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 solutions and they very quickly rose into the same ballpark.

Features

Hostfactory offers:

• Apache/PHP (7.3/8.x)
• Unlimited MySql/Maria databases (I only need two)
• 50GB of storage space (does not include database or Git repository space)
• Unlimited Git repositories
• 20 domain accounts (I only need one)
• Unlimited traffic
• Integrated SSL (LetsEncrypt)
• SSH access (so I’d have scp for upload/download and shell access for stuff like mysql or moving files)
• Unlimited Emails (probably don’t need this, as I’m running earhtli.com mail through Protonmail)
• Backups
• 30-day free testing (I’m all set up and haven’t signed up yet…)
• Excellent and very responsive support. I’ve gotten answers within minutes and even got an answer on a Sunday.

Requirements

What does earthli.com need?

• PHP 7.2 or higher (that’s the version I’d tested; I’m on 7.3 now, will probably migrate to 8.0 soon)
• Modules:

  • EXIF
  • GD
  • Mysqli
  • Zip
  Git repos to store the earthli-webcore and earthli.com repos for easy deployment
• MySQL databases (two of them)
• At least 10GB of storage
• .htaccess support (for securing folders)

Anything missing?

What has changed?

• data.earthli.com [1] is no longer available. Use www.earthli.com/data instead
• dev.earthli.com [2] is no longer available. Use www.earthli.com instead.

Drawbacks?

Are there any drawbacks to HostFactory? No, not really.

Getting used to a hosted environment was a good learning experience. I no longer have full control of the server, but I also no longer have full responsibility for setting everything up in a secure manner. PHP is set up to run more efficiently, with caching, and with maximal security (using Fast-CGI now instead of Apache modules). I have control over most PHP settings I need, but had to contact support to have them set my include_path for me.

They do a great job of that, including a WAF (Web Application Firewall), which has some pretty aggressive rules. For example, I tried to post an update to an article that had the word “sexual” in it and was rejected. I contacted support and was told about an IP-white-listing feature. After white-listing myself, it worked immediately.

This is fine, but I worried about how well the solution scales. After a quick discussion with support, it turns out that the (non-security-relevant) rules can be individually tuned, should that be necessary. I don’t think it’s necessary yet, but it’s good to know that it’s an option if IP-white-listing proves to be insufficient for my needs.

So far, so good! 👍

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 because they changed the entire reference/copy semantics. From there, though the upgrade to 7.2.x was relatively easy. The jump to 8.x shouldn’t pose too many issues, either. [1]

The move through MySql versions to the current 5.7.33 and Apache versions to the current 2.4.29, all running on Ubuntu 18.04 was more or less without incident.

Fixing the Encoding

One last vestige of that original setup was the encoding. I’d opened an issue called Add support for UTF8 as the default encoding almost 8 years ago, but never found the time or inspiration to actually make the change.

I did end up making some workarounds for missing characters, but it was always less work to just add another one. See the section on “proprietary markup” below.

You have to be careful when changing encodings, making the sure that the tool that makes the conversion is aware of both the source and target encodings. You have to be dead-certain of the source encoding or the conversion will not succeed. You’ll end up with garbled characters.

The earthli database isn’t large by any enterprise standards, but it does contain almost 27k pictures and almost 4k articles [2], some of them quite long. There is a lot of text, created with various browsers and tools over almost a quarter of a century.

A search online for tips on converting to UTF-8 turned up a lot of useless advice for older versions or based on an inadequate understanding of encodings or the available tools.

