've gotten from folks thanking me for trying to get the site back on its feet have been quite heartening, and I thank you all for sending them. I'm sorry I've not been able to get the site functioning better sooner.

This situation isn't the best for anybody involved. Although I am the most active person with regards to working with the server configuration, I would rather be spending more…

October 15, 2011 (log)

2011-10-15T22:17:51Z

There have been a lot of people who have tried to figure out what the magic sauce was that made Wikipedia so popular. Two Sheds recently linked to this article The contribution conundrum: Why did Wikipedia succeed while other encyclopedias failed?. It mentioned E2 near the start, and implies we're a failed encyclopedia, which I guess I can get behind, because E2 was never meant to be an encyclopedia.

E2 is intended to be a web of ideas, connected both by intentional direct links and by the naturally-arising web of softlinks that evolve as people travel about, linking knowledge, stories, and emotions together in a useful and sometimes-surprising web. The intermeshing purposes of the content, both educating, entertaining, and exploring, entangle the people creating those links, and hence you find a community intertwined within the writing, making the content…

E2 Bugs (thing)

2011-10-12T05:34:11Z

User Clockmaker reports that the achievement "Printing Press", which is supposed to be awarded for writing more writeups than any other noder in a month, does not appear to function. The code in question is located in writeupsMonthMost and simply returns 0. It was likely disabled after the switch to InnoDB, as aggregate statements, like the GROUP BY that was inevitably used, are far more expensive with row level locks.

This should be a monthly cron job (or implemented, equivalently, in a nodelet) which queries all writeups published in a month grouped by publisher_id, finds if there's a clear winner (SELECT COUNT(node_id) 'num_published' ... ORDER BY num_published LIMIT 2, if the two num_published don't match, there's a winner; or do something more complex to award to all people who tie for most that month), and awards the achievement appropriately. This is a good candidate to use the slave MySQL DB since stale data is unlikely to have an effect.

…

September 29, 2011 (log)

2011-09-30T04:16:15Z

A Consideration of Comments on Writeups

Preface

We're all discussing a proposed feature which isn't coded, but is easier than you might think to implement. As such, don't freak out because we're doing something horrible. We're just talking. But please feel free to add your voice if this idea horrifies you. Because it still might be a reality, and it'd be best if we addressed everyone's concerns to make it the best reality it can be.

To me, the point of adding discussions is to encourage feedback and increase interaction. It falls somewhere between the public catbox and long form writeups; and it potentially provides a place for something that presently has no sanctioned place on the site: long-form criticism or discussion of a writeup. Although the "blab" box was already created to encourage feedback, it doesn't fulfill this need as well as it could because: (1) its intent (to message the writeup's author) is not clear to many, (2)…