Late Tuesday night, I created a post on digg.com about my AJAX File-Upload Progress Script.  It became extremely popular: in about 24 hours, it received 500 "diggs," and it spent most of Wednesday as #2 on the the del.icio.us "popular" page.  (It’s still #1 on the AJAX page.)

Encodable.com received 5800 unique visitors who were checking out the script on Wednesday.  At the height of the traffic, there were about 130 visitors online simultaneously at any given moment.  And since the demo version is here on nodivisions.com, there were 1800 unique visitors here yesterday, too.

(If you’re wondering why there are so few files in the file-list for the demo, it’s because the uploads were quickly filling my server to its full capacity.  I had to implement a cron-job that automatically deletes uploads older than 30 minutes twice an hour.)

Now at 11am on Thursday, there have already been 350 visitors on encodable.com, and 250 on nodivisions.com.  Much less than yesterday, but still going fairly strong.

This is unbelievable.

MillionDollarHomepage is a website started by a kid in the UK to make some money for college (or "Uni" as they say over there).  His idea: sell 1,000,000 pixels for US$1 each, in blocks of 100 (10x10 pixels).  Each buyer would send him a small image file, and he would put it on the front page of milliondollarhomepage.com, as a link back to the buyer’s website.

He started this two months ago, at the end of August 2005, and has made over half a million dollars in those two months.

I need to come up with a way to make my business do so well!

That’s not right: Sum Ting Wong

Are you harboring a fugitive?: Hu Yu Hai Ding

See me ASAP: Kum Hia Nao

Small Horse: Tai Ni Po Ni

Did you go to the beach?: Wai Yu So Tan

I think you need a face lift: Chin Tu Fat

It’s very dark in here: Wao So Dim

I thought you were on a diet: Wai Yu Mun Ching

This is a tow away zone: No Pah King

Our meeting is scheduled for next week: Wai Yu Kum Nao

Staying out of sight: Lei Ying Lo

He’s cleaning his automobile: Wa Shing Ka

Your body odor is offensive: Yu Stin Ki Pu

A while ago I wrote up an article on doing secure remote backups/transfers across the (insecure) internet, using rsync.  I just put it online the other day over at Encodable.

And speaking of Encodable, I recently finished a major overhaul of my weblog script, turning it into a full-featured CMS (Content Management System).  That is, it can now be used to create and edit normal web pages (as opposed to serial/dated blog posts) anytime, right in the web browser.  I also ~just finished the PMLSC site (Pittsburgh Molecular Libraries Screening Center) which, though you can’t tell unless you’re logged in, uses the newly finished CMS so the author(s) can add & update content anytime.

Finally, speaking of the intarweb, does anyone here actually subscribe to feeds (RSS, Atom, etc) for any of the blogs that they read?  I personally don’t; I find it easy enough -- and more interesting too -- to actually visit the small handful of sites that I read regularly, rather than setting up a new system where I get notified of posts/replies via some special new application.

Photos from Honeymoon Day 1: The Day That Wasn’t Day 2 are now online.

There are lots more photos from the other days; this set is pretty light.

A week ago when John Paul wanted to send me the video clip from my bachelor hike, we had some trouble: the file was about 19 megabytes, far too big for Gmail’s 10MB attachment limit.  We tried to send it through instant messenger, but as is often the case, one or both of our firewalls prevented that from working properly.

The easiest solution was for me to write up a quick CGI script so he could upload it to my website, from which I could then download it.

But uploading a 19MB file on a slow DSL connection takes a long time; it took almost an hour, and about 20 minutes in, John Paul was asking me, "ah... is it going?  my browser is just sitting here..."  It uploaded fine, but many an impatient (i.e. normal) internet user would have assumed it wasn’t working about a half-hour into it, and closed the window.

So I decided to whip up a little AJAX goodness and have the upload page show a progress bar and an ETA for file uploads.  The result is the Encodable Industries AJAX File Uploader, which you can try out right here.  You can also download the script to use on your own website by visiting its homepage over on Encodable.com.

Kim and I went to see the new movie Elizabethtown on Friday night.  I liked it a lot; initial reactions can’t always be trusted, but so far I’m thinking it’s one of my favorite movies ever.  It’s Truman Show quality as far as I’m concerned.

The movie has so many different facets and random rabbit-trails everywhere.  The main character (Drew Baylor, played by Orlando Bloom) is so quirky and so funny without really trying to be (like the scene where he’s waving his fingers over his cell phone saying "someone call me back").  He’s sort of really quiet, but you hear his thoughts overdubbed through a lot of the movie, and his expressions say a lot.

Elizabethtown is a sad movie in some ways, but it’s funny as I said, and it’s got the cute love-story element (Kirsten Dunst plays the lead female) too.  Fortunately the love-story element isn’t obnoxious or overly cheesy, either.  Overall the movie is just really interesting; it tells an interesting (if not novel) story with interesting characters.

The Truman Show is one of my favorite movies (maybe even #1), and Elizabethtown has some of the same kind of quirky humor as that movie.  It also is sort of funny in the ways that Napoleon Dynamite is funny.  There’s just a lot of really random non-slapstick interestingly funny stuff in it.

So I highly recommend this movie.  And Kim does too.

Nick V. took a few photos and one awesome movie clip during my bachelor hike last month.  Check ’em out.