Luckily, my database dump was already in UTF-8, but it contained SQL commands to use the latin1 collation instead of utf8 or, to be more precise, utf8mb4 (which is the version of UTF8 that supports 4-byte characters, e.g. 🧐). With utf8, you can store anything you want in MySql other than emojis. It’s unclear why they have two formats, but MySql has always had its idiosyncrasies. [3]

Converting earthli’s proprietary markup

The most fiddly bit I had to deal with was actually optional and involved converting some of the ad-hoc character combinations that I’d added to my markup language in order to use characters not supported in the latin1 encoding (e.g. I would write Slavoj Žižek as “Slavoj (Z-)i(z-)ek). I used sed to replace these character combinations. Obviously, no-one else uses these, but for the sake of posterity—and to serve as an example for other replacements—here they are:

sed \
-e 's@(a_)@ā@g' \
-e 's@(c,)@ç@g' \
-e 's@(C,)@Ç@g' \
-e 's@(c-)@č@g' \
-e 's@(C-)@Č@g' \
-e 's@(g-)@ğ@g' \
-e 's@(i-)@ı@g' \
-e 's@(I.)@İ@g' \
-e 's@(l-)@ł@g' \
-e 's@(L-)@Ł@g' \
-e 's@(s,)@ş@g' \
-e 's@(S,)@Ş@g' \
-e 's@(s-)@š@g' \
-e 's@(S-)@Š@g' \
-e 's@(u-)@ū@g' \
-e 's@(z-)@ž@g' \
-e 's@(Z-)@Ž@g' \
-e "s@(a\\\')@á@g" \
-e "s@(A\\\')@Á@g" \
-e "s@(C\\\')@Ć@g" \
-e "s@(n\\\')@ń@g" \
-e "s@(N\\\')@Ń@g" \
-e "s@(o\\\')@ő@g" \
-e "s@(O\\\')@Ő@g" \
earthli.sql > earthli_utf8.sql

I used @ as the separator character and had to escape the backslash twice (once for sed and once for bash). Also, you have to use a different output file because sed truncates the output before it does anything. If you use the same file, then you just end up with an empty file. Neat.

It’s not super-efficient, but it was done in a few seconds.

A bonus to doing these replacements for me is that a full-text search for “Zizek” or “Žižek” now finds all articles where I mention the Slovenian philosopher. That didn’t work before because MySql was indexing “(Z-)i(z-)ek” instead.

Working with the dump file

If you need to open the dump file, be aware that the lines are very long. vim does a good job of searching and editing and jumping to locations (e.g. +normal 15G25| jumps to line 15, column 25. nano can also find text (⌘ + W) pretty well and quickly. Both edit the text without a problem, once you’ve found the location you’re interested in.

Desktop editors (e.g. Visual Studio Code or Sublime Text) and differs (e.g. BeyondCompare) were mostly overwhelmed by both the file size and the line lengths.

Luckily, I only ended up needing to make one edit to avoid an error creating an index because the UTF-8 encoding considered “bugin” and “bügin” to be equivalent.

Commands

I made most of the following changes from the command line, but made one change using PHPMyAdmin.

Here’s what I ended up doing:

1. <p>Dump the current database. MySQL dumps to UTF-8 by default and converts all text.

   mysqldump --user=earthli -p --add-drop-table earthli  > earthli.sql

   </p>

2. <p>Verify that the dump file is in UTF8 format. If it’s not, then you can use iconv to change the encoding (example from Wikipedia):

   iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 <infile> -o <outfile>

   </p>

3. <p>Search/replace the character set for each table with the following command:

   sed -e 's@CHARSET=latin1@CHARSET=utf8mb4@g' earthli.sql > earthli_utf8.sql

   </p>
4. Use PHPMyAdmin to change the default encoding for the database to

   utf8mb4 in the Operations pane for the database.

5. Import the database.

   cat earthli_utf8.sql | mysql --user=earthli -p earthli

In PHP and the configuration, I made the following changes:

1. Call mysqli_set_charset ($this->_connection, ‘utf8mb4’); after opening the connection to the database
2. Change the encoding in all generated pages by including the tag < meta charset=“utf-8”>
3. Change the default charset in the Apache config files php_value default_charset UTF-8 (it’s possible that this is already the default by now)

Conclusion

It took a bunch of research and preparation and nerves to dump, globally modify, and re-import a database that contains the last quarter-century of my writing. In the end, though, it wasn’t even that much work and it went smoothly. As always with encodings, it serves you well to understand exactly what you’re doing—it often saves a lot of steps.

And, now, because I can: ✊🏼.

