News | Coincidence? I think not.

Errors galore!

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 20:46:46 +0000

There was an error on the website which lost any votes made in the past 48 hours. I’m working to restore these, but it’s possible that they might be lost forever. It’s not as easy as just restoring from backup: it was the sort of error where data wasn’t properly saved in the first place!

I’m pretty sure it’s working again now though. Unfortunately, sorting this out means that I won't have time to upload some new graphs to celebrate that it’s 20/10/2010 today, at least for those of us who use DD/MM/YYYY-formatted dates!

(Personally, I prefer ISO 8601 dates.)

On an unrelated note, I should probably set up a better News page someday!

Happy 10/10/10, everyone!

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 10:10:00 +0000

(sorry if this shows up twice in RSS readers: I pressed the wrong button when I first tried to write this article!)

Two things prompted this update:

Continued stagnation of the website. This has become somewhat embarrassing, to be honest. My excuse is that I’ve been quite busy lately, and haven’t had much time to make new graphs.
It’s the 10^th of October 2010! In other words, it’s 10/10/10.

Spurred on by these realisations, I decided (perhaps foolishly) to upload ten new graphs. Yes, ten. It took a while. Fortunately, you don’t have to wait a while: the graphs are listed and linked below!

Note: You can also go to the list of all graphs sorted by age. These ten new graphs will, conveniently enough, fill the entire first page of this list!

Oops.

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 08:30:47 +0000

It seems that I’ve let this website stagnate for a couple of months. Sorry about that! I had been planning on making its return to activity slightly more impressive than this, but I realised that this would lead to the following endless spiral of procrastination:

Oh no, I haven’t done anything for a while. I should plan on doing something big when I return to make up for it.
Hmm, this big thing is taking a while. I’m too lazy to finish it all at once.
Argh, now it’s even later. Now I definitely need to do something cool.
GOTO step2;

So, nothing too impressive yet, except for five new graphs I've uploaded. Be on the lookout for bigger changes in the future though! (one of which, I think, should be to enable comments on News items )

Something Slightly Mathematical

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 19:38:58 +0000

Something interesting has happened, which may amuse those of you who are comfortable with simple algebra.

Earlier I uploaded three new graphs, bringing the total number of graphs on the site to 37. I then felt like finding out how many possible combinations of two graphs there now are.

You may be aware that the number of unique combinations of two items chosen from a set of n items is given by ½n(n - 1). So, the number of possible pairs of graphs that exist now is given by:

(possible pairings) = ½ × 37 × 36 = 666

There now exist six hundred and sixty-six possible pairs of graphs.

Coincidence? I THINK NOT.

Okay, switchover should be complete.

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 09:24:15 +0000

As you've probably gathered, we've just moved to a new server! Now I don't need to worry that getting too much traffic could knock out the website. Also, it means the “testserver” bit of the URI isn't needed: we're now “coincidenceithinknot.com” rather than “testserver.coincidenceithinknot.com” or “ouch.my.hands.this.is.a.long.uri.can.i.stop.typing.soon.coincidenceithinknot.com”. Thumbs up for that!

Thumbs down for the lack of new graphs recently. I'll try to throw together a couple of graphs today and have those up for your amusement later.

(As always, dear reader, you are also welcome to make and submit graphs via the form at the bottom of the voting page.)

A little something to clog up your RSS reader

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 21:52:49 +0000

Just a little heads-up: the 'hottest' ordering on the Popular Graphs page now works properly! Previously it was showing pretty much exactly the same as the 'default' ordering, but I've fixed that now.

(For the techies among you: I had previously used MySQL's NOW() function instead of the CURDATE() function when calculating the age of each pairing. This was of course foolish, because I was subtracting a date from the current UNIX time in seconds. Basically, everything looked like it was the same age!)

Feeds now available!

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 11:56:19 +0000

There are now more RSS/Atom feeds available! They're all listed on the list of all feeds.

There are three options of things to subscribe to: News, Graphs and Pairs of Graphs. News, of course, updates when this news thing does, Graphs updates whenever a new graph is uploaded, and Pairs of Graphs updates when pairs of graphs are upvoted.

But, since nobody probably wants to be bombarded with dozens of updates per day, there are three separate feeds for pairs of graphs, each of which only shows pairs above a certain level of popularity. This basically means you can choose (within certain limits) how often you want to hear about new graphs.

Any comments, complaints or suggestions about this new feature should be directed at the feedback page. I'm very interested to hear what you think of the new features :)

P.S.: I'll be uploading a few more graphs sometime this weekend. If anyone wants to submit a graph of their own, feel free to use the form at the bottom of the front page!

edit: Spotted a couple of small problems with these RSS feeds - they seem to be updating more frequently than expected. I'm looking into that at the moment.
edit #2: Should be working now.

Site improvements

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 08:52:50 +0000

So, it turns out that some people like this website. That's pretty cool!

Just to warn you ahead of time though: you might come across an undiscovered problem with the site, since there are still some 'bugs' that need to be fixed.

At the moment I'm looking into a way to make an RSS/Atom feed for the Popular page. Basically that could tell you whether, for example, someone had just discovered a particularly funny pair of graphs on the voting page.

Speaking of graphs, I'll probably be uploading a few more sometime this week.

Welcome!

Mon, 31 May 2010 11:22:39 +0000

If you're new: hello, and welcome to “Coincidence? I think not.”!

Nothing to report at the moment. News about changes to the site will be reported here, so why not subscribe to the RSS feed? (or follow on Facebook/Twitter if that's how you roll)