In “celebration” of the New Year Yahoo closed down a free service that sustained Grammar Captive’s WordPress RSS feeds. A new free service has been found and the feeds have been restored.
Other than the several projects that were still under way at the end of the year, no further development is being planned until a suitable place to podcast has been found and podcasting can begin.
Roddy
One can only hope that this New Year ends on a happier note than the year just ended.
For the moment, I can only write that Grammar Captive will move forward. How far, how fast, and to what extent is momentarily difficult to say.
Important is that significant progress was made last year, and there is some reason to believe that the same can happen this year.
I wish you well in the year ahead.
Roddy
This year is finishing with great disappointment, for the fall launch of Grammar Captive did not occur. This said, much good did occur this past year despite tremendous setbacks. And, the good news is that I have not lost hope.
Roddy
CRON Scheduler is now fully implemented, and thanks to its seamless integration with SwiftMailer that I also recently installed, Grammar Captive not only receives notification that a scheduled job has been executed in a timely fashion, but it also receives a copy of the job’s output for easy to use verification of proper execution.
Hooray! Hooray!
What is left is the Matomo interface. Likely a more time-consuming task.
Roddy
This has been a week of research and experimentation. Both the Mecab parser and CRON Scheduler are installed, but putting them to work has proven to be no less challenging.
Hopefully, the cloud cover will break before the end of next week. In the meantime the weather in Seattle is cold and clear — an absolutely beautiful fall day in the northern hemisphere.
Roddy
After several weeks of intermittent study, research, and experimentation Grammar Captive installation of MySQL’s MeCab parser has finally been achieved. What remains is its implementation.
The MeCab parser will allow Japanese visitors to use the Grammar Captive custom search engines to search single Japanese words and phrases in Japanese text. Without the parser MySQL treats entire paragraphs of Japanese as single words, and the result is a failed search. The solution is just around the corner.
Work on the CRON Scheduler continues.
It is hard to believe that this fall’s scheduled podcast launch has failed, but circumstances simply do not permit, and I will now shoot for the spring of 2019 — the Year of the Boar.
What is cool is that I have not surrendered and continue to push ahead with site development.
Roddy
It does not appear like much now, but Grammar Captive has made its first successful Composer installation on its host server at Lunarpages.
Peppe Occhi’s CRON Scheduler software and required dependencies including SwiftMailer and the PHP intl extension will facilitate a more effective rendering of Matomo data.
Eventually, we are not there yet, the requisite Matomo data will be downloaded at regular intervals and stored in a format that will provide visitors with immediate access to Matomo data. In this way the long delays necessitated by Matomo’s overhead will not be directly experienced by the average visitor.
Still looking for a way to raise money for new office space and a stable environment suitable for regular podcast production. It is only a matter of time before a solution is found. Certainly there is no shortage of other projects that can be undertaken in the interim.
Roddy
What is so cool about the newly created dynamic cubes — now fully functional — is that they not only provide eye-candy to the visitor, but they also multiply the amount of advertising space available to sponsors by a factor of six!
Where before one could view one of the seven gates in each of the seven spaces , one can now view six of the seven gates in each space.
Sponsors will be able to rent an entire cube or multiple cubes, or any number of facets of a single cube that they share with other sponsors.
For the moment I have made the selection of cubes and their faces completely random. Every 1000 milliseconds three cubes are randomly selected and each randomly rotated to show a different side. With the current setting I am able to control the
With minor modifications of the code, the randomness of the selection can be turned off and the rotation of sides can be made to order according to a sponsor’s need.
Further, I am able to replace any of the rotated sides with images, words, and even links to the sponsor’s website.
How is this for cool? Was it worth waiting for?
Now, if I could only find a reliable place for podcasting and the means to afford it! This task is still under way.
Roddy
It has been very slow in coming and is not yet complete, but the most difficult task has been accomplished. The single gate images on the Grammar Captive podcast homepage are now randomly selected 3D rotating objects.
In the end it was accomplished without GreenSock (GSAP) — a long story in itself.
I still have not found a location for podcast production, but the effort is on-going. Please do not give up hope.
Roddy
In order to podcast and produce quality webinars I must find a professional sound room that I know will always be there when I need it and does not depend on my precarious living situation. This can be achieved only through additional expense.
In order to raise the money to pay for such a place I have decided to make Grammar Captive more available to University of Washington students. To this end I have created a subdomain with a direct link to the GC Tutor panel of the Grammar Captive mainpage.
It took a not so brilliant change in the Seattle weather to provide the brilliant inspiration for the webpage!
The next step is to advertise on campus with fliers posted everywhere where it is permitted.
Roddy
