Inventing Time » Features

Introducing the Autocappomatic 4500 (Patent Pendulous)!

GersonK — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 00:48:15 +0000

Finally, Inventing Situations has freed the common capper from the twin drudgeries of matching your caption to the grab and actually writing a caption! Just click the magic button – – and the Autocappomatic 4500 will not only write a caption for you, but it will pick an image to go with it; in that order. The cappomatic’s no prima donna either, it shares credit with you by just using your handle its logo right next to it. So, thank the Autocappomatic 4500 for this new progress and thank Competition too, because it was only by shamelessly following the competition that I realized just how much demand there was for this sort of thing.

(Note 12/16: The cappomatic won’t work unless you’ve made a cap that saved your handle lately – that is, you need to cap with cookies enabled first. So there.)

Of course, the Autocappomatic can use your help, so if you have some captions that just need NOUNs, VERBs, PLURALNOUNs, GERUNDs, CELEBRIRTYNAMEs or the like added, suggest them, and the cappomatic might use them.

Holiday and Alternate Handles

GersonK — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 19:37:45 +0000

I’d just like to point out that as long as you’re not afraid of somebody stealing your holiday handle, you don’t have to register it. All of the other advantages of being logged in – voting for your favorites, editing your captions, and now getting a link to your wiki profile – are all still available when you’re logged in as yourself but capping with a different handle.

To get the profile link all the time, you need to go to your sector7g-zz9 profile page and select “always” for ‘Display a link to my capper wiki profile”, otherwise I’ll go on assuming you’ve changed handles for anonymity, since I can’t read your minds (yet). The “when posting with my handle” choice may be a little cryptic, but it just assumes that when you cap with a handle other than the one you’re logged in under, you want to be anonymous. I may be a little crazy for trying to build a system that supports logging in with anonymity, but both bogus handles and insanity are capper traditions, no?

Sorting by grab – it had a good run. Plus, ratings – take two

GersonK — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 03:10:30 +0000

You may have noticed that the gallery is arranged a little differently now. Instead of all the captions for a given grab being clustered together, the newest captions show up on top, regardless of their image. I think this makes more sense with a lot of the changes I’ve been making lately, like the ability to cap any image in the main gallery or the favorites gallery by clicking on it, and the way the fancy auto-refresh gallery needed a whole lot of pointless work if I was going to make it keep the old sort style. But, if you’re like me and you’ve been capping with the image sort for over ten years, this may be a tough change to get used to and if you really prefer the old style, just click the sort by image link over the captions and you can get the old style back for the manual refresh version of gallery.

I’ve also broken down and sort of given in to popular demand on the favorites gallery. You can now vote for as many captions as you like, but to satisfy me elitist leanings, the favorites gallery will only display the 18 most popular captions. I kind of feel like I should have figured that out sooner.

Pick Your Favorite Captions. Woo!

GersonK — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 01:09:24 +0000

You might have noticed thumbs sticking up over the captions. They’re not part of my Fonzie obsession, they are instead proof that I’ve officially admitted to being a follower in the caption this like caption site community instead of pretending to be a leader like I once did. By clicking the thumb over a caption, you select it as your “current favorite” caption. That puts it on a page full of the popular favorites that you and the other cappers have voted for. If that seems a lot like a feature from some other capsite, that’s because it is, kind of. I like to think I’ve put my own spin on it. Captions stay on the favorites page for up to 24 hours after they were written, and you can only vote for one caption at a time. That is, as soon as you click the thumb, your previous vote is wiped out. My thinking is that makes getting on the favorites page more of an honor and keeps the voting from becoming too much of an obsession. To provide at least some enforcement of the one capper/one vote thing, you do need to be registered to vote. The honor system takes care of the rest. Note, there’s no rule against voting for your own cap – heck the first test vote was of, by and for me. If that’s how you want to spend your vote, be my guest. Thoughts? Complaints? Job offers? Share them.

YOU CAN STILL CAP WITHOUT A PASSWORD (if you’ve never registered)

GersonK — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 03:09:41 +0000

I just felt that was the first thing I had to say. I know some people are going to freak when they see that password box. But if you leave it blank, and you’ve never registered at sector7g-zz9 or lustforlunch, you can cap just the same as you always have.

Anyway, inspired by equal parts competition, thinking about updates, and procrastination, I’ve finally finished the long promised use of WPT handles on IS. Of course it turned out that 90% of the remaining work was on tweaking the page layouts and a single bug. I hope it’s all pretty self-explanatory. If you want to protect your handle, register it. All that requires is a working email account (and they’re free and plentiful these days), and a minute. From there on, you’ll just have to occasionally enter your password along with your cap. You can still use whatever unregistered handles you want at any time. If you want a link to your capper wiki profile, once you’ve logged on, you can go to your profile link (it’ll be on the upper left of the screen, just under the mothership menu), and enter your wiki profile.

I also made a few other small fixes, including eliminating a weird wrap around that would occasionally happen with the paypal ad, and sending you back to the gallery after mailing a caption.

Pay me to add spellcheck

GersonK — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 23:57:36 +0000

Ok, this is me being mercenary, take it or leave it. There was a request to add spellcheck to IS in the gallery today. Here’s my offer, $200 in tips earmarked for this purpose to my paypal account, and it’ll happen not long after. We’re already at $50 earmarked for that purpose (I’ll update this amount daily as it changes), so only another $150 and we’re there.

Yes, if you’re running Firefox 2.0 and some other browsers, you probably get spellcheck for free. Yeah, this is a little like guilting you into it, but well, this request feels like work, so I’m treating it as such. If you’ve made a previous donation that didn’t go towards something and would like to see spellcheck, lemme know. If you have another feature you’d like added, contact me before tipping, I’ll let you know how much it’ll take to make it happen.

