Site History

March 26, 2006: Switched to full content for both RSS and Atom feeds.
February 26, 2006: Switched from hierarchical categories to tags (examples: format cloud and resource cloud).
January 7, 2006: Switched application servers. Now running Apache Tomcat.
December 17, 2005: Upgraded database server to MySQL5.
November 27, 2005: Converted all html pages to UTF-8. Actually, they could be US-ASCII since everything else is entity-encoded.
October 15, 2005: Loaded all the samples for various graphics file formats (for example: GIF Samples).
September 10, 2005: Reorganized the index of file format to make things easier to find. Probably about time I started adding to the formats available.
August 27, 2005: Version 0.2 of UnicodeInput, a utility to enter Unicode characters in Microsoft Windows.
August 7, 2005: Improved Browser Marketshare Stats. Might be time to recalculate them with something better than Webalizer.
July 3, 2005: Version 0.1 of UnicodeInput, a utility to enter Unicode characters in Microsoft Windows.
July 2, 2005: Updated the list of top-level domains (TLDs).
June 14, 2005: Added a simple date to milliseconds converter.
May 25, 2005: Added a online java.text.SimpleDateFormat test.
April 2, 2005: Added the list of Unicode versions.
March 13, 2005: Added a dotNet production server, so information from Microsoft's proprietary dotNet framework is online (Browser capabilities and all Unicode codepoints, for example: Airplane).
March 3, 2005: Added Site Search with Yahoo using their new REST API.
February 27, 2005: Added ImageMagick Identify which gives a lot of detail about an image, much more than JAI does.
February 20, 2005: Added RSS 2.0 and Atom news feeds.
February 20, 2005: Several fixes for Unicode codepoints above 0xFFFF (for example: U+02446D).
February 19, 2005: Added a very basic SimpleDateFormat pattern tester.
February 16, 2005: First mention on SlashDot.Org. It was in a low-rated post, though, so I can't say I survived a slashdotting.
February 12, 2005: Added a blog-like News section done.
February 6, 2005: Added Section 1 of the Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats (Table of Contents).
January 29, 2005: Added comments, see also and history to the Unicode character pages (for example: double quote).
December 26, 2004: Added links to the new Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats content from resources, MIME types and extensions.
December 19, 2004: Added memory to the FileFormat.Info web server.
December 18, 2004: Added Section 2 of the Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats (for example: TIFF Summary).
December 17, 2004: Added links between resources and fonts so people have a way to find the fonts (for example: Gentium Resource Info to Gentium Font Info.
December 6, 2004: First unplanned downtime (9 hours). Resin didn't restart after running out of memory. It seems like having Lucene index the Unicode fonts and Han characters took too much memory (as well as overwhelming the rest of the search results).
November 21, 2004: Added Unicode Han Characters (for example: U+56FD).
November 20, 2004: fixed a bug (extra leading zero) in the "How to type in Windows" for Unicode characters and added a detailed explanation of how to enter Unicode characters in Microsoft Windows and a list of code pages.
November 14, 2004: added a p3p.xml file and updated the human-readable privacy policy.
November 8, 2004: converted to Java 5. Everything worked! Seemed too easy, so I turned -Xlint:unchecked on...
November 6, 2004: added Unicode categories.
October 31, 2004: made separate pages for development technologies and production technologies used at FileFormat.Info.
October 31, 2004: split the UTF-8 Browser Test Page into separate pages for each Unicode Block.
October 30, 2004: revamped the Third-party Resources section, with a category listing and cross-links between related items.
October 24, 2004: added font support information pages to unicode blocks (for example: Dingbats).
October 24, 2004: added support for Pattern flags to the Online Regex Tester.
October 22, 2004: added HostIP.info's web service to the IP address GeoLocation page.
October 16, 2004: new CSS-based tabs (for example: Extensions and Unicode Characters). Design credit to Adam Kalsey.
October 15, 2004: fixed a really nasty problem with the Content-Type header that was causing problems on the Unicode Character Browser Test Page. (for example: Thorn).
October 15, 2004: added Google AdSense to all pages. Seems like some of the more commonly viewed ones didn't have it.
September 27, 2004: Subnet website finder that looks for websites on a range of IP addresses. Login required to prevent abuse!
September 25, 2004: enhancements to the SVG to PNG/GIF/JPEG conversion program to support height, width and quality.
September 21, 2004: added an Affiliates page in case someone's feeling generous.
September 16, 2004: added feedback for longer-running processes so people aren't left staring at a blank screen (for example: the SVG to raster conversion).
September 4, 2004: Mail-merge PDF labels (for example: Avery 5160) from text files.
August 17, 2004: Utilities to deal with Unicode Fonts.
August 15, 2004: Added font support information for Unicode characters (for example: the airplane).
August 8, 2004: Font Character Test to see what characters are in a given font.
July 27, 2004: Label Maker. Not really related to file formats, but hopefully useful.
July 11, 2004: PowerPoint to Flash converter.
July 11, 2004: Custom text for database driven pages, so some of the Unicode character pages can have details on them.
