denniland.com

What’s Wrong With the Search Engines?

August 17th, 2004. Published under Games, Techie Stuffs. No Comments.

Today I checked this site access log. Great, the Google bot finally showed up in the list. Then I performed a search for this site on Google. Darn, still no results. Maybe Google had not indexed my site yet. At least Yahoo and Altavista already did. Well I’ll check to make sure. What the!!! My site disappeared from their listing. How could that happen? Arrrggghhh… I didn’t do anything stupid to this site lately but why the heck did the search engines not list my site? Bah, I couldn’t find any clue :(.

This site gets slower, it must be because I write blogs almost everyday. My blogs are all shown at the homepage so it will take a while to load the whole page. Do search engines hate this? Well I hate this, maybe they do too. Now I display only the last seven blogs at the homepage. It should be a lot of faster now to load the page. The older blogs can still be reached from the Archieved blogs section, so it won’t be a matter. I hope the search engines will like this new design.

There was no badminton practice today as the gym was closed temporarily. We are celebrating the Indonesian independance day today so most activities are suspended. It should be a holiday too but my office moved it to yesterday so I got to work today. No badminton meant more time to play RO :D. My magician was up for 6 levels today from 26 to 32. Not bad. I did the first few levels solo. Upon reaching level 30, however, things started to move very slowly, so I tried to make a small group to help me level faster.

My first group-mate today was an archer. He was at some levels below me but it was really not a big deal. I only needed someone to hold back the monsters for a second while my magician was casting his deadly spells. Although the magicians’ spells are so powerful, they need time to cast. If the magician is hit during the casting, the spell will be cancelled. That’s why I needed somebody to cover me. Later the archer introduced me to his friend, a thief (not a real thief of course, it is a profession in RO like archer or magician). We teamed up together and kicked the monsters’ asses.

Everything was great until an acolyte offered her service. My teammates gladly welcomed her as she could heal their wounds. I personally had no need for acolytes since magicians are seldom to get hit. Unfortunately, the acolyte had a bad intention. She tried to break our team apart. She only healed the thief’s wound. She even tried to seduce the thief to leave the party and started to go duet. Her sheme succeeded as the thief followed her will. This made the archer really upset and he started to bother them by kill-stealing the monsters they were engaging. The thief didn’t like the action and they started to insult each other. It wouldn’t do any good to me so I decided to leave the broken group and started soloing.

Some times later the archer asked me to rejoin because the acolyte had left. It looked like the archer and the thief had been in peace once again. Hahaha, I know it’s only a game, but it’s really funny when the emotions are involved.

Site Redesign

August 4th, 2004. Published under CSS, Techie Stuffs. 1 Comment.

Today, I redesigned this site. The title bar were face-lifted. The sections menu were moved from the left pane to a navigation bar just below the title bar. Blogs page was completely rebuilt. I tried to create a tableless layout and fortunately it did work. I also fixed some CSS-related problems that prevented this site from being viewed correctly under Netscape or Mozilla. That was a lot of work and I spent the whole night just to do it. Why the heck do the browsers behave differently? It really pisses me off and maybe other Web developers. Why do the f***ing browsers makers not follow the established standard. Each created its own standard. Could it be called a standard anyway?

Shirley (the cool one) wanted to add a tag board (a.k.a. shoutbox) to her blog site. I showed her a free one but she’s not satisfied because it was shared with other users. As usual, in an uncontrollable environment like that, people could say anything. Some just wanna say hi to others. Some promoted their sites or products. Some “generously” gave the urls to the sites containing pictures of beautiful girls that unfortunately (or fortunately) were naked. She obviously didn’t want her tag board was filled with such things. In order to get your own tag board, however, you must host it on your own site so you can have a separate database. Unfortunately, blogspot doesn’t have server-side scripting support, yet. So she asked if I can put the script on my site and she could link her site to mine. No big deal, done in less than five minutes. But still, this girl wasn’t quite satisfied yet. She didn’t like the color what-so-ever. She told me that she would change it by her self. But the moment we’re going to go home, she asked me if I could do the favor. She thought that she could bribe me with a “cakue”. Well, she’s damn wrong, I’ll do it for at least five “cakue”s.

