Hello, we’re currently thinking about version 4.0 of TCAL, and we’re currently looking for ideas in the following areas:

1. Encouraging more people to sign up and post
2. Increasing readership
3. Presenting the information better
4. New features
5. Subject matter - more Irish stuff? Less random internet shit?

Drop a comment or contact us if you’ve any ideas/anything you hate at the moment etc…

TCAL Labs, in conjunction with the eight scientists that independently verified Steorn’s free energy technology, have created a competing free energy device. The scientists jumped at the chance to work with TCAL labs. Non disclosure agreements or nay, they all agreed that the opportunity to swap ideas with us was too great to pass up and they called over for a chat. After several minutes we created a technology that was even more efficient than free. You heard us, punks, we created a device with the potential to yield infinity + 1 million joules per second. In a row. We are calling the device “Weekend”.

Slim pickings on the spheroweb today.

After 604 days in operation and 5,385 posts we’ve decided it’s time for another redesign, as this one is getting slightly crusty and can’t quite contain how kick ass the site is becoming. To tell the truth the monkey butlers have been pouring over wireframes, uml diagrams and photoshop mockups for several months now, dilligently coming up with a new iteration of TCAL that should support it’s continued growth. Have you got some killer ideas for us or some way to help out? Want to give your thoughts on the way you see TCAL going over the next while? Let us know.

For those of you keeping score, here’s what TCAL looked like when it launched. And here’s the second iteration before it went all 3 column.

It’s a perfect world. It’s a TCAL world.

After some problems with our brandspanking new media server we’ve got the video for Jennifer by Gary Dunne back up and running. We’ve also put it up at a much larger resolution so even if you have seen it or already check it again.

Also, we’d appreciate anyone linking to or sending the URL for the video around:

http://tcal.net/archives/2005/12/21/music-video-jennifer-by-garry-dunne/

Defying all sense, we went ahead with the Wordpress 2.0 upgrade and it’s gone swimmingly, though there will probably be teething problems. Notice any problems? Please contact us immediately.

Original content alert!

We’re happy to present the first of what we hope will be many feature articles at The Community At Large. Click on the links on the right hand bar to access the first few. We’d love to hear your comments on them, good and bad so get reading and get writing.

We have many more exciting things planned that will be coming on stream very shortly.

This all falls under ‘new initiatives’ as stated in our previously posted diagram of intentions.

Never ones to sit back on their arse and enjoy the posts, TCAL Labs are back with a bunch of new stuff for the site. First of all we’ve 1024erized™ the site. We want to push things forward (god knows Ireland is lagging behind enough on the internets) so to that end if TCAL doesn’t fit on your screen anymore, your computer is too slow and old to deal with a lot of the stuff we link to anyway. So what’s changed?

Sign Up Side Bar
We’re trying to make the whole process of signing up for the site easier so there it is on the right, broken down and explained. Have a click and if you think you are up for it register.

Recent Irish Posts
Believe it or not we’re an Irish website, and although we post a lot of stuff from around the world, we want to draw attention to anything Irish.

Voting
We’re not sure how this will work out, but it’s worth trying. You can now vote on all posts on the site. We’ll see how this goes. Note the little circles (a bit ambiguous perhaps?) to the left of the comments link at the bottom of every post. You can’t vote on site news like this post.

Random Posts
Note the addition of a random post button on the top menu bar there. It’s surprisingly addictive to click it a few times and find something you haven’t seen.

That’s it for now, we’re still streamlining the registration stuff. As always, any suggestions just hit the contact button in the menu up top there.

To celebrate the launch of TCAL 1.5, we present the first TCAL background for your machine. Enjoy! And good luck being able to see any of your icons on top of it.

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TCAL Background. 460kb jpeg. Load it and then right click and choose Save As Background.

Ahead of the much anticipated launch of TCAL 2.0 (you’ll just have to wait and see) TCAL Labs has been working on drafts for our advertisement campaign so we thought we’d give you a teeny tiny preview.

TCAL Ad 1. (PDF.)

Introducing TCAL Labs, the incredible research division of The Community At Large. Here you can see incredible feats of technical engineering and other incredible nerd-related activities.

Kicking it all off is the TCAL RSS Super Button tutorial.

The TCAL RSS Super Button code is really two bits of code from two sources which I then hacked together. The first is a PHP based RSS feed parser by Emperor. This code takes the TCAL.NET rss feed and then spits out the headlines as strings in an array called headlines[]. Then, the headlines are run through a couple of while loops - I needed to make sure that the headlines didn’t go over 39 characters long or else they’d dissapear off the end of the background image. So any headline equal to or over 35 characters gets truncated and 3 dots added to the end. Then, using code based on an image script created by majinsoftware the headlines are outputted onto the background graphic and the whole thing is bundled as a PNG. Click on more for the code and links to download the files. (more…)