June 21, 2004: I browsed the site from work in the middle of the day for the first time, and it was very slow. Assuming the problem is bandwidth, I enabled gzip support. We'll see.
June 20, 2004: added Unicode Blocks Reference
June 6, 2004: added a Browser Capabilities page based on the Microsoft-proprietary dotNet System.Web.HttpBrowserCapabilities class.
June 6, 2004: added an Image Metadata Viewer for standard image types.
June 5, 2004: added metadata (standard PNG tEXt chunks) to Unicode character images
June 1, 2004: more pages with AdSense. Doesn't seem to be earning much.
May 31, 2004: added Tips section for random info that might be useful.
May 17, 2004: first visit from msnbot, Microsoft's robot
May 16, 2004: added Browser Stats page with fancy charts and whatnot.
May 15, 2004: got Webalizer up and running to generate some usage stats.
May 12, 2004: added IP geolocation page.
May 8, 2004: added bar charts with JFreeChart (Recent Searches and Trackback).
May 4, 2004: new PDF to plain text converter.
May 1, 2004: added Web resources section, though it is still a work in progress.
April 30, 2004: added code to put a FileFormat.Info badge in unicode character PNG's if they are being referred from an external page. Only one site (and in a discussion forum post) is doing it so far.
April 27, 2004: added New and Updated pages for the resources database.
April 20, 2004: improved Unicode character lookup to support common notations that people have used.
April 19, 2004: various enhancements to the search pages.
April 18, 2004: added Google AdSense to select pages (for example, the full-width dollar sign).
April 15, 2004: added New and Updated pages for the extension database, since I'm starting to update it occasionally.
April 11, 2004: added Registration, though for the moment, being registered doesn't get you anything special.
April 8, 2004: added a Glossary. Pretty sparse for the moment.
April 3, 2004: enhancements to Trackback to make it easier to find less-popular but interesting incoming links.
March 27, 2004: added Trackback page that shows incoming links by monitoring the REFERER header.
March 26, 2004: added "Remember Me" support for logins (design credit to Charles Miller).
March 24, 2004: first feedback from a user. He liked it! Thanks Tom!
March 10, 2004: added a Software section to resources.
March 10, 2004: first visit from Ask Jeeves/Teoma.
March 7, 2004: added SVG outlines for each Unicode Character (for example, the airplane).
March 6, 2004: added a Recent Searches page so you can see what everyone is searching for.
March 5, 2004: added tips to the site search to help people find unicode characters (which aren't indexed)
February 29, 2004: added MIME Type database.
February 25, 2004: switched to Caucho Resin. IronFlare doesn't seem to be serious about maintaining Orion.
February 24, 2004: added tips to the search results if the query is for a unicode character.
February 23, 2004: I'm appearing in Google's search results for various queries. All of a sudden lots of traffic. I hope everybody isn't disappointed.
February 22, 2004: added HTML named character entity reference and test page.
February 22, 2004: added option to search descriptions as well as the extensions.
February 21, 2004: internal changes to extension lists. The only visible change is that descriptions can have formatting and hyperlinks.
February 21, 2004: added thumbnails to books
February 16, 2004: added SVG to raster conversion.
February 15, 2004: added a Resources section (currently just books but easily expanded).
February 14, 2004: first visit from GigaBot, GigaBlast's robot.
February 10, 2004: added Unicode Character Search with wildcard and regular expression support.
February 9, 2004: added a feedback page. Let me know what you think!
February 8, 2004: added a search log and a recent searches page to view it.
January 28, 2004: started a JavaScript Information page.
January 27, 2004: switched Site Search to use Lucene.
January 25, 2004: dynamic text generator and font sample page.
January 24, 2004: new design for the home page.
January 11, 2004: md5sum and online hash tester.
January 5, 2004: initial Search system installed.
January 4, 2004: information and details about the installed Character Sets
January 3, 2004: information and details about each and every Unicode character
January 1, 2004: automatically generated Site Map and What's New pages
December 20, 2003: general Character set conversion tool
December 20, 2003: PC BIOS/MS-DOS (codepage 437) to UTF conversion
November 21, 2003: simple Regular Expression (Regex) Testing tool
November 19, 2003: Unix2Dos and Dos2Unix tools online
November 18, 2003: first visit from Zyborg, LookSmart's robot.
November 14, 2003: first visit from Slurp, Yahoo's robot.
November 13, 2003: ByteCount tool online
November 11, 2003: Bookmarks loaded
November 10, 2003: first visit from FAST-WebCrawler, All The Web's robot.
November 8, 2003: first visit from Scooter, AltaVista's robot.
November 6, 2003: first 404 (on my non-existent search results page)
November 6, 2003: first hack attempt (nsiislog.dll from Germany)
November 5, 2003: first visit from GoogleBot, Google's robot.
November 5, 2003: www.fileformat.info live!
October 31, 2003: Extensions directory loaded
October 31, 2003: Strings tool online
October 30, 2003: HexDump tool online