New Stuff

Just finished upgrading the shoutbox. I got jealous of that Gabbly thing being so much more useful than the old shoutbox...

Here's the key features:

[list][*] Uses AJAX so you don't have to refresh to see new posts. A yellow flash indicates when there is a new post.
[*] Supports bold, italic and underline bbcode. Also supports links using the url tag.
[*] Improved 'past shouts' - now sorted into archives by day
[*] Now prints out a timestamp every hour, so you don't jump into a conversation that was over a long time ago.
[*] Times out after 10 minutes of inactivity and greys itself out. Simply go to another page, refresh the whole page or post a shout to bring it back.
[/list]


Also, on a side note, the URL for your profile has changed. Thanks the magic of mod_rewrite your profile now lives at: http://www.vegetablerevolution.com/user/<username>;

Mine, for example is:
http://www.vegetablerevolution.com/user/admin

Just makes things a bit cleaner and easier if you ever send it to people. And makes it easier to remember.

Any problems, questions, or suggestions please let me know. If you get any nasty errors, or it makes your computer go slow or anything at all - please let me know, it will need to be fixed.

It's slick - I like it. Lots of nice touches. Especially the yellow flash, that's a great addition. Not too distracting, but enough to make you realise something's going on.

Seeing how there's nothing underneath the Shoutbox how about fixing the position on the page or having it catch up with the scrolling so that it's still visible when you scroll down? I'm guessing the Shoutbox will be a little more active now conversation wise, and if you get caught reading a long thread on the forum you could miss a lot of stuff unless you keep scrolling up. Seeing how it's just empty space once you scroll past it anyway...

ditto that



it's the same in my IE too

Noia 2.0 (eXtreme)

I hacked together a quick and dirty Firefox extension to take advantage of the new spangly auto-update-ness when you're looking at other webpages. I can't do the fancy auto-install link through BBCode, so if you want to use it you'll need to download this XPI file and then just drop it onto a Firefox window. It's basically just the VR Shoutbox embedded into the Sidebar, so all normal rules like the ten minute timeout still apply. If it times out, just hide and open the bar again. Use either View -> Sidebar -> VR Shoutbox or ctrl-shift-z to toggle it on and off.

Anyone that it's blank for - can you go to http://www.vegetablerevolution.com/shoutbox/index.php

And see what shows up?

blank!

It's also blank with me, on both accounts.

Right, should work in IE now - all because it can't take a silly auto closing script tag. That was the cause of the blank-ness

If it's still blank, log out, and log into VR again, should be OK then.

Yay for the new shoutbox, which appears to be working OK for me. But I'm going to kick your a*se RE: the new profile urls because it means I'm going to have to edit the Name list!

The new shoutbox works fine for most of the site, but not in the gallery. It says 404 not found, then tries to sell me stuff.

Quote: Parachutes

Yay for the new shoutbox, which appears to be working OK for me. But I'm going to kick your a*se RE: the new profile urls because it means I'm going to have to edit the Name list!

The old ones still work - Just the new ones are much prettier...

Quote: LoonyPandora

Quote: Parachutes

Yay for the new shoutbox, which appears to be working OK for me. But I'm going to kick your a*se RE: the new profile urls because it means I'm going to have to edit the Name list!

The old ones still work - Just the new ones are much prettier...

Now you bloody tell me.

I think Andrew's having a bit of a fiddle, it was all over the place earlier, think he's trying to make it slide down the page like Gary suggested. Use http://www.vegetablerevolution.com/shoutbox/index.php until he's sorted, maybe?

Just to let you know, the yellow flash keeps sticking for me rather than fading...I'm using firefox, if it helps.

Quote: Completely_Underwhelmed

mine keeps getting stuck with only one post. also in firefox!

mine us currently like this too.

:-[ how do you clear your caches?

Ctrl + F5 together.

Quote: Surfer_Rosa

It has no filter for swearing!

This makes me too pleased

I'll soon change that

If more than two BBcode italic tags are used, it breaks.

"Testing [i]just the one[/i]"
works fine.
"Testing [i]one[/i] two [i]three[/i]"
doesn't.

Pfffft is my answer to you sire! As someone who understand PHP to a degree, but not Perl of course, that is.

Quote: Will

Doesn't PHP use the same regex syntax as perl if you use the right functions? Works fine for me..

Just because it's Perl compatible doesn't mean it's exactly the same. [tt]preg_replace[/tt] will match as much of a string as possible, meaning if you have multiple tags, it will match everything between the first opening tag, and the last ending tag.

In Perl, you can use the [tt]//g[/tt] modifier at the end of your regex to make it match as many times as possible, meaning it 'correctly' matches multiple times (correct, as in it's what I want it to do)

[tt]preg_replace[/tt] doesn't support the [tt]//g[/tt] modifier, and you have to do some workarounds to get an effect that's similar. So I read here anyway:

Quote:

By calling pcre_exec() multiple times with appropriate arguments, you can mimic Perl's /g option, and it is in this kind of implementation where \G can be useful.

In the end, I didn't bother and did it a different way - it's not as good, because it's case sensitive, and the url tags probably won't work if there is more than one in the message because of the same [tt]//g[/tt] problem.

function parseBBCode() {[br] $text = $this-&gt;text;[br] [br] $bbcodes = array();[br] $bbcodes[] = array("[b]","&lt;b&gt;" ;[br] $bbcodes[] = array("[i]","&lt;i&gt;" ;[br] $bbcodes[] = array("[u]","&lt;u&gt;" ;[br] $bbcodes[] = array("[/b]","&lt;/b&gt;" ;[br] $bbcodes[] = array("[/i]","&lt;/i&gt;" ;[br] $bbcodes[] = array("[/u]","&lt;/u&gt;" ;[br][br] foreach ($bbcodes as $bbcode) {[br] $text = str_replace($bbcode[0],$bbcode[1],$text);[br] }[br][br] $text = preg_replace("/\[url=(http\:\/\/)?(.*)\](.*)\[\/url\]/si","&lt;a href=\"http:\/\/\\2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"external\" class=\"external\"&gt;\\3&lt;/a&gt;",$text);[br][br] $this-&gt;text = $text;[br]}[br]

If you know of a PHP function that is better than [tt]preg_replace[/tt] for my needs, let me know

Quote: Radical_Edward

Yo, not sure if you know, but their needs to be a word break after about 15 characters otherwise it forces the shoutbox to side scroll - however, since I'm guessing you set it to not use scroll bars, its not instantly apparent, unless you use a scroll whell while hovering over the shout box.

I'd commented that out for some reason... no idea why... It's back on now!

No worries - doesn't matter what language you use really, PHP was designed for web use, so it stands to reason that it's 'better' for it.

Perl was designed for manipulating text, which is why it's the daddy for regexes. Since so much stuff is basically just 'text' (even images are) - Perl can be used everywhere.

It is a bit silly that PHP doesn't support it, but hey ho - It does the business, in the end

hehe, it's not about cred - it's about getting the job done. People who program in assembly are just making a lot more work for themselves, and whoever has to maintain the code after them.