On Monday we presented a talk about Siafoo to the Linux User Group of Davis. It went quite well, nobody fell asleep or walked out, and we received some really good feedback. The talk had two parts: What Siafoo does and How it works. Most of the information about Siafoo's purpose and features is contained within the about page but if you are interested in knowing a bit about the technologies Siafoo uses check out the PDF slides. Also if you happen to live in the Davis area we encourage you to check out LUGOD and attend some of their monthly talks. Of course if you run a User Group or club and want us to swing by and feed you some Siafoo propaganda contact us =)

On another note, the nodebox community brought to our attention that line endings for downloaded snippets were CR-LF (Windows style). The issue was caused by the fact that the internets use CR-LF as the standard line terminator. To remedy this all snippets are now stored with LF (Unix style) line endings. You should not see a difference when copy/pasting from the page but all downloaded snippets will have Unix style line endings. Let us know if this is causing a problem. Next release we will start sending the correct MIME type for most languages which should allow your browser to correctly change the line endings to your native format. For more about the history of line endings check out Wikipedia

Also Siafoo now supports COBOL, thanks to Theo

Defcon is upon us, and I am there [allegedly] to learn some things that would prevent Siafoo from getting 0wnx0red.

Anyway if you have made the trek here, be safe (make sure you turn off your windows file sharing), and enjoy.

Also because of the usual pre-Defcon paranoia we realized that the Create Account links on the site were not SSL! We remedied the problem and suggest you go change your password... just in case.

Oh and if you noticed a weird FF2 glitch today, it's now been fixed =)

A few weeks ago, during the last release, we upgraded Siafoo to Genshi 0.5, a version that promised to deliver more speed using static include caching and a C-based text processing module. It was fairly obvious that the site had gotten a lot faster but we didn't know how fast until we looked at the Google Webmaster tools crawl statistics. Among the statistics provided is the Time spent downloading a page:

Average time (in ms) Googlebot spent downloading a page

The sharp drop off at the end of August coincides with the Siafoo R8 release and upgrade to Genshi 0.5. Note that the drop off can not be account for by a difference in bandwidth or traffic to the server as our burst-transfer rate has been the same and the traffic to the site has been steadily increasing. As far as the two peaks, the first (May) peak was probably because David's Python Tips, Tricks, and Hacks article hit the front pages of reddit, ycombinator, and delicious, the second (June) peak was probably because the tubes were clogged... or possibly because of solar flare radiation.

In other news, next week is dedicated to BogoSort implementations. I thought I'd get the ball rolling with a simple Python implementation.

We've racked our brains, developed algorithms, ran complex simulations, and consulted world class scientists [1] all in an attempt to solve the great Siafoo Mystery of 2008. The mystery is that although Siafoo has acquired dozens of new user accounts over the past couple of weeks, none of the new users have shared any source code... or even rated any of the existing code.

This is confusing for various reasons, among them is the fact that people actually took the time to fill out the create account form, solve the captcha, verify their e-mail address and login to the site... but did not take advantage of all the cool features it has to offer.

Although neither of us is superstitious we are going to attempt to break the dry spell by offering $1, that's right one US dollar [2], to the owner of the first legitimate snippet that shows up in the recent activity stream after this news item [3].

This could be the actual dollar you receive

We want to let you know about some cool tools we've created recently.

First of all, we have new demos for the syntax highlighter, and reST renderer. If you've been avoiding posting a snippet or article because of you feel like you don't know what you're doing, here is a chance to play around without the risk of messing anything up. And if you're undecided about joining Siafoo, you can try out some of the functionality here without creating an account first. Both tools will load example data so that you can simply press the 'Render' button and get results.

You can also use these demos to create content for your own site. Using the reST Demo you can generate math expressions, flow graphs, and charts that you can then save as images. Similarly, you can use the Code Highlighting Demo to render an HTML version of the code.

Additionally, we implemented a cool Google Gadget that will let you enjoy the fortunes on your iGoogle homepage, blog, or website.

All of these tools will work for those without a Siafoo account, so feel free to share the links with your friends.

We've just updated Siafoo! This update was more of a 'soft launch' (insert joke here) -- we actually did the update Monday night, didn't tell anyone about it, and spent all of yesterday fixing bugs and writing help pages. And then we were too tired last night to write this news item : ).

The first chunks of newness (is that a word?) fall into the category of "Things you can do with reStructured Text". You can now put LaTeX Style Math and Graphs directly inside any reST. This means that articles, descriptions, and anything else that uses reST can now have math like or graphs like:

Thought I meant the other type of graphs? We also support Charts -- bar, line, x/y plots, and more -- in all the same places. So you can easily do something like this:

The second chunk of newness is a vastly improved Full-Screen Editor:

The editor lets you get an instantaneous preview of the code or reST you're working on without losing your place or undo history. It also lets you indent and dedent blocks of code... no more hammering the space bar!

Adding to the barrage of new help pages (most of the links I've mentioned so far are help pages), we have a redesigned About Siafoo page to show you Siafoo's coolest features... even if you've been using Siafoo for a while, I recommend you take a look -- there is probably a lot you didn't even know existed.

We've also improved searching throughout the site (especially the Siafoo Help pages) and made everything a lot faster. As always, for a list of everything that is new you can check out the What's New page.

I think that's it for now... if you have any feedback we are always happy to hear from you. And I really mean that - we've added a lot of cool features and tried to design the site for both you and us, but unless you tell us what you want the site will just be designed for us. As cliché as it sounds, we want to make sure the site works for you.