Blogging lately became more and more popular among my colleagues. They even tried to design the pages manually though there had been many templates available already. Recently Shierly (the little one) and most noticeably Carla were really in to designing their blog sites. I’m looking forward to the release gals.

The best things in the world are really free

August 1st, 2004. Published under Daily Journal, Games, Techie Stuffs. 4 Comments.

Just a week ago, when browsing the Webhostingtalk forum for some eCommerce recommendations for my current project, Admirology, I found some people talking about the best free Web hosting. I tried some of their suggestions and found one that is interesting, 100Webspace. After a common signup procedure, I got what I wanted: a generous 100Mb space, adequate PHP+MySQL support, an FTP account, SSH telnet, the awesome CPanel, and many others, for free and without that annoying ads. This is so damn cool but I did have bad experience with some free hosting services before: f2s and spaceport. The former had its free service discontinued. The latter were extremely slow and troublesome. I hope the service will last for a long time enough, at least until I can spare some money for a paid hosting.

What now? I got a free hosting, what would I put there? Yes, I had a Web site already. It was created when I’m in college to host my assignments. Okay, just upload it to the new host. Great, it worked. Ummm… when was it last updated? May 12, 2003? What the heck. It is the Internet. How could you abandon a Web site for more than a year? Leave your site without updates for a week, your visitors will get bored. Leave it for a month, you’re dead. What’s the big deal? I didn’t make money from my site. It was only a personal site for hosting my college project. I don’t care if it’s alive or dead. So why did you signup to the new host at the first place? Why did you bother, stupid morron. No offense, I’m speaking to my self. Te he he… I recently found that speaking to my self sometimes give a pleasure. Oh no!!!, Gollum you be responsible for this.

It’s been a while since I write my last blog. Actually, I didn’t call it a blog. I used to call it “site news”. Since some of my colleagues recently get addicted to blogging, I decide to start writing again. My old site had no feature for writing blogs. I used to do it manually. Composed the html files, uploaded, edited, uploaded, added, uploaded,… Hei, were you leaving in caves? Gosh, today everything is automated and instant. Need writing blogs, blogger.com will take care of every blogging thing for you. Wait, you had a free host already and you are a programmer, aren’t you. Why the heck do you need blogger.com anyway? Get your lazy butt up and start to do it yourself.

Phew, it took me about four days to finish this new site. Okay, I lied. It is not finished, yet. But at least I can write my blogs and others can add comments to my blogs. Who cares about other things.

Ragnarok Online was never attractive to me although thousands of players played it everyday. Being an online game means that you must stay connected to the f***ing Internet just to play the f***ing game. Is it enough? No, you still have to pay a weekly or monthly submission fee to login to the Ragnarok Online server in order to play the game. How ridiculous. There are still many great games you can play for free. I’m not talking about pirated games, maybe I’ll talk about it someday. But wait, Ragnarok Online Indonesia announced that it had a new server and will made it available to the public for free on July 28th, 2004. Did I hear “free”? Wow, that’s a news. So what are you waiting for, I signed up and started to play on my free time, he he.

Hey, you always talk about free stuffs, are you really that poor? Perhaps, but believe me or not, the best things in the world are really free. The air we breathe and the water we drink are free. Okay, we must pay for clean water these days. Malaysians and Singaporeans no longer can breathe fresh air because of the smoke from the Indonesia’s forest fire. But they are given for free from the very first time. It is our responsible to keep them free and healthy. I’m not an environmentalist so I dare not to speak more than this. What is the best thing in the world for you? Can you really get it for free? Yes I can. My salvation is the best thing and I get it freely just because Jesus has paid it for me with His blood. For that I can only offer my eternal gratitude.