FLOG

Wha..? I followed the instructions and what did I get for my trouble?

"This is a private video. If you have been sent this video, please make sure you accept the sender's friend request."

LAME!

Also: nary a Pepper video in there.

Dude, you're already a friend, aren't you? I'll admit that I don't fully get it. Well, try again. If it never works maybe I'll just make it public. It's not THAT bad.

As for the lack of Pepper vids: check back later. For some reason uploaded videos sometimes take unaccountably long to "process" and become available.

Yeah, I think you are my friend, but I am not your friend yet...? DON'T YOU LIKE ME? *sob*

Maketh it public, so sayeth ME.

I AM DURNK!

No, seriously, it should have taken that long to "process." Try it again, buster.

Dang, I haven't seen the three new-ish Flog posts because I didn't do the reload trick until now.

Anyway, I'm thinking of joining YouTube so I can move some videos off of my server and not have to worry about them taking up space or sucking up bandwidth if for some strange reason I get linked to by Boing Boing. Because, you know, videos of riding the cable car in San Francisco are so awesome!

Yeah, this reload thing is kinda chappin' my cheeks. I think it's something to do with the phooeyhoo.com server. Just hit shift-reload whenever you visit the phooeyhoo.com infortainment family.

As for YouTube: you should join. But I'm not exactly impressed. It's not as well-oiled a machine as Flickr is by any stretch of the imagination. Considering the way it fucks up video files when it compresses them, its incoherent "friends" set-up, and the fact that it can sometimes take a full day for an uploaded video to actually become available, I wouldn't look to it as the end-all, be-all of putting your vids online. But hey, it's free.

The problem is that most browsers default to not checking static pages (that is pages ending in .html or .htm) everytime for the newest version if the page is already in the cache. See here: http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t23441.html.

The options are to change your default pages from .html/.htm to .php or .asp thereby telling the browser that your page is dynamically generated and, hence, must be refreshed everytime on load (as in the main phooeyhoo.com pages) or to write a piece of JavaScript to force your page to be reloaded every time it's loaded. The first may not be recommended because your archives will also have a .php or .asp extension and hence anyone who has linked to you in the past will be bum out of luck. There are plenty of free JavaScript codes on the web that will do the latter.

Alternatively, you could tell people who visit your site to change their browser settings of "Check for newer versions of stored pages" to "Every visit to the page" as alluded to by the movable type forums.

Done! I've written in a piece of JavaScript that automatically reloads the page every time. Tested with Firefox 1.5+ and Internet Explorer 6. Somebody with Netscape will have to check that it works with Netscape. Duh!

Ironically, ya'll will have to reload the page one last time so that your "cached" version includes the piece of JavaScript!

Systems Administrator, you truly are King of Kings.

I realized that last script was sending the date and time through the URL so the flog main page began becoming http://flog.phooeyhoo.com/?412312388235789237592374832.

Then I remembered that you can just set a META tag telling the browser never to cache the page, hence, forcing the page to be loaded fresh every time. All that JavaScript for nothing. You win again Ockam's razor!

Seriously, this has been an interesting development because it's still true that browsers treat static .htm and .html pages like they did 10 years ago. They load a copy from the cache because it's faster and that made a lot of difference in 1996 when web pages were rarely updated and most people were surfing at 9800 baud. (Come to think of it, this new reloading will probably wreck havoc on you when you move and have to live with a modem connection. Welcome back 1996!) It's probably time for a phooeyhoo.com article on antiquated web practices that still haunt us today.

Anyway, let me know if things don't work out the way they should.

Systems Administrator, you are awesome. If only you were in charge of my laptop support, too.

Back on topic: my embarrassing video is now public.