Columns Overhall

By Pete | @kingpetey | 25 Aug 2002

If your reading this then the "overhall" on the columns is well under way. We have 2 new columners, Jamie and Shenton so welcome them. We are eager for some content from them as soon as possible. More to come soon.

Computer problem

By Pete | @kingpetey | 15 Aug 2002

Just after i get my computer working just how i want it too the hard drive crashes big style! As i went to turn my computer on the other day the bios (that black screen you first see when yuo turn your computer on) could not detect the hard drive, so i opened up the tower and checked all the cables etc etc but nothing was wrong, i then checked the drive in another computer incase it was my computer playing up but still no joy. Thus i'm going to have to send it back to the manufacturers to either be fixed or to get me a new one. I'm hopeing for all my datas sake that they can fix it as i have a lot of songs and videos it would be a shame to loose let alone all the site files and the files for imafish 5!!

Anyway before my computer crashed we were making good progress on the beta version of imafish 5 and i have to admit its looking very good and a lot more professional. We were orginally planning to have the site done by the end of august/beginning of september now i'm not sure :/ However we will push on and keep working on more great content and articles for the site!

Comedy is back

By Pete | @kingpetey | 31 Jul 2002

Yes the comedy section is back to ImAFish with all its flash movies back online! Shenton has been working hard over the last couple of days to upload all the flash movies and checking they all work. The comedy section has been down for about 2 months now because for some unknown reason all the flash movies strangely "disappeared" though the site investigated the situation thoroughly the case was deemed unsolved and now lingers in the ImAFish X-files department along with all the other strange goings on at the site.

ImAFish also offers you to browse through the large collection of 'funny pics' the site has mounting up in: http://imafish.com/funnypics/ Just click on the file name to view the picture! While looking through the 'archive' we also found a selection of office jokes which as I?m feeling generous I will share with everyone else.

Get everyone but your target in on it and never come by his or her office twice in a row wearing the same clothes. Sanity test... Staple ever unimportant paper on their desk together. Take a exploded pen and replace it with your co-workers. If your target has a computer, reposition the monitor everyday. Fill an empty white out bottle with milk and replace it with your co-workers. Put a live lobster or any other creature in the file cabinet. If computer has speakers turn the volume all way up or way down depending on your mood. :) Taping down the switch hook buttons on a phone gets some interesting reactions. When the mark answers the phone keeps ringing.

Program the mark's phone to forward to the office paging system. Ask your mark, "ARE YOU GETTING FIRED? WELL, THAT'S THE RUMOR." Does your coworker have fish in the office? Take the fish and leave a ransom note. If a coworker brings a bag lunch, switch the contents. It's even better if you switch it to something totally random. (beer, rubber cement, condoms, etc.) Pull the labeled buttons off of their phone and rearrange the order and put them back on their phone. They won't be sure of which line is which or which connects them to the boss!

Tape your victim's telephone receiver down at top and bottom when they are away from their desk. When they come back, call them from your desk and watch them struggle to answer. Put transparent tape over the read out of a calculator. It makes the numbers blurry. If your boss wins some kind of prestigious award, manufacture a phony memo from the company president announcing the discontinuance of the award. By a package of approximately 200 of those little paper bathroom cups and neatly arrange them all over the subjects desk. Then staple them all together and fill them with water. See how long it takes them to figure out how to get rid of this set-up wi thout spilling water all over their paperwork, files, computer, etc... Take the paper out of the copier and write "Everything written of the flip side of this paper is a lie!" Put it back into the copier mixed with regular sheets.

Take one of your coworker's 3 1/2" floppies and label it something banned at your workplace. A good practical joke you can play on someone at work is with the intercom in the store. (This joke will only work if you have to dial a number on the phone to use the intercom.) Tell new workers that you must dial the intercom number to dial out. Bye a voice changer at Toys 'R Us and answer the phone in strange voices. Does somebody smoke at work when they're not supposed to? Put Ambesol on the filter of their cigarettes. Watch as their lips and mouth go numb when they light up! Seal the boss's desk during their vacation in Suran wrap. Get Valerian Root capsules (at health food stores) and when co-worker is away from desk, take his phone apart and open a capsule or two of Valerian Root in the mouthpiece then replace. Guaranteed to smell terrible!

