Reginanana

2006-11-22T00:11:00.000-08:00

New Features

A couple of new features have gone up, quietly, in the last couple weeks that I wanted to point out to everybody:

All images on the site are now served up from Amazon's S3 Service. This means that everything from stock site images, to user avatars, to skin screenshots, to cached skin images should be served up faster and more reliably. Some of this has been in place for more than a month, but I finally finished up everything last week.
Speaking of images, you'll now see user avatars in more places, like the comments lists on the skin info pages.
Speaking of images again, BlogSkins will now cache your images for you for skins that support previews. That means you don't have to worry about going over your bandwidth allowance at Photobucket or where ever. Also, BlogSkins lists the images it knows about underneath the skin download link, so users can download your images from here instead of somewhere else.
By popular request, I now allow the ~~strikethrough~~ tag in the forums, and support [url][/url] tags for making links.
I'm finally doing something with user ratings. Users with ratings less than or equal to -3 (there's currently 13 of them) may not post comments until their ratings rise above this level. I'm flexible on the rating limit, and may adjust it up or down as I see fit.

As always, there's more to come!

test1

2006-07-14T21:41:00.000-07:00

Written accounts of the early history of Singapore are sketchy and the names used to refer to the country are varied. In the third century, a Chinese account gave reference to Singapore as Pu-luo-chung, or "island at the end of a peninsula". In 1320, however, the Mongol court sent a mission to a place called Long Yamen (Dragon's Tooth Strait) to get elephants. This probably referred to Keppel Harbour. A visitor from China, Wang Dayuan, who came around 1330, called the main settlement Pancur (spring), and reported that there were Chinese already living here. One of the earliest references to Singapore as Temasek, or Sea Town, was found in the Javanese Nagarakretagama' of 1365. The name was also mentioned in a Vietnamese source at around the same time. By the end of the 14th century, the Sanskrit name, Singapura (Lion City), became commonly used.

At that time, Singapore was caught in the struggles between Siam (now Thailand) and the Java-based Majapahit Empire for control over the Malay Peninsula. According to the Sejarah Melayu (Malay Annals), Singapore was defeated in one Majapahit attack, but Iskandar Shah, or Parameswara, a prince of Palembang, later killed the local chieftain and installed himself as the island's new ruler. Shortly after, he was driven out, either by the Siamese or by the Javanese forces of the Majapahit Empire. He fled north to Muar in the Malay Peninsula, where he founded the Malacca Sultanate. Singapore remained an important part of the Malacca Sultanate; it was the fief of the admirals (laksamanas), including the famous Hang Tuah.

test2

2006-05-27T18:48:00.000-07:00

The term fashion usually applies to a prevailing mode of expression, but quite often applies to a personal mode of expression that may or may not adhere to prevailing ideals. Inherent in the term is the idea that the mode will change more quickly than the culture as a whole. The terms "fashionable" and "unfashionable" are employed to describe whether someone or something fits in with the current popular mode of expression. The term "fashion" is frequently used in a positive sense, as a synonym for glamour and style. In this sense, fashions are a sort of communal art, through which a culture examines its notions of beauty and goodness. The term "fashion" is also sometimes used in a negative sense, as a synonym for fads, trends, and materialism.

Fashions are social psychology phenomena common to many fields of human activity and thinking. The rises and falls of fashions have been especially documented and examined in the following fields:

Architecture, interior design, and landscape design
Arts and crafts
Body type, clothing or costume, cosmetics, grooming, and personal adornment
Cuisine
Dance and music
Forms of address, slang, and other forms of speech
Economics and spending choices, as studied in behavioral finance
Entertainment, games, hobbies, sports, and other pastimes
Etiquette
Management, management styles and ways of organizing
Politics and media, especially the topics of conversation encouraged by the media
Philosophy and spirituality (One might argue that religion is prone to fashions, although official religions tend to change so slowly that the term cultural shift is perhaps more appropriate than "fashion")
Technology, such as the choice of programming techniques

Of these fields, costume especially has become so linked in the public eye with the term "fashion". The more general term "costume" has been relegated by many to only mean fancy dress or masquerade wear, while the term "fashion" means clothing generally, and the study of it. This linguistic switch is due to the so-called fashion plates which were produced during the Industrial Revolution, showing novel ways to use new textiles. For a broad cross-cultural look at clothing and its place in society, refer to the entries for clothing and costume. The remainder of this article deals with clothing fashions in the industrialized world.