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 article NY Times Spelling Bee now includes the following OpenGraph metadata:

<meta name="twitter:image" 
  content="https://…/forthwith.png" />
<meta property="og:url"
  content="https://…view_article.php?id=3974" />
<meta property="og:title" content="NY Times Spelling Bee" />
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
<meta property="og:description" content="I recently 
wrote that Kath and I have a one-year streak going in the
NYT Crossword Puzzle. While that is still ongoing, 
we've also recently discovered a little gem 
called Spelling Bee. The concept is …" />
<meta property="article:author" content="marco" />
<meta property="article:published_time"
  content="2020-05-16 20:39:52" />
<meta property="article:modified_time"
  content="2020-05-21 21:15:08" />
<meta property="og:image"
  content="https://…/forthwith.png" />
<meta property="og:image:width " content="2562" />
<meta property="og:image:height " content="1566" />

The same article also now has Twitter metadata:

<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />
<meta name="twitter:site" content="" />
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@mvonballmo" />
<meta name="twitter:title" content="NY Times Spelling Bee" />
<meta name="twitter:description" content="I recently 
wrote that Kath and I have a one-year streak going in the
NYT Crossword Puzzle. While that is still ongoing,
we've also recently discovered a little gem
called Spelling Bee. The concept is …" />

Twitter refuses to use any of the OpenGraph information, so you really need to include both copies.

Implementation

Some of the properties aren’t necessarily required, but it was easy enough to generate them all from earthli’s general facilities.

• The AUDITABLE object provides the creator, creation date, and the last-modification date.
• The CONTENT_OBJECT object provides the title and the description.
• The DRAFTABLE_ENTRY updates the creation date to the publication date for articles.
• The ATTACHMENT_HOST sets the image to the first attachment.
• The IMAGE_METRICS provides size information for the default image
• The MUNGER_STRIPPER extracts and formats text for the description so that it is legal HTML.
• The ALBUM sets the image to the main picture for the album, if available.
• The PICTURE sets the image to the picture’s URL.

In addition, I added support for SOCIAL_PAGE_OPTIONS and introduced a method on the data hierarchy called set_social_options(), which allows the data objects to enrich the social options before they’re formatted into the metadata area of the page header. A page must enable the social options and explicitly request to generate them, a feature I only enabled from the view_entry.php and view_folder.php pages.

The results are shown below.

Apple Messages

Apple Messages uses the OpenGraph tags to make nicely formatted previews now.

Apple Messages news articleApple Messages photoApple Messages photo album

Facebook

I haven’t actually posted anything to Facebook, but was able to use the Social-graph Testing tools to see how posts would look.

Facebook article with attachmentFacebook photoFacebook photo album

Twitter

I only tested articles with Twitter because I don’t anticipate ever tweeting photos or albums. The tweet is nicely formatted now, with or without an attachment. Previously, Twitter displayed links to earthli as only a simple title, with no description or image.

Twitter article with attachmentTwitter article without attachment

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 focus on simplicity in page design, semantic structure, etc., it turns out that earthli also does quite well for accessibility.

Home page

The home page demonstrates the new responsive grids and columns.

Home page at standard widthHome page − small-screenHome page − wide-screen

For this page, I’ve included samples taken from the Opera device emulator to show that the responsiveness actually works for mobile devices now—no more scaling and zooming on your phone.

Home page on the iPadHome page on the iPhone 5Home page on the iPhone 6

News Index

The News home page demonstrates how I converted the top-level navigation area to use responsive columns and how the articles are now shown truncated to a limited length and in grids, instead of full-length and in a single 900-pixel–wide column. At a standard resolution, the tile still stretches across the whole page, but beyond that size, it switches to multiple columns, to improve readability and use space more efficiently.

News index − standard sizeNews index − small-screenNews index − wide-screen

Webcore Index

The WebCore index is a custom section of earthli, with a column to each side, and a responsive grid in the middle section. With just a handful of simple directives, the browser makes the best use of the available space.

