newenigma

I have been working on a new design/layout for the site and below is a preview of what it may end up looking like. It's not finished yet and there is a possibility it may end up looking nothing like the preview, but for now this is what the preview looks like. The page shown in the preview is the albums index page.

Hopefully, the new design will be ready soon. I am hoping to have the site running under the new design in the next month or two.

Another minor update that has been done is to the accessibility of the site. I have added an icon to appear after any links which open up a new window to an external site. An example is shown here: Google

Another update has also been made to the login page. This will now redirect you to the page you came from when you clicked the login link. So for example, if you clicked on an enigma question link and were not logged in to the site, the page would provide a login link to click. After clicking this and successfully logging in, you will get redirected back to the enigma question that you were originally on. Before this was implemented, the login page always took you back to the home page, so this change should improve the user experience.

A recent comment posted in a response to an enigma question mentioned information on how to post images in the response. This particular response mentioned that only .jpeg images seemed to be allowed. I was pretty sure that .gif images were also allowed, so I went and checked the source code just to be sure. The actual allowed image formats according to the source code is: jpg, jpeg, gif, png. So at work, using Firefox browser, I posted a response to this, and included a .gif image in the response. I was able to see this image and so presumed that all was working as expected.

When I returned home and viewed the page from my own computer, I saw that the image I posted before was not being displayed, and instead an image about not hotlinking was displayed. No problem, I found another .gif image on the internet, and edited my response to include the new image. I previewed the response and all displayed ok, so I posted it. It was then I saw that the image was not being displayed.

3 or 4 hours later, I believed I had found a fix for it which was adding a blank url attribute to the body tag into the style sheet for the site. The image then displayed on the page and I thought it was all done. Unfortunately not. I went to a different enigma question page and added an image into a response, and previewed it. The image would not display.

I then removed all the background image urls from the stylesheet and the image then displayed. I also noticed that if somebody had already posted some images in a response which were displaying ok, if I edited the page and added an image above that response, then the image in the response would not display. It seemed as though the second image that appeared on the page would not display, but the first and any others after the second image would. This is the strangest bug I have ever seen regarding web browser rendering. Anyway, I put the style sheet back to how it was, and tried to do some more searching on the net. I came across a post mentioning Adblock Plus. I have this installed as an addon for Firefox, however, according to it, it says it was blocking zero items on my page, plus Firebug was showing no problems at all with the request and the response for the image that was not showing. I disabled Adblock Plus for my domain, and refreshed the page. The image now displayed, I refreshed lots more times just to make sure, and every time it displayed. I went to a few more enigma questions and previewed adding a repsonse with an image, and it all seemed to display correctly.

The browser I was using was the latest version of Firefox on the 3.0 series, which I think was 3.013. I downloaded Firefox 3.5 and installed that, and then tested again, with Adblock Plus enabled again. Images are displaying. I am still a bit worried that the underlying issue may still exist, and that some time in the future, I'm going to try and post an image, and it's not going to display. My concern is based on the fact that the problem disappeared when removing background images from the stylesheet, or even disabling all styles on the page.

I may start looking into getting a new design for the site, which will use a new stylesheet, as I am convinced that the issue is related somehow to the style sheet. However, for now, if images are not displaying, it appears upgrading to the latest version of Firefox should fix it.

If anyone experiences the issue of an image not displaying, please let me know. Information on the browser you use, what page you were trying to post on and the URL of the image would be very helpful. I can't promise that I'll be able to fix it though.

It is now possible to receive any site updates by following my account on Twitter. The following are currenty being added to Twitter automatically:

• New enigma question posted
• New movie added
• New album added
• New TV show added

It is now possible to browse the enigma questions alphabetically by title, and by enigma author.

To browse by title, go to http://www.newenigma.com/enigma/browse.php and then click on any of the links from A to Z.

To view all enigma questions by a particular author, you can click on the author name on either the main enigma index page, or on the individual enigma page for a particular enigma number.

I had been planning to implement pagination quite a long time ago, almost since the site began. Over the weekend I managed to sit down and implement it. It's almost completed now and being used in almost all the places it is required. The only part where it is still required is for the enigma comments. I will try and get this done over the next week, as there are a lot of other changes that need doing on that page first. The blog section also needs updating to use the new system, as it currently uses its own one which was not written by me, and is not very efficient in its design.

Please let me know via the contact form or commenting on this post if you spot any issues with it, or if you spot a place where it's not being used and you think it would benefit from using it.

Here is another last post of the year! Haven't done many posts this year so thought I'd do one now. Need to check that adding a new post actually still works!

The site seems to be running pretty smoothly and quickly. There hasn't been anything added to the error logs in quite a while which is good. There are a number of code improvements that still need to be done. It's just a question of finding the time to sit down and tackle them, as some of them are not simple tasks.

Anyway, I thought I'd post up some of my favourite TV shows that I've been watching this year, since last year I did movies and music albums.

• Prison Break
• The Unit
• Flight Of The Conchords
• Leverage
• Burn Notice

The site should be running a little bit quicker now, although the speed difference is probably unnoticable. I have finally got around to caching some of the common data, so that the pages don't have to hit the database as frequently. There were a few pages that were hitting the database over 10 times, and these have been cut down to 1 or 2 times now. There is still a little bit more work to do on this but it is 95% done.

On a seperate note, I have decided to store all times as UTC time (or GMT time) in the database and retrieve them as they are. Previously, the time was stored as the server time, which was 4 hours different to GMT. However, this caused many problems with archiving the blog posts by month, and with the issue of daylight savings time. All times displayed on the site should now be in UTC time, and any bits of text like 'Posted 2 hours ago' are based on UTC time.

For those who are interested, the site has had a redesign with a new stylesheet. Unregistered users viewing the site will see the new design. Existing users can select the new design from their profile page by changing the stylesheet to 'default' in the dropdown box.

The site is also now making use of Apache mod rewrite for the enigma, albums and tv section, so that the url's look cleaner and are more search engine friendly.

It's been quite a long time since the last post, so thought I would add one more just before the year is out.

Recommended movies of 2007

• The Kingdom
• 3:10 To Yuma
• Shoot 'Em Up
• The Brave One
• Death Sentence
• Day Zero
• Eagle vs Shark
• Surf's Up
• Zodiac

Recommended albums of 2007

• Jimmy Eat World - Chase This Light
• Alter Bridge - Blackbird
• Serj Tankian - Elect The Dead
• City Sleeps - Not An Angel
• Sunset Rubdown - Random Spirit Lover

Thanks to those who continue to provide their responses to the enigma questions. For those wondering why their wasn't a question posted last week, New Scientist has a break over the new year period, so there was no issue of the magazine last week. I'm not sure if there will be an issue this week either, but normally it's only a week that is missed out.

You can now preview your enigma response before submitting it. This should help with testing out any special text formatting, especially when using the [code] tags.

Unlike many preview buttons, this does not rely on Javascript, so is usable by everyone. Of course this means it will cause more strain on the server, but I'm sure the server can cope. However, if the site were to have hundreds of users posting at the same time, then it may become a problem, but I think for now we are safe.