At lunch, swap the worker's real food with look-a-like dog toys. If someone is applying for a job, call them back and leave a wrong number. They go crazy for a while until you call them back apologizing. If the drawers to the victim's desk has a board under it you can take the drawer out, take the contents out, put the drawer back in, but UPSIDE-DOWN!

Then, while the upside-down drawer is partially opened, put the contents back in and close it. When t he unsuspecting victim opens the drawer, all the contents fall out! If able to impersonate supervisors voice, call co-worker and have them write incident report/memo on "their problem". Watch as they turn it in. This only works if Janitorial staff works late and not early. If you work in a building that has a no-smoking policy, buy a carton of (soft pack) cigarettes, an ashtray, and stay really late one night. Place the ashtray on the victim's desk.

Light up about 5 cigarettes and place them in the ashtray. Throw away the rest of the cigarettes but keep the packs. Crumple them up and toss them all over the victim's office/cubicle. Take some cellophane and open up the glue bottle. Put the cellophane across the opening, then close the bottle. Watch the victim try to squeeze glue out. They either open it up to check, or they squeeze to hard, breaking the cellophane and spraying glue everywhere. Tell a new worker that everyone has tomorrow off because of the boss's religious beliefs. See if he shows up the next day.

The story of ImAFish #1

By Pete | @kingpetey | 06 Jul 2002

The story of ImAFish!

I have decided to let out my cool story for everyone else to read! Feel privilidged :D

It all started when i was born in shrewsbury hospital - little did i know that i had been born with a special power, that of being cool. However i did not learn this over night, it took years of dedicated chilling out to master my coolness. One of the first signs of my coolness was pointed out by a friend when i was telling him about not having a belly button. He suggested that it could be because of a special mystical power - in my case coolness.

My childhood was a reasonably quiet time in that of my skills of coolness, but they were essential to building up my cool techniques for later life. I was teased for not having a belly button and many people laughed when i told them i was stuck in a conicle flask before birth :(

Throughout secondary education my cool powers did not come to life, this is for many reasons but mainly as they were clouded by un-cool people who were scared of my mystical force. In my later years of secondary school my fasination with computers increased and i found an interesting technology -- the internet. Here you could find new friends who no nothing about you, and in most cases dont care but have 1 thing in common, have a passion for somthing computer related, whether it was webdeign, linux or just entertainment. This led to the start of experimentation with webdesign, a lot of the early sites were very bad i will admit, however by the time ImAFish 1 was started our skills had nicely developed and we were ready to produce a good chillout site.

Anyway here my coolness skills developed, this slowly led into college where my cool hay day began and also ImAFish started to become increasingly popular..

to be continued!!!

.........................................................

Site Changes

By Pete | @kingpetey | 25 Jun 2002

So what are the main changed seen in the updated site? Well quite a few, the first thing you will notice is the front page as i have decided to scrap the into image page as it really wasn't needed. As soon as the front page as loaded you will notice changes to the left and side, the new articles section has been added which shows you the most recent 3 articles.

There is a handy link below for the older articles. Below this you can see the 3 most recent column posts and another handy link to the columns section. Further down the page still is the site news section which i have taken the bulky blue away from and now store things in a sql database instead of a text file. Other changes include updates to the navigation at the top of the page, updates to the admin section and updates to the way we store the columns.

Instead of each columner having their own table in the database all the columns are now stored in 1 table in the database. This make it possible to show the 3 most recent posts on the front page. We have also decided to scrap the site intro as no one has voluntered to keep it updated as rob as become a bit too inactive. If anyone wants to take this position then email me.

So why make these changes? Well as ImAFish is constantly changing and new features are being added, we felt that these changes would be useful and relatively easy to do. The changes shouldn't cause any problems to any of the other features on the site including the forum, email and the auction. If anyone would like to submit articles to the site we would be more then welcome to put them up for you. Pwhite

ImAFish 4.5 launched

By Pete | @kingpetey | 25 Jun 2002

About 2 week ago I had the idea to add an articles section to the site, somewhere where we can post on going things that we feel are more important for the forum and that we want to keep more of a permanent record of. After thinking about this for a while and how to do it, i decided (yesterday) to get on and try to code it, anyone who knows me well will know i'm wasn't the strongest of php and sql coders but i thought the task would be easy enough.

