After 16 years hosted at Encodo Systems, earthli has moved from an Ubuntu VM to Web Hosting at HostFactory.

The move went very smoothly, although there are always a bunch of things to remember, especially when you haven’t changed servers for a long time—and especially when changing from a dedicated VM/server to shared web hosting. Thankfully, web hosting is a great fit for earthli because a dedicated server is quite expensive, starting at about CHF35.-/month. I took a look at cloud-based... [More]

Earthli started out in 1997 on an Apache 1.2.x server running on a Windows desktop in my office cubicle in New York. I set it up at the time with PHP 2.x and MySQL 3.x.

History

The default encoding at the time was to use the latin1 character set, which mapped to Windows-1252 and roughly corresponds to ANSI, which is somewhat standardized, but is platform-dependent for some characters (hence the moniker).

Over the years, I migrated to PHP 3.x, then 4.x. The migration to 5.x was a lot of work... [More]

Most tools that scrape web pages use the OpenGraph metadata embedded in web pages. Some fall back to using the more general and older metadata tags, like description or the <title> element, but this leads to a rather limited embedding. Almost no-one extracts pictures from pages unless explicitly requested to do so by metadata.

Until recently, earthli didn’t include this metadata, leading to somewhat substandard rendering of any links pasted to social media.

Sample Metadata

As an example, the... [More]

Go ahead. Open earthli.com on a small-screen device. Get out your phone. I’ll wait.

Pretty cool, right?

I mean, it’s not rocket science, but it involves no small amount of work to come up with a design that works at both very wide and very narrow screens. Sure, I could have used Bootstrap, but then my site would look exactly like everyone else’s. Also, earthli’s stylesheets and components are much simpler and easy to use than Bootstrap.

Not only that, but with the redesign and the continued... [More]

With the help of Letsencrypt, all of earthli.com is now accessible only via HTTPS.

What does that mean?

• For your day-to-day use of the site, nothing. Any data you send to or from earthli is now hidden from prying eyes.
• All traffic is end-to-end encrypted between your browser and the earthli server. This includes your password, when you log in.
• Although almost everything on earthli is still open to the public, encryption now truly protects areas that have restricted access.
• It means your... [More]

This is an old post that I never finished when I released earthli WebCore 3.5 almost a year ago. The design analysis is still pretty relevant, as are the conclusions about flexbox.

We released version 3.4 of the earthli WebCore over a year ago, in June 2013. That release introduced a new overall style that was both looked more modern and also conformed to recent design/development standards. See that article for more information about what would turn out to have been stage one of two stages of... [More]

I dug up some long-lost game logs from games nights here at Opus and generated some stats for Quake3 and Urban Terror. Unfortunately there are no dates in the logs, so there was no way to separate individual evenings. Still, it shows just how pathetic dur is when there’s strategy involved (check out that UT rank!).

The earthli home page has gotten a professional makeover and should be more usable now. The poll has also finally been updated, but it asks a rather obvious question.

The entire web-site, though it may look exactly the same, is chugging along on a new engine (earthli WebCore 2.6). It’ll be in a beta stage for a bit, but most of the wrinkles should be smoothed out soon enough.

There are more upgrades and changes planned for the near future — that will change the look of the site a bit, but first, we’ve got to nail down the foundation.

If you see any warnings or errors, please send them to me and I’ll take care of them right away.

Thanks,
Team earthli

Here are a few tips for uploading pictures to the earthli server.

Now that everybody’s got a great digital camera that takes super hi-res pictures in super high quality, we’ve got pictures that are too big to display and take too long to upload and download.

The problem

Your camera will typically take a picture at 1600 × 1200 with a JPEG compression of 90-95% (if you’ve set high quality).

That results in pictures that are anywhere from 500KB to 700KB. My camera takes them even bigger and... [More]

The JavaScript Calendar page looked too nice and was putting earthli Software to shame. No longer! The summaries are small News articles, which means that software is now dynamic and searchable. There are only four entries so far, but more are coming. So far, the earthli Browser Detector has gotten an update. The code will be updated with the next WebCore release, but the algorithm description is much clearer now.

earthli was down for a few hours recently because the server has moved to a new home, a move of only a few km. earthli’s generous hosting company, Opus AG has moved into fresh new quarters, which means earthli shouldn’t move again in the near future. Current bandwidth is 1MB upload capacity.

Earthli, less than a year after it’s last logo change, has once again updated its logo. This one really feels like the one that will stick, as it’s unique and looks nice. It also lends itself much better to a smaller, more recognizable page icon (if you’re using a browser other than IE, you should see the icon in your page tabs or bookmarks). It also doesn’t remind people of IE (like the last one, with the ‘e’ in it) and doesn’t steal the look of Mac OS X with the ‘aqua’ rendering.