As for other improvements like logins, they’ll come eventually, I just haven’t been in a feature adding mode lately. So there.

Protecting Usernames on IS?

GersonK — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 00:46:06 +0000

I’m thinking of finally letting people protect their handles on Inventing Situations, but would like to get some feedback and give some warning before I throw the switch. It would probably work thusly: if you’ve registered a handle at sector7g-zz9 then you’d have to be logged on to use that handle on IS (even if you only registered it for use on Wasting Precious Time or the movie catalog). The submit caption form would include a password field so you could log on and submit a caption in a single swoop. But if you haven’t registered, then you’d be able to just leave the password blank and keep capping as always. In the past I’ve waffled and given reasons not to do this, but I’m starting to think it’s finally time to go ahead with it.

To my mind, here are the major pros and cons of my proposed system.
Pros:

Allows people to protect themselves against password theft (which I still think is a very rare occurrence).
If done properly, should be low impact. Little to no effect on those who choose not to use it, and just an occasional password entry for those who do use it.
Will allow for addition of things like capperwiki profile links on people’s captions.

Cons:

Security on the site is still sort of weak: only as secure as your email account, no https, and so forth and so on.
System requires separate registrations to protect alternate and holiday handles. (It would still be relatively easy to flip between handles, though.)
Some people registered for WPT or the catalog, but don’t want to have enter their password to cap. Or they forgot their password and lost access to the email account they signed up on, requiring manual intervention to get their username back.

If this happens, it won’t be for another month or so, but since this is a major change, I thought I’d get feedback to see if I need to do things differently or not at all. Thoughts?



	
		Should handle registration be extended to the caption gallery?
		
		
		
			
					
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					No
			
			
					
					Explain it some more
			
			
					
					Maybe
			
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The Catalog Marches On

GersonK — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 02:20:26 +0000

I just added over a hundred sample images to the movie catalog. There are a few other new improvements to the system like proper sorting on titles, episode numbers for tv shows and serials, and showing the sample images on the list page instead of just the details page. It’s still a work in progress and apart from the “now playing” feature it feeds, most of what will make it really exciting is still in the wings. Now is still a very good time to suggest changes (and catch any mistakes in the data). I should have ability for users to schedule showings of movies ready for a public trial in the next week or two – and honestly, that was my main motivation in building the whole thing. (Well, the next stage of that system, where I start requesting/requiring a small gratuity for the service was).

As I’ve been building this thing I haven’t exactly experienced feature creep, but working with what’s done so far has helped change my priorities for it. The things that I figured could wait for the second version are feeling like they need to be done to before I can rest on my laurels. It’s already clear that what “little” data is there requires better searching tools than just sorting and category filters. Most of all, the data that’s there needs to be fleshed out – both by me and my fellow cappers. Which of course means that I need to add a commenting and rating tool to the catalog. But perhaps the biggest hole I’ve spotted in my plans is that maybe cappers would rather be able to schedule showings of the ephemeral films – and boy, I don’t even want to think about fixing that.

A quick note to anybody who wants to link to all the images I’ve just added: don’t. Well, you can make a hyperlink to them, but don’t try embedding them as images on your pages or posts on other sites – they won’t work. They’re supposed to get IS’ address superimposed on them when they’re embedded somewhere else, but the script that does that is on the fritz. Since it’s my contention that these images are in the public domain, if you want to take them and handle the hosting yourself, I won’t stand in your way. Obviously a link back in exchange for my effort in selecting these and putting them in a handy package would be nice, though.

New(ish) Look

GersonK — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 04:32:35 +0000

As you might have noticed, we’ve got a winner in the menu contest – ReptilianSamurai‘s design handily beat mine by more than a 2 to 1 margin (16 to 7 to be exact). Congrats to RS and thanks to all who voted. For those of you partial to way the old links would keep the different images and gallery pages in your history, use the old text links that have stayed just where they are right above and below the screengrabs. Actually, I’ve even added them to all the other pages on IS.

To those of you worried about the height of the menu, note that all the stray links it replaces actually took up more space on the page.

I’ve also continued to upload additions to the movielist, like filtering by category. That movie ordering capability is right around the corner, honest. One more thing – WPT now expects cookies to be on to keep you logged on. If demand somehow merits, I may fix that.

Anyway, what do you think sirs?

More Fun With The Catalog

GersonK — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 21:42:51 +0000

To make use of the new movie catalog, I’m now displaying a brief “now playing” line during the IS Playhouse hours to help identify the movies and what not that you’re capping. I know this goes against the whole anti-clutter plan I have going with the upcoming layout changes, but everything should come together a little nicer next week.

Now that I’ve unleashed all this knowledge about the available movies, feel free to help me identify actors and artistes that I’ve got a good chunk of material from who might deserve “birthday parties” of their material at IS. It doesn’t have to be a huge chunk of material, a couple of feature films or so, and since it’s about the capping, these don’t have to be great artists. Here are some of the candidates I already have:

Cary Grant 1/18/1904
Lorne Greene 2/12/1915
Jack Webb 4/2/1920
Roger Corman 4/5/1926
Vincent Price 5/27/1911
Moe Howard 6/19/1897
Art Clokey 7/7/1921 (unconfirmed)
Joe Shuster 7/10/1914
Alfred Hitchcock 8/13/1899
Dick York 9/4/1928
Bert I. Gordon 9/24/1922
Jerry Siegel 10/17/1914
Bela Lugosi 10/20/1882
Boris Karloff 11/23/1887

There are a few problems here with dates bunching up.