This was a dose of sad news to find in my RSS Reader this morning, FileFront shutting down March 30, this is almost as bad as when Stage6 went away. :(

Edit: Turns out some people have acquired FileFront and will be keeping it running wooooo

Oh wow a real blog entry! This is madness!

Okay so, here I was, minding my own buisness, coding some HTMLz for a client. I started getting a lil bit drowsy so I decide to crack open a Rockstar. Now, I usually have this LED multicolour lamp on while I code