Webcore index − standard sizeWebcore index − small-screenWebcore index − wide-screen

Theme Settings

The theme settings page also combines a lot of different elements: a responsive grid of content-sized tiles for the theme thumbnails, a form with top-aligned labels and responsive width, another form—the test form below the fold, not shown in the screenshots—which shows how the left-hand labels are moved to the top at smaller screen widths.

This page also uses a smaller column on the left with a content area on the right. These columns share the space in a given ratio at wider resolutions, but are stacked at smaller screen widths.

Theme settings − standard sizeTheme settings − small-screenTheme settings − single columnTheme settings − wide-screen

Read Article

When you read an article, it now makes much better use of the space. In a standard size, the page looks about the same it did without responsive design (where the page width was fixed at 900 pixels). However, at smaller widths, the page collapses as expected.

The neat trick on this page is that at larger widths, the layout starts splitting content into columns so that you never have to read really long lines. The drawback to this approach is that, for longer articles, you have to manually scroll back up to the top of the next column. However, I think that’s more acceptable than displaying text in 2000-pixel–wide paragraphs.

Article page − standard sizeArticle page − small-screenArticle page − two columnsArticle page − wide-screen

Edit Article Form

As mentioned above, the forms are also responsive: at smaller viewport widths, the labels move from left-aligned to top-aligned automatically. Any form can now be used on a small mobile device, limited only by the limitations of the device rather than any forced layout in the form itself.

In this way, the form makes the best use of horizontal space, keeping the form as vertically short as possible if there is screen space. If there is not, the form uses more vertical space, but avoids horizontal scrolling. I think this is a good trade-off.

Additionally, If you work on larger texts, there is a new full-screen editing mode, that maximizes the preview area and editing areas to share the screen equally.

Edit Article − standard sizeEdit Article − small-screenEdit Article − full-screen

Albums Index

And, finally, I’ve included a screenshot of the Albums home page, to show off how it also makes maximal use of the screen width, creating new columns as space allows rather than being hard-coded to three columns, as it used to be.

Albums wide-screen

Conclusion

I’m pretty happy to have gotten to this point with earthli, which turns … 17 years old this year. Even after all that time, I’ve managed to keep it looking relatively modern and based on modern technologies.

• Everything is now HTTPS.
• LESS-based single stylesheet with a consistent UX and VSG for the entire site
• Simple, responsive design for all pages
• Very good scores on mobile-friendliness from Google
• Very good scores on accessibility from other sources

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 browser will show a little green or grey lock icon in the address bar next to the URL.
• If you click the lock, you can show the details for the certificate (shown below).

www.earthli.com certificate

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 a style update.

If you look at the release notes for 3.5, you’ll note that almost all of the changes occurred in the rendering part of the framework. In fairness, the issues don’t even begin to cover it. What the release actually contains is the following:

• Removed all inline CSS styles from everywhere in the web site. Replaced everything with CSS classes, where needed.
• Removed all explicit 100% widths from containers. CSS determines whether a container has its natural width or the default 100% width or another, smaller width
• Grids, forms, calendars and column layouts no longer use tables for layout. The default CSS still uses table, table-row and table-cell display types but that is temporary. The only tables left are containers that really should be represented as tables.

The visual style is more consistent throughout, as you can see in the examples below. Click the images to see specific notes.

Home & Index Pages

Minor changes to the home pageMinor changes to the news home pageThe earthli home page and the product index pages have been cleaned up, reduced and standardized. On these pages, icons have been reduced or removed—especially where they used to appear at the left, where they tended to disturb the vertical text line. On the product index page, all toolbars were combined into one single area.

User Details

New user detailsOld user detailsPages common to all products have been spruced up. It’s especially noticeable on forms with a lot of controls. These are now very consistently aligned where they’d fallen into disrepair before.

Folder Permissions

New folder permissionsOld folder permissionsAnother common page is the permissions manager for folders. This page doesn’t look radically different at first, but if you compare the screenshots more closely, you’ll see a lot of improvements in consistency that add up to a big improvement. The toolbar was consolidated and line-specific commands were standardized.

