Scripts.Indisguise.Org - a hobbyist's blog and scripts archive

Gabrielle wrote an Enthusiast anti-spam addon, which may be useful for those of you whose listings have been targeted by spambots. Please check it out if you have this problem, as this may work for you. Thanks so much to Gabrielle for doing this. <3

On the subject of Enthusiast, I would like to assure everybody that I have not “abandoned ship”. Believe you me, I’ve been through a lot because of Enthusiast, from disgruntled users who swear at me or my script, to people who have ripped my script and claimed it as their own. Yes, I have thought of “abandoning ship” plenty of times, and I suppose this might keep happening far into the future.

But I haven’t thrown in the towel just yet.

That doesn’t mean, however, that everything will be oh-so-fine and dandy and scripts will get chugged out of this scripts archive/tech blog at a steady pace. I wish I could, but there are only 24 hours a day, and seven days a week. I am no longer a college student, as the case was when I started Enthusiast all those years ago and virtually no one knew about it.

(I started to break down my time in an attempt to show just how scrapped for time I am, but I decided not to let it go that far.)

Enthusiast is not the only thing I have to put my time on. I have three blogs, and none of them even get updated as regularly as I like. My first love is creative writing, but I can’t even allot proper time for that. If you look at my fanlistings, a whole chunk of them haven’t even had new layouts in a year, some of them over two! I’ve even relegated to using layouts made by others in my journal (and maybe others) in an attempt to cut down on whatever coding I need to do. I’m a developer/designer, coding is what I do, but I can’t have time to whip up a quick CSS file to customize my own things. How sad is that?

Enthusiast is not the only thing I want to do. I have three scripts I want to create, one script that desperately needs a revamp (and I mean really desperately, but guess what? Enth development is still ranked higher), and I have a couple of others (featured here) that needs an update sometime soon. They’re all competing for attention, and I’m trying to manage it all, along with my work as a Yahoo, the little things we need to do daily so that we continue living, take care of my health, interact with the people around me.

That said, Enthusiast is important to me. I don’t think any one of you who are using it can claim that Enthusiast is more important to them than it is to me. It is important to you only so far as it helps you maintain your fanlistings, but Enth as an entity by itself is useless to you. You’re free to move to other scripts if you find Enthusiast lacking, I’m not stopping you.

To those of you who have shown me support, who help others with their Enthusiast installations, who have donated a little bit to my tip jar for my efforts…I thank you, from the bottom of my heart. Your show of support does not go unnoticed, and they continue to fuel the work here when times are tough. <3

So last night, armed with my nifty new font, I decided I’d get a move on with the next top-level version of Enthusiast. (Yes, I’ve started working on Enthusiast 4.0.)

(For those of you interested in it, it will probably be slow going, as whatever free time I have needs to be spent juggling between rest/recreation/social/family/other hobbies… and because I’m putting in a lot more effort in the backbone, and in usability.)

One thing I’ve always believed in is that you only get as good as what you actually do. That one might read a lot of tech blogs, a lot of white papers, a lot of those hifalutin framework blueprints… but if you don’t get down and dirty with code, you can’t expect to get better. It’s a given that the first few codes you churn out will be riddled with flaws. That’s normal, but that’s better than never getting over that simply because “I can’t fully understand OOP yet, I need to read more about it”. Ugh, get a grip, and get on with playing with code.

My first PHP project, way back when I was doing self-studying, was actually the precursor to Enthusiast. It was the script that handled my then-fanlisting, Bubblegum Crisis. After it was working, I moved on to the first “system” — an admin tool for handling my directory for NeoPets galleries. I actually put up that site, got a pretty nice following for it, and then when I weaned off NeoPets, I shut it down.

And then I started working on Enthusiast (the single-fanlisting version).

Without these first projects, I’d never have learned PHP. And this time, with PHP4’s End of Life looming in the distance, Enthusiast will be bringing me forward to PHP5. OOP, Exceptions, and many newfangled stuff in PHP isn’t new to me, but it’s been a while since I’ve actually handled PHP code continuously (almost eight months–the same time I’ve been with Yahoo! as a frontend engineer). I will be getting personal with a lot of these new things, in order to do what I need for it to do. And that’s quite exciting.

For anyone who’s thinking of learning PHP, the best way to learn really is by doing something you’re passionate about using PHP. I was passionate about NeoPets galleries; I was passionate about fanlistings. The passion drives you forward, and that’s a great thing to have.

I will probably be blogging here occasionally about new things I find out while working with PHP, or thoughts on development in general — what would you like to hear about?

Happy, hopeful new year, everyone!

Life is just barely settling down after the holidays, and I’ve been meaning to work on Enthusiast for a while now, but kind of endlessly putting it off. I want that to change, but to change that, I’ll have to do a bit of reassessment, and to pinpoint why I have lost the thrill and joy of working on Enthusiast.

It won’t mean it will be gone, as even if I feel rather unmotivated to work on Enth, I still love it and want to bring it to the next level. I’ll just have to figure out what the next level is.

Just in case it helps others out there, here’s something I’ve started reading that I feel is helping me a lot: Getting Real. A lot of things won’t be applicable to Enth (I don’t think suddenly scaling down features is an option) but I’m trying to figure out what to do with the stuff I’m reading and taking in.

The 3.1.3 bugfix/delayed feature release of Enthusiast is out! You can either pick up a complete installation zip or get an upgrade zip if you’re already running Enthusiast 3.1.2. Please run the upgrade file (upgrade_312_313.php) after overwriting the contents of your Enthusiast installation folder/admin panel with the updated files from the zip.

Changes for this version include:

• Allowed setup of mailing mechanism in admin panel (via either native PHP mail() command or PEAR mail)
• Made site include scripts compliant with doctypes XHTML 1.0 Strict and HTML 4.01 Strict
• Added Enthusiast version printout include
• Removed use of short tags to cater to more server setups
• Fixed minor bug in statistics template that causes blank/nonexistent fields to show up
• Added check to ensure pagination parameter is a digit

Please let me know if you run into any bugs, but support and troubleshooting should continue to be at the CodeGrrl forums.