Since the update stream does not [currently] display information about updated help pages and since you probably never got around to reading the reST help page, I wanted to give you a heads up that the guide has been updated to include a brief list of the cooler features of our customized reST formatter.

Check it out and feel free to send us feature suggestions and feedback about my grammatical and/or spelling errors.

Since David didn't actually mean to post this news item... and apparently we didn't implement news item deletion I thought I'd hijack this post and write about some new things we are working on...

For the next Siafoo release, R8, we have implemented:

• A much better full screen reST / source code editor
• LaTeX equations
• Dot based flow charts
• An XMLRPC interface for Siafoo (with a pre-alpha quality eclipse plugin)

Also did you know you can put nifty charts, like this one, in your reST:

More on sausage dog aggression

See about reST for more on reST and Siafoo

Stou

Apparently a crawler went crazy today and decided to download every single page on Siafoo... at full speed. This caused a huge amount of traffic and made the site painfully slow. We have made some attempts to bring the speed of the site back to normal.

Every once in a while I pray to the computing gods for a configuration setting (for whatever program) along the lines of MemoryLeaks=Off... Well today my prayers were answered and I discovered just such a configuration parameter for PostgreSQL: SearchSuckiness=Less. It's not actually called that but it might as well be, because it's effect was exactly that. If you have been using the Siafoo search box or have added us to your browser search engine list you should notice more items in your search results.

For the technically minded (that's you), the configuration option's purpose was to set the default text search language to English instead of nothing allowing the stemmer to correctly do it's job and change words like colors and colored into color, thus providing you with useful search results.

Makes sense? If not, check out the text search manual for an in depth explanations of the capabilities and operation of full text search in PostgreSQL.

Wow it looks like Siafoo users are early adopters... over the last month 36% of you that used Firefox have used Firefox 3 to visit the site! And the final version just came out a few days ago.

(Blue is Firefox 2.0.0.14, Green is Firefox 3.0, other colors are other Firefox 2 versions)

We haven't really done any UI testing with FF3; the betas had some weird rendering bugs but a cursory examination seems to show all of those now gone. But if you notice any weird visual bugs with Firefox 3 let us know via the Feedback link at the bottom of the page. Of course if you notice anything weird in any browser let us know too ;)

(Note that IE6 won't render the site quite as well as other browsers; we just don't think it's worth it to put the work in for a very-non-standards compatible browser with a shrinking user base... but for the 3% of you that use IE6, still let us know if anything is so bad as to be unusable.)

That's all for now.

Cheers,

David

Hi all... if you've been watching closely you might have noticed that pretty much everyone has a full name displayed now, not just a login.

We found an innocuous (but annoying) bug in the way your names were being saved in the database (not your first name or last name, but the derived string that appears to other people). Basically if you created an account in the last while, your "derived name" was just set to your login name no matter if you entered a first and last name or not.

Do not despair, though, the bug is fixed and the world is safe again. The default is to show logged-in users your first and last name; if you'd like to change this you can go to http://www.siafoo.net/my/options#general.

We finally "got around" to releasing the new version of the site. The changelog is pretty short for the amount of work we put in, but isn't that always the case.

To give you a sense of the heroic effort that went into the current release take a look at the changelog for ticket #110 (Homepage design) a ticket that has been with us since the very first Siafoo milestone ("Internal" ~10 months ago). We sort of put off design and appearance stuff for last. Sorry.

Changed 10 months ago by stou

• priority changed from major to critical
• type changed from task to enhancement
• milestone changed from Internal to Invite Only

Changed 10 months ago by stou

• component changed from Core to Users

Changed 10 months ago by david

Homepage should also probably check for new messages and subscriptions on load.

Changed 6 months ago by stou

• version changed from 1.0.alpha to 1.0.beta
• milestone changed from R1 (Invite Only) to R2 (Invite Only)

Changed 6 months ago by stou

• description modified (diff)
• summary changed from Prettify/Clean user homepage to Design user homepage

Changed 6 months ago by david

• milestone changed from R2 (Invite Only) to R3 (Invite Only)

Changed 5 months ago by stou

• type changed from enhancement to appearance

Changed 5 months ago by david

• owner changed from david to stou

Stou, I'm throwing this back to you so you can make the mock-up

Changed 5 months ago by stou

• milestone changed from R3 (Invite Only) to R4 (Invite Only)

Changed 4 months ago by stou

• milestone changed from R4 (Invite Only) to R5 (Invite Only)

Basic homepage is done

Changed 3 months ago by stou

• severity set to Important
• milestone changed from R5 (Invite Only) to R6 (Invite Only)

Changed 2 months ago by stou

• milestone changed from R6 (Invite Only) to R7 (Invite Only)

Changed 6 days ago by stou

• status changed from new to assigned

Changed 3 days ago by stou

• status changed from assigned to closed
• resolution set to fixed

You've probably noticed that we've really improved the look of the site. So, if you've been waiting to invite your friends, now is the time to do it! And thanks for sticking with us, and for helping to draw other people into our web ;) (pun not actually intended).

On an unrelated note, sorry about the double update email... we must have accidently double-clicked on the send link or something.

It's still leap day, and since it only happens once every four years we wanted to celebrate by releasing a new version of Siafoo! [1]

You'll notice a few changes around the site. The home and messages pages have been redesigned. You can now rate things with a cool slider bar thing. And, we also have a new type of object: the Algorithm. For more about what's changed you can check out our What's New page.

Oh yeah and... First news item ever! (We also have an RSS feed for the news.)

That's all we've got for now. Check back often :-)

Stou and David