Calendar Chooser

In-place calendar dropdownAnd, finally, the old, old—old—calendar-chooser-in-a-separate-window has been replaced by an in-place calendar control. It’s not rocket science, but as a regular user of this control, I’m glad to have gotten rid of the old, crufty version.

Edit Article

Edit article form – WebCore 3.5Edit article form – WebCore 3.4I put the most customization into the relatively simple article-editor, simply because I spend the majority of time there, editing blog posts. The new version makes much better use of horizontal space—without using so much that line-length detracts from legibility. As with the other forms, the edit-article form automatically picks up much better control and text alignment.

Inline Preview

Edit article with standard previewEdit article with tall previewThe article editor also includes a side-by-side and non-refreshing preview. Another Godsend for anyone who spends a lot of time editing longer posts.

Edit Job

Edit job – WebCore 3.4Edit job – WebCore 3.5In the earthli Projects, the job editor is one that shows a lot of improvement after the upgrade. The design is much quieter, with less jagged edges on the right to distract the eye. The code that builds this form is essentially unchanged [1]—the improvement came “for free” when I updated the stylesheets.

Edit Recipe

Edit recipe – WebCore 3.5Even the relatively straightforward form in the recipe editor looks nicer and automatically makes better use of horizontal space. There is no inline preview yet, but the old server-round-trip preview is still serviceable for these shorter texts.

Edit Album

New album editorAnd, finally, the album editor shows how well the stylesheet maintains both vertical and baseline alignment for many different types of controls. Controls are aligned to an imaginary plumb line as are their labels (and descriptions for radio buttons and checkboxes). In the case of text controls, alignment to the text in the control was preferred to aligning to the border of the control itself.

Where to next?

The next natural step is to use flexbox display in many other places, but browsers are not quite ready for that yet. This is probably the last difficult CSS rewrite that I will have to make, in which layout must still be made using floating elements because too many browsers still have shaky flexbox support.

In two or three years, though, I’ll be able to just switch out the display styles and much more cleanly and easily define the form layout using flexbox than the occasionally shaky and still unevenly support margin/padding/float/relative-positioning solution that earthli currently uses.

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 stores pictures up to 900KB in size.

There’s a few things wrong here:

1. 1600 × 1200 is way too big to display on screen. Most of you have album options that constrain the picture size to 640 × 480 so it doesn’t make huge scroll bars all over the place. If you click the picture, it shows in full size and then you’ve got massive scroll bars anyway.
2. 500KB+ per picture is too big for my server. I don’t have unlimited space and we should aim to keep pictures at a reasonable size (big enough for nice online quality, but no bigger).
3. Huge pictures will just take longer to download and make your albums look slow … all for quality that a web browser can’t display anyway.

Now you ask…

How can I fix this?

When you upload, you should first work on the pictures a bit to get them into postable format (i.e. doesn’t take too much space and isn’t ridiculously big). That means you’ll be making a second set of pictures from the raw JPGs you got off of your camera.

First of all … BACK UP YOUR PICTURES … make sure you are working with a separate batch so if you mess something up, you can always start over. I repeat, BACK UP YOUR PICTURES, earthli Support will not be able to rescue lost pictures :-D

Now, let’s work on those pictures…

• Install Irfanview

  1. Download Irfanview 3.80 or higher. It has a neat batch-processing feature.
  2. Once you’ve got Irfanview installed, open it up.
• Start Batch processing mode

  1. Hit ‘B’ (File…Batch Conversion/Rename) to bring up the batch processing dialog (this lets you work on several pictures at once without opening/closing each one by hand)
• Select your files

  1. On the top right, browse to where your pictures are
  2. Select the ones you want to convert and click ‘Add’ or just hit ‘Add all’
  3. Now you should have a list of files on the left side
• Select JPEG conversion options