The logo... [More]

Earthli has a new default style — based on OS X backgrounds and colors. Also, for all you IE users stuck in the dark ages, there is now automatic support for using GIFs instead of PNGs so you’ll get to see all the icons correctly.

Earthli has been upgraded to the latest version of the WebCore. All applications have been upgraded, but only Projects really has new functionality. The entire site benefits from upgraded styles and theme handling.

earthli has been upgraded to a 2.4GHz IBM rack server with scads of memory. Tests indicate that application pages (like those in Albums, News, Projects or Recipes) are loading from 10-15 times faster than before. This is due in part to the move to a faster server, but also because the server is now Debian Linux and can use the APC PHP cache, which gives a 50-200% speed boost as well (again, based on testing). Enjoy.

The first small portion of the WebCore is documented and released as a taste of what’s to come in the full library. The browser detector can be used as-is and implements an algorithm that is not at all PHP-specific (though the implementation is in PHP). There is full developer and public documentation included (also a taste of what the full WebCore documentation will look like). Check out earthli Software for more details.

Marco and Kathy have been busy and there are several new pictures in the Langfurren album showing off their newly furnished apartment. There is also a new album showing their first overnight ski-weekend in Klosters, Switzerland.

dur has been playing around with Quake again recently and took a few screenshots of his handiwork. It’s just bot play, but it’s on the Hardcore level and has some neat stats.

Ozzie has some new pictures up, documenting his experiences so far in Switzerland. He’s got a journal entry, Kicked out of the States (and poor) and he’s got some pictures from
December 6th, 2002 (Sami Claus day) and some pictures from December 1st, 2002 (one of the few sunny days in the last 8 weeks). Check ‘em out to see how the Oz-man’s doing.

Swiss earthli Logo

If you’re seeing this article, then you’re browsing the Swiss version of earthli.com. The site (along with it’s proprietor) has moved to Switzerland. As you can see, the logo has been updated to reflect this status :-). If you find anything that is broken, be sure to let me know, as it could be a configuration problem as a result of the move.

After long months of focus-group testing and careful deliberation, earthli has a new logo. This logo is only rendered in alpha-transparent PNG, so will look extra bad on all Windows IE incarnations, but those are the breaks. It’s worth it just to have one logo for all themes now. The new logo also makes a nicer and more distinct icon, as you can see in the icon to the left. With the decision to leave all non-alpha-transparent-PNG rendering browsers behind, the logo can make full use of the... [More]

For the dismantling of the apartment, prior to earthli’s move to Switzerland, the Webcam has been re-enabled. As usual, service will be intermittent, but you should be able to see the living room change…and maybe we’ll move the camera as we move to different rooms.

earthli.com will soon be leaving its home at Logicat, where it’s been housed for almost 3 years. I’m leaving Logicat and moving to Switzerland, so soon earthli will be served from there (hosted at Opus, my new employer). I’ve updated my resume (PDF) with my last work at Logicat.

The earthli WebCore is now at version 2.0.0 and the entire web site has been converted to take advantage of it. The functionality hasn’t changed, but the site is much more flexible for future projects. If you want to start working with the WebCore, there is some documentation available.

The invitations to Marco and Kathy’s wedding have been sent on schedule. The Hochzeit site has been improved and a new theme “Hochzeit” has been added (and selected as the default for that part of the site).

Check out the Bass Harbor, Maine 2002 album. Gary hasn’t contributed his pictures yet, but I wanted get an album for a vacation finished in less than a week from the end of the trip itself. I’m sure he’ll have pictures to contribute later, but these are my pictures (and journals) for now. As always, there’s a calendar for easy browsing and a Print Preview if you just want to look at the whole album (just click the print button in the bottom right on the screen that comes up).

Kath and Marco’s wedding will of course be enhanced by online functionality. There’s an online guest list, with real-time updates of registered guests (whether yea or nay). You can search that list, or use the handy search tool to find people and R.S.V.P. yourself. The hand-crafted (digitally) invitations are also online for you to look at.

There are 68 pictures and 15 journal entries detailing our journey to Switzerland almost a month ago. If you just want a massive overview, then check out the new print feature here [print] (just click print at the bottom right, after selecting options).

Weighing in at 16 journal entries and 157 pictures, the Southwest 2002 is finally finished. It includes over 70 pictures from Gary’s collection as well. The Print Preview alone is over 40 pages and is the best way to check it out offline. However, I highly recommend to browse through the Calendar if you’re looking for something specific.

A long-lost feature from version 1.x has finally been restored to the modern photo albums. Printing is back and enhanced from the original version. Any journal entry can be printed, either by itself or in a hand-selected group from the explorer. Additionally, the entire album can be one-click printed from the album’s home page. Print options include all standard options plus the ability to include thumbnails from that journal day.