VOID-STAR.NET » F.A.Q.

What 's with the name?: It's a nerd joke. A void * is a kind of pointer in C-family languages that is untyped. Conceptually, it's like a 'box' that can either hold everything, or holds nothing at all. I thought of the name one day in a CompSci lecture circa April 2003. I liked it because it was dual-purposes; it was extremely nerdy, but would sound very glamtrash to anyone who'd never done intermediate 'hard' programming. Just what I was looking for.

How long have you had a domain for?: About a bajillion years. My first domain was mokushi.net, which I shared with Matt. I don't really remember when we first registered it, but I believe it was at least 1999. Not long after I moved to my own domain, synthetickiss.com; again, I'm not sure of the date. I stayed at sk.com until 2003, when I moved to the current domain.

Prior to owning a domain, I had at least a year or two experience with shitty free host pages; first on GeoCities and then places like Xoom and Crosswinds.

Why register?: You don't have to, of course, but registering gives you a few benefits, most notably the fact that you'll no longer have to enter in your name, email and URI every time you make a comment, nor go through the CAPTCHA. The other benefit is content-related. Every now and again I make posts that are 'hidden' to various degrees; sometimes registered-only, sometimes based on specific user groups. To have access to these posts you must be registered. Registered users may also use these security settings on their own comments.

Remember if you register to re-grab your RSS feed link; registered users will get a different feed URI that will appear something along the lines of /rss2/username/abc123. This feed will alert you when a new hidden post has been made.

Do you allow trackbacks?: Yes! I really like trackbacks and think it's a shame they're not more widely adopted. That being said, they are a great target for spammers. To combat this, I've put in a kind of 'check phrase' system similar to the CAPTCHAs used for comments. Each post has a keyword that must be added to the end of the basic trackback URI linked on the post page. The end result would be something like /trackback.php/12345/keyword. The key itself is written in the hover text to the trackback link, in the form of trackback? [ key: keyword ].

Why does this site look terrible in IE6?: Theoretically, the CMS should serve up a different layout for IE users but it seems to be broken right now and I couldn't quite be bothered to fix it. The actual reason is because the layout uses both 24-bit transparent PNGs and (ohmigawd) CSS such as pseudo-elements and position. You can still read the damn thing but it looks terrible, and quite frankly I don't care; I don't design sites for Netscape Navigator 4, either. IE7 looks marginally better, but still not as clean as the site is supposed to look. There are plenty of browsers out there that aren't running on outdated rendering engines. Go get one of those instead.

What logware does the site run on?: Since somewhere in 2001 I've been using a custom logware/CMS script called sk.log, named after my previous domain; synthetickiss.com. It's currently somewhere around v6.0.2. v0.6+ of sk.log is not publicly released and with my track record it's highly likely that it never will be. v0.5.2 is 'public' but I don't recommend that anyone use it. For anything. Ever. The v0.6 release was an almost total re-write.

Astute readers may note that the development of sk.log pre-dates that of b2 (now Wordpress). As far as I'm aware, it is the first PHP-based logware-cum-CMS system. Go me.

Where are your icons and images from?: The icons for the current theme (Century) are slightly resized versions of the infamous Silk icon set from FamFamFam. The emoticons are taken from here with the heart icon from here. It has also been pointed out to me that I'm using a background tile from k10k, so I'd better credit them, too.

The image in the header was drawn by yours truly.

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