Thanks for the all the "watch out" PMs I've been getting in regards to this page http://z13.invisionfree.com/Duck_Divis ion/index.php?showtopic=1047 and my account getting "hacked".

The simple fact is that if someone were going to do something -- BESIDES a lot of needless photoshop work -- they would have done it as soon as they had access. They wouldn't wait around and give me time to change my password.

Speaking of passwords, I'm surprised to hear that a lot of people don't change their passwords regularly or at the very least have different passwords for different situations. I think I've had the same 10-digit password for my main email account for the past 10 years, but that's ALL I use it for. That way, I can be sure to get any password-change confirmation emails without them getting intercepted.

Anyway, it's all safe around here. And if it weren't, we always have our site backups. :)

As many of you know, my friend Nathan is making a documentary about the Internet.

To help finance this, he is selling limited edition Alien Hominid plush toys to help him finance it.

Go help support his movie and grab one before they sell out!

http://www.newgrounds.com/store/produc t/alien-hominid-plush

They're painstakingly, lovingly, sweatingly (but hopefully not on the doll LOL) hand sewn, and ALL of the proceeds go towards the funding of his movie!

Man oh man, I spent weeks dreaming about today.

The idea was first mentioned as a "what if..." when we were discussing how Google sold out to gain market share in China. The idea snowballed from there: What would Newgrounds actually be like if it were run by Chinese officials? Now we get to find out.

Anyway, getting back to my main point: the new site skin. I'll admit, it's a little abrasive. As the guy behind all the CSS, I was a little annoyed when I had to sit down with the Chinese officials and listen to their ideas about a new color scheme. I hate to admit that it's growing on me but still I wish they listened to just a little more of my input. Would it kill them to allow a little blue or green somewhere? Hell, maybe even a little black. At any rate, the entire re-skin took me only 8 hours total, including a little back-and-forth on the approval process.

The other changes are trivial. A few restrictions on free speech for starters, which is perfect since were were looking for a reason to close down the BBS anyway. We're phasing it out slowly by allowing our new Chinese users to post there for a while but it'll soon be gone for good; I just wish the moderators hadn't leaked the story until we were ready to break it ourselves. Anyway, people can still post on their user pages of course since it's more of a private area, though we may still have to censor speech there too. We can't have Newgrounds users saying just any old thing they want or we might get in trouble. Also, many user page banners are offensive so we had to fix a small percentage of those as well.

One major upside is that the Newgrounds Chat is finally up and running. We're still approving people as they come in, and there's a bit of a backlog while the moderators approve comments, but it's a definite step in the right direction.

I'm probably most psyched to work with my good friend Xi-Jinping on his first Flash submission (now that he can finally see the site in China). He did almost all the work, but I did the voices. The guy has a sick sense of humor but he's right: life's too short to be worried about offending someone.

Speaking of which, it's a little disconcerting to me that Tom is going along with the new rules about adult submissions. There are some pretty funny movies that I can't watch right now, but Tom assures me it'll be for the best in the end. Plus, there doesn't seem to be too many people in the BBS complaining about the content restrictions anyway. I guess that means no-one has a real problem with the decision and I should just accept it already.

Well, hope everyone is as psyched about the new changes as I am!

OMG lets see how fast these babies go.

And I probably had more fun than I should have taking pictures of these things.

Josh and I were spied in P-Bot's forums today testing out his new formatting. Josh played the role of the feisty robot and I the moderator who eventually deleted the rogue thread. There's no way to *actually* test the automated post until it goes live at midnight, but everything checks out when we post it manually.

Wish the little guy luck. :)

We finally got around to including our newest staff to my favorite part of this site, the Staff Select.

Now Psychogoldfish and Rob have been officially welcomed to the team, and only about a year after the former started working with Newgrounds on a certain project that still isn't finished yet that I won't name...

Anyway, go check it out for yourself, help me proofread it for errors. And for those of you who are wondering, Ross wasn't entirely deleted from the staff but will live on in secret until the end of time or until he decides he'd enjoy commuting all the way to Philly again, whichever comes first. (I'm not holding my breath since he's got a pretty sweet thing going on up there in Hoboken.)

Of course, I don't deserve any of the credit for this fine piece of work. All I did is upload the beast, Stamper deserves all the credit.

