1,313,973,713. That is the latest population figure I got when I searched Google for "China Population". It came from the CIA. How useful of them.

It is therefore also the number of people blocked from seeing Network54.com. Apparently, this tiny company is a threat the government of China. Or someone is building a competitor to us and they have a friend in the government that can block us out. How is that for free trade? Where is the WTO on this?

Nowhere. And won't be. Just look at this article from News.com about filtering search results. Not only does the Chinese government block us via the "Great Chinese Firewall" but they pressure search engines to do so also. Oddly, the old school monopoly seems to be the most fair to us: Microsoft. Who knew?

V3 provides a way around it, but it is real annoying. And we were becoming immensely popular in China. It was quickly becoming half our traffic. Now its none...

N54/Steven Roussey/My Weblog

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I have been working on improvements to the UI of the forums, doing things like making the admin menu in the forum index page change on the fly depending on what your permissions are and what is selected (what rows are selected). Its pretty nice, you can check it out in the test forum at v3.network54.com. This week, I'll have all the admin stuff for the thread menus working the same way, so it knows if a user is a group or not, etc., so you can add them in or remove them without going to an admin page.

It makes things really slick.

And a pain to debug. I highly encourage everyone to update their browsers to the newest one. Please! The experience in IE7 is far better than IE6, and the memory leaks are far smaller. The same with Firefox. FF2 is far, far, far better than FF1.5. Personally, I also find the nightly builds of Webkit better than stock Safari, though they aren't release version like IE and FF.

IE8 (sometime next year) will likely have silverlight built in. I'm assuming that IE8 will use its DRL to tap into CLR and JIT for JS. What that means, is that if I'm reading the tea leaves correctly, IE8 will have much faster Javascript. Not to be left out, FF4 (OK, both of these are a good year or more away) will take in Flash's script engine which also does JIT. What that mean, assuming I'm reading the tea leaves correctly, is that FF4 will have much faster Javascript.

The moral of the story... please keep up with the browser version recently and in the future. After a long time, they each have major reasons why the new versions are of value. Starting today with FF2 and IE7.

PS: The 800,000,000 post is waiting for an event coming up soon... It will make sense when you read it...

PPS: I'm writing in the v3.network54.com forums again about specific v3 features...

N54/Steven Roussey/My Weblog

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My posts are going to be about numbers for the next few weeks. This one is 1300. That is the version that is currently deployed. I think the last time we mentioned such a version number it was 663.

So much goes under the hood and isn't seen -- it is frustrating to not see immediate results of your work. But it is needed if we want things to scale. We don't want the site to slow to a crawl when people start using it.

Then when we work on the user interface... well, lets just say that we wish Internet Explorer 6 would die a very quick death. For the love of God people, at least move up to version 7. And to all of you on Windows 98 (more than Mac & Linux combined, more than people on Vista): it was released 10 years ago!!! Drop those things out the nearest window! (Look down first!)

Oh, I got carried away on a tirade. Sorry. IE6 has so many bugs, that working around them for a feature can take longer than building the feature in the first place. Experience counts here, and we have better tools and ways of working around these things. But I have a dent in my forehead from all the banging against the nearest wall.

I had wanted the new v3 blog to be running before i started writing again, but i'll just move things when the time comes and just start writing now. Actually, I have been writing something for this blog, but I'm not done with it yet.

Its long. Its about frustration and delays. Its about you. It involves Hitler (seriously!). Its title: 800,000,000.

N54/Steven Roussey/My Weblog

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Today we are making public an alpha version of what v3 forums can look like at http://v3.network54.com/. It is essentially a v3 support site built using v3. Go, have a look, come back.

Why are we calling it v3 and v2? Well, mostly since we have been calling it v3 here at Network54 for some time. Last year we scratched the v2 code and moved it to another base and have called it v3 ever since. There are many benefits to the change in the base code, which we become evident as time moves forward, but it did set us back a bit. We still have some v2 code to move over to the v3 platform. It has become easier and easier to do.

The theme for the V3 support forums is very clean with lots of features hidden in menus. For those that like icons and links everywhere, don’t worry, we’re working on such a theme as well. It will have so many icons and links and stuff that no one will notice if you have a brand new forum with no content.

The login system there is separate from the normal one, and the logins you create there won’t be kept around when the temporary support site is eventually removed. So you will need to create a new one. Once you do, you will also be able to see hidden forums that show what our todo lists are for the next couple of months.

Again, not all features are there. Some are done but we won’t show them until the real release date, many are half done, and some only partially, and it depends on the feature on whether you’ll be able to see it at this site.

Please give us feedback, and especially let us find and fix the bugs that might be lying around.

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 OK, its been a while I know.... Here is a feature I added this week that some of you have asked for:

In the first week of September I'm going to write a series about how the color/style/theme stuff is done. So in September, I'll be looking for some volunteers with design sense!

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Someone out there might not like it, but most of us won't morn its demise. The message editor is dead!

Long live the message editor! Well, sort of.

Most people still want to be able to delete multiple threads at a time. Now you can do that right where you started -- in forum's home index page.

You'll just click the thread icons on the left of the table to select the threads (they turn redish in this style), and then go to the menu at the bottom to do an operation on all of them.

This is part of our effort to make things easier and take less mouse clicks.

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Since it's been a while since we've posted anything about V2, I thought I'd add a little bit on the File Upload feature that we've implemented in V2 of our software.

One of the things that we've noticed that people use a lot in forums is the ability to post files and images. You may have noticed recently that we added support (in V1) for image uploading via Photobucket. And Network54 has always had support for image uploading (via Realms) since 1999.

Of course, in 1999 it was the coolest feature ever. But it's 2006, and file uploading in V1 is a little clunky (not to mention an IE only feature). So, we took out all of the clunkiness and tried to make it as simple as possible for V2. Just for definition purposes, "clunky" here means too many mouse clicks. And by that definition, the Realm/Browser feature in V1 for uploading images is clunky.

So, this is the upload panel for V2:


Clicking the "Browse" button will pull up a file selection box like you would normally see. And here's where the good stuff happens. Once you've selected the file, the upload process happens automatically.


Once the file is uploaded, it's right there. No page refresh, no V1 type browser:


Of course, you can also upload multiple files/images:


All of this happens asynchronously... which means you can be typing away while your multiple files are uploading. So we took the multi+ clicks from the current V1 way of uploading things and turned it into two clicks.

Like Steve said before, "Should make things faster and easier"

-- Chris

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