Well after installing apache in windows and php and testing all the code i had written offline i thought it was time to upload it! Everything i could see worked fine offline but once i had uploaded it, it was obvious it wasn't working. The main problem was in using mysql_fetch_assoc which isn't yet supported by supanames, sam helped me fix this and everything went fine. I have a few more tests to do and a few more column posts to move over to the new database otherwise everything looks good.

I have a lot of people to thank for getting ImAFish 4.5 up and running, in no particluar order - Pariah from norway has been a great help in helping me code the articles and columns section. Sam also has been a great help as always for getting things working we wish him the best in running devilware. I would also like to thank all of the imafish crew and visitors for making the last year great for the site.

Site Birthday

By Pete | @kingpetey | 25 Jun 2002

Around a year ago this month myself, benjie and yammez at the time invested in our first domain name, somthing which didn't cost much per year plus was a bit of a spur of the momment joke. Little did we know it would turn into the popular site we have today which recieves over 800 hits per week, with 38 forum members and a database driven backbone.

The site has gone though many changes in the past 12 months, we have had changes in crew members - we lost yammez but gained shannon and shenton as the site grew. We have seen many different designs and graphics, some being more sucessful then others. And now we have the summer design which is proving very easy to use and sucessful.

We hope to build on the sucess into the future of imafish - hopefully into providing more resources and if possible moving the site into making a profit. We have seen many other features come and go on the site and some which are now here to stay - such as the return of the columns. We have had our problems though - such as being the hosting problems we had originally and more recently forum problems. However we have got through these and learn't from our mistakes and have now had the site up for a longer period of time then we have done before and we hope to keep it that way!

Our main goal has always been to provide a fun entertaining informative website for our friends and its slowly coming towards reaching that goal. We are always open to new suggestions and new features to the site - such ideas which have come up recently have been the site awards which have been very sucessful not only in providing entertainment but also in getting people to keep visiting the site which has been another large task which again is slowly looking good for us.

The site isn't just for entertainment though it gives us crew and creators time to use our skills as webdesigners and programmers and build on the skills we dont yet know. ImAFish isn't the only site we now own and work on - the new site switchweb is dedicated to explaining in more simple terms the things we do every day on computers.

I hope to start adding more database script we have written for imafish to switchweb in order for anyone else who is interested to see simply how we have created imafish. ImAFish does like the idea of open source and where it can is trying to help others in ways in which it can easily. The site has certainly achieved a lot in the last year and will certainly go on in the future to achieve a lot more.

We hope to build on the success of the site over the last year and continue to improve and add new features to the site in the comming weeks. One things for sure we do have some interesting things planned for the site which should be a lot of fun for everyone. Pwhite

Todays site updates

By Pete | @kingpetey | 01 Jun 2002

I have been hard at work on the site today and there have been many small updates and some larger updates. The main has been in this columns section which for anyone interested has a simple sql database backbone for each columner. The contents of each column is then displayed on each page.
The other big update today has been on the front page (index2.php) the categories section has been added on the left hand side to fill a bit of space and to help ease navigation on the site. Also the page stats bit has been added to show how many hits the page has had and who is online at that current time.

I have fixed the recent forum topics section which hasn't been updated since we started using phpBB2, this now only displays the most recent 15 topics instead of all topics posted within the last 24 hours. That was ok when the forum was inactive but with sometimes over 50 topics being posted on every day the front page could get very large and slow to load.
Another update has been on the history page (located here) which seems to have been neglected since december. Anyway its upto date now with all the latest site information. Anyway until next time - pwhite

First Column!

By Pete | @kingpetey | 10 May 2002

Those of you who were around in imafish 1 and some of imafish 2 will remember a feature we had called the columns, this was very simply where you could have your own column post your own content and others will read it. The idea at the time was great but because of different issues we had problems maintaining them so we scrapped the idea. Until this morning that is. The system is now a lot more secure and uses the database as the backbone and various php scripts to post and display the data. (if anyone wants the source then email me)

Anyway as you all know imafish is getting more and more popular and i can report that we are getting around 700 hits per week - this is increasing slowly each week i'm pleased to say. I would also like to point out some of the great features we have coming up on the site in the next few weeks. In the half term I hope to rewrite some of the news posters and the admin section making the site look even better and function quicker and better. We also have the ImAFish awards going on at the momment and hope to start ImAFish Big Brother soon.
I will post lots more soon on me column and hope to see a lot more columners in the future.

Pwhite

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