  1. On the bottom right, you’ve got options to rename and/or convert your files. We want to convert files, so click “Batch conversion”
  2. Choose “JPG − JPEG Format” output format
  3. Click Options and select the 80% JPEG quality.
  4. I also highly recommend to “Save as progressive JPEG”. That lets slower connections gradually fill in your picture and is very nice for browsing quickly through pictures.
  5. Also, make sure that “Keep original EXIF data” is checked. At some point, I’ll enable the feature on the web site that automatically extracts the date from pictures when uploaded, so you don’t have to fill in date and time anymore. That info is read from the EXIF data.
  6. Click OK to save the JPEG settings
• Select sizing options

  1. Click the “Set advanced options” button
  2. Make sure all checkboxes are off to begin with (so you don’t get any surprises)
  3. Click “Resize” to enable the second group of controls
  4. Click “Set new size” and select 1024 for both width and height. Don’t worry, it’s not going to stretch your pictures all out of whack (see next step). If you’re using irfanview 3.90 or higher, you’ll see slightly different options. Instead of “Set new size”, choose “Set long side to” and enter 1024. Same results.
  5. Click “Preserve Aspect Ratio” so that the resizing effect keeps the same width/height ratio your picture started with and you get no stretching.
  6. These settings will give you pictures that are, at most, 1024 pictures in either dimension, regardless of whether you took it landscape or portrait.
  7. Click the “Use Resample function (better quality)” … well, because it says better quality. Sounds good.
• Choose folder and go!

  1. Now, you can choose an output directory on the middle right
  2. Click “Start” in the column of buttons on the upper left and it churns away, converting your pictures into exactly the right format, qualiy and size for posting to the web.

Upload away

If you use this system, you’ll have well-behaved pictures that don’t hog server space, that have a good balance between download speed and picture quality and, best of all, are nice and consistent between batches and albums.

If you’ve got any more questions, feel free to post them in the comments or email me directly.

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 is, of course, based on the illustrious Oz, depicting him sitting in his garden. I think the new design lends itself much better to a T-shirt than the last, with just Oz by himself adorning the pocket and perhaps the whole thing across the back. It’s just an idea for now, though…

In addition, earthli has been upgraded to the latest version of the earthli WebCore, including software upgrades for Albums, News, Projects and Recipes. The long-awaited subscription integration is almost complete and will be activated as soon as the testing phase is complete. This latest upgrade involved a significant database upgrade. Subsequent code releases should come more quickly as the next few versions worth of features involve code-only changes.

Enjoy.

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 alpha-transparency to make a blue button that is translucent on any background color and has a nice, subtle drop-shadow (inspired by the Aqua interface I’ve been working with now for over 3 weeks).

See browser support for more information on PNG images.

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.

Kath and Marco’s car, ‘Fritz’, now has his very own earthli Album, called Fritz, strangely enough. So far, there are just basic outside pictures, but after a good washing and cleaning, more interior pictures should be available.
 

The Southwest 2002 Journal from the Van Evera family trip to Arizona (and Las Vegas) is available, but hasn’t been proofread or edited yet (just entered by mvonballmo).

earthli Projects is functional enough to move the site changelogs into the automated format. The Albums, News, Recipes and Webcore logs have been imported.

earthli Albums has been upgraded to the latest WebCore code and benefits from fixes and improvements made to the code shared with Recipes and News. earthli can now offer text-searching in the Albums; you can look for pictures or journal entries, searching in the title or the description or both.

Oz has just come back from a visit in upstate New York with a new sitter, because his usual sitters were abandoning him for a vacation with his parents. While there, his sitter kept a journal and took some pictures There was also a photo shoot back in March, as well.

Marco’s Papers, Notes, Research & Manuals are now available for browsing. All existing documentation has been reformatted, cleaned up to valid HTML 4.01 Strict standards and collected under a shared style sheet (not earthli themes, though). The listing has also been re-organized to provide a full chronological listing and a project listing.

The earthli Christmas theme beta program is over and user complaints have been addressed. The christmas theme is now the default for the holidays. For more holiday-related stuff, check out Oz’s new pictures.

earthli’s themes have been separated into sets and the theme selector has been updated to make it easier to choose the best theme for you.