While working out some IE styling issues for the new store (to be launched sometime this year), I stumbled across my user page in IE7 for the first time since... well since updating one of my userpage posts.

Apparently, the little blurb at the bottom of a post -- the little "Updated: 04/18/08 4:16 PM" -- still had a little bug associated with it. I only noticed it today because I normally use Firefox, but in IE7 only it pushed the tiled site background to the right, leaving a large dead space between the content and the background image.

The issue is fixed now, but was linked to the following style:

.commentlink .updated {
position: relative; /* Added 6/25: fixed HEADER SHIFT in IE7 */
max-width: 300px; /* Added 6/25: fixed HEADER SHIFT in IE7 */
font-size: 11px;
float: right;
color: #fff }

The fix as noted in the comments was technically working, but not to the extent it should have. Apparently, the greater the number I specify for max-width, the greater the width of the centered site-containing content box. The odd part is that it wasn't related to the width of the text at all. The text I had in there is well under 150 pixels. What's weirder is when I made the offending text longer, the amount it pushed out of its container was actually less.

Anyway, all I had to do is lower the max-width to 270px -- again, odd because the text is well within the specified maximum -- to have it look fine. Of course, this is until the text length changes or I view the same element in a different context elsewhere on the site. Then it's time to address this issue all over again.

If any of this is confusing, then good; because it sure the hell confuses me too. The moral of the story is that my secret to debugging CSS that otherwise works fine is to 1) quickly identify the offending tag -- my method of choice is to delete large chunks of HTML one by one until the page renders fine -- then 2) add a background color of red to see the area you're dealing with, then 3) change the shit out of your existing atrributes until you see noticeable change. Once you've done that, figuring out what you need to do to fix the problem is elementary.

Note that the steps I listed are for debugging "CSS that otherwise works fine". It's a lot of hard work to get the styles to look good in the first place, but if you've laid the right groundwork then debugging little things like some extra margin on a floated element is relatively simple.

Also, if any of this is garbled or doesn't make any sense, it's because I'm suffering from a post-lunch food coma and had a beer with my meal. I'm feeling verrrrrrrry relaxed right now.

Here are the correct and incorrect shots:

Ever considered buying a graphics tablet? Well there's a great deal on one today over at Woot.

It's only $33. Seriously, that's uber-cheap if you ever wanted to test one out. It's probably crap, but at least it's better than using that mouse of yours.

Act quickly, and it coult be yours. And I do mean quickly, as Woot deals only last a single day.

This would make me want to scream.

Linked from this page.

Instead of working on fun stuff like 2007 awards nominees layout or our internal admin page overhaul, I got to spend the morning fixing the Awards section in the Portal front page. Specifically the Turd of the Week award.

The CSS isn't that complicated. But it's definitely made more challenging when you consider it's a heavily viewed portion of the site, located in an area on the page where it affects the position of the pods around it, and that it needs to be tested in Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE7, and IE6 (where the bug was more than just a visual thing, it actually pushed boxes around making the page harder to navigate). So not a hard thing to implement, but something I had to recheck a dozen times before making the decision to push a new stylesheet live. The good news is that my fix didn't require anyone else, I didn't have to bother any of the programmers to change any of their code; something I could just tell Tom about after I fixed it.

Then there are the larger questions. Do we delete the user who so delighted in making the site look ugly for a time? ("Nah, not *that* big of a deal"); Do we ditch Turd of the Week altogether since it's just a headache anyway ("No Tom, let's not be hasty"); Do I quietly delete the review of the user who claims the ugliness brings a tear of joy to his eye? (Nope, that would be an abuse of power).

I could have simply deleted the entry, which would only be a short-term fix. Instead, it wasted around an hour of my time, something I hate to admit to the little bastards that revel in that sort of thing -- little attention whores love to know when they get a reaction.

But I share all of this for two reasons:

First, to say that these stupid little exploits are only temporary. Our fixes are permanent. In their own way they would even be a fun challenge if it didn't mean diverting our attention from launching new features.

Second, a warning to people who defend these lame movies by marking scathing reviews as "abusive". If I see a review calling these submissions out for what they are I tend to clear them of any wrongdoing. So anyone jumping on the bandwagon and flagging comments that are accurate in pointing the finger at spam groups, they're going to get a surprise in the form of a garbage whistle.

So keep playing your little pranks. The rest of us will just keep besting you.