Stephen Skory

I saw this on digg. Apparently every PHP v.4 and greater has an easter egg of a small dog photo. The string appended to the end of any page processed by PHP will give you the photo, which is different on different versions of PHP. Here’s mine and an older version on UCSDCycling.org.

My avid readers may not have noticed that I have added a Cool Websites category to this non-blog blog. There I have put all my navel-gazing website posts, as well as my posts on Yahoo! Mail Beta. This new category will be used for posts about cool websites, like this one, or any other I feel inclined to write about.

I have just discovered a new website, digg.com that I think is pretty cool. It’s not that new, so you’ve probably heard of it already. I was introduced to it as an alternative to Slashdot, and I like what I’ve seen so far. The links seem fresher than Slashdot, and if you make your own account it keeps track of the stories you like, or that you “dugg.” You can “digg” a story by clicking on the “digg it” button next to any posting. The more people that digg a story, the more likely it is to show up on the homepage.

I suggest you go check it out and see what digg is all about. I think I’ll add it to my list of daily websites, along with Slashdot.

Although it is still a work in progress (see forward parenthetical note), the “Phratry Nexus” has been greatly improved today. (I don’t know about you, but I remember some years ago when “Work In Progress” or “Under Construction” images were common on webpages. I don’t see them so much anymore because I figure people finally figured out that all web pages are always “Under Construction” by definition.)

Back to my main point. If you look at the Phratry Nexus you’ll see thumbnail sized screenshots of the various Phratry.net webpages (four as of this writing). Due to the already mentioned fluid nature of the web, keeping those thumbnails current would be pretty tedious if done by hand. That’s where Applescript comes in. Ideally, I would have liked to write some kind of script and put it in crontab on the webserver, but doing screenshots is difficult from the command line. The Applescript I wrote (along with some help from my father, Mike) uses four apps, which either come with Mac OS X or are free: Cyberduck (for FTPing to the server), Freesnap (screencapture utility), Image Events (image editing) and OmniWeb (web browsing). OmniWeb isn’t free, actually. Firefox would work too, but I got the script to work better with OmniWeb.

The specifics of the script aren’t important, but the cool thing is Applescript allows me to do a 15-minute process of screenshot editing and uploading with just one double-click. It still takes about a minute for the whole thing to work (most of the time is from built-in delays in case of slow webpage loads), but that’s still fifteen times better than before, and it’s done right every time.

Hello from an entirely new server and address! The old steve.yikes.com (which equalled stephen.kicks-ass.net) is now stephen.phratry.net. The old site was hosted on my father’s 933Mhz G4 using his residential cable modem connection (which was throttled to 40 kb/s for uploads). This new one is hosted by Site5 which offers feature-packed deals for not very much money.

You may be wondering what phratry means. According to Dictionary.com it means

1. A kinship group constituting an intermediate division in the primitive structure of the Hellenic tribe or phyle, consisting of several patrilinear clans, and surviving in classical times as a territorial subdivision in the political and military organization of the Athenian state.
2. Anthropology. An exogamous subdivision of the tribe, constituting two or more related clans.

Since I wanted to have other family members & possibly friends use this domain & hosting service, I wanted to think of a domain that wasn’t too specific to any of us, but was descriptive. Although none of us are a member of a Hellenic tribe, the general idea is phratry refers to an extended family group, which describes the situation. I also kind of like the word because it’s not very common and has an odd spelling.

The cool thing is everything is so fast! Downloading photos off of the old hosting situation was pretty painful. This should be much nicer.