The earthli Forums are officially closed. Their content has been moved into earthli News, which is built with the same technology as the Albums and the Recipes, yielding a single shared earthli user for all sites. There is also better searching, print previews, a draft/published mode for contributors and a better date-oriented layout for easier browsing.

A brand-new application has arrived for earthli.com. earthli Recipes lets users publish, print, sort and comment on recipes.

Oz has added over 30 new (old) pictures to his Autobiography album. There are a lot of pictures from his early years.

There are over 130 new pictures in Kath & Marco’s Switzerland 2001 album. There are albums for Pilatus, San Bernardino, Ermes’ Family Trip, Werner & Ekhlas’ House and the 1st of August.

earthli Forums are now searchable. You can search all forums or just within a particular forum. There’s even fancy keyword highlighting (which carries over to the post as well).

The earthli Christmas theme has arrived. It’s not as ostentatious (or musical) as some have requested, but hopefully it’s ready early enough for those who get into the spirit early. It isn’t the default yet (earthli does not get into the spirit early), but you can choose it from the list.

earthli Themes now have their own screenshots, making it even easier to choose how you want to browse the web…and, yes, a Christmas theme is coming.

The Photo Albums have re-opened with many new features, including nested albums, comments, enhanced security, an explorer, an updated calendar and better navigation for browsing sets of pictures.

Rewrote the Quake site to use the earthli settings. Much re-organization, but no new content. The original quake style sheet is now available as an earthli color scheme − ‘Quake’.

I’ve caved in to user demand (that’s right, 1 user) and gone seasonal again. Enjoy the Thanksgiving theme. (if you don’t use [default] colors, then choose it from the settings menus.)

[default] options added to earthli settings, which will use the default at all times, and changes for holidays ;-). Also fixed some bugs in the cookie that only Mozilla-based browsers detected.

The Jass Manual has been converted to use the new settings.

earthli gets into the Halloween spirit with a new default theme (select Halloween from the settings menus if you have set a different default theme).

The new Photo Albums are working and all existing photos are browsable. Soon you’ll be able to add pictures again.

earthli Settings (color, font, size) are now stored indefinitely (fixed a bug that stored them only for a day). So now when you make a change, it will stick.

The ‘Settings’ are stored elsewhere now. If you use Mozilla or Netscape 6.x, you have to clear the old earthli cookie. Oh, and you can show replies in the forums pages now.

earthli News recreated as the Announcements forum.

New subscription service available for earthli Forums. Get the latest posts emailed to you.

Initial earthli forums overhaul is completed. New posts piling up daily.

2 new Oz pictures.

Work proceeds in the forums. Many new posts added. Existing posts separated into Current Events, Humor and Technology.

Earthli Forums code updated. Users can now create accounts. More invective than you can handle.

Marco’s Tuesday commute.

Added customization options. Change color scheme, font and size and use it throughout the site. (See Settings on the right.)

New (old) quake battle. malloc and dur in Urban Terror.

Added a style-chooser on the home page. Check out which styles you like. More coming soon…

Added 239 pictures to the Switzerland 1997 album.

Added AEStats to the Quake battles site. New battle: dur, joker, kavorka, malloc.

Finished the first version of the polling system.

Added the first earthli poll.

Added Christmas 2000 pictures to the photo album.

Grizz vs. dur quake battle.

Mark III ready for delivery.

earthli systems Mark II arrives.

New Quake battle

earthli moves to a dedicated server and gets mail service.

Updated logos for earthli.

Battle statistics added to quake site.

Logicat Test Engine build history transferred to earthli.

earthli systems offers the Mark I.

A new look for earthli.

earthli Forums has been spun from the project manager.

The project manager is underway.

Oz is back on the Webcam.

Added some pictures to the Whistler 2001 album.

Updated Oz’s home page (New pictures).

Cleaned up and reorganized the work and notes section.

Added updated version of Test Engine manuals.

Added a strategy to the Jass Manual (playing backwards).

Updated the Jass Manual with a multi-page, browsable version.

Added forest, winter and island styles to photo album admin area.

Numerous improvements to the photo album site. (Work Log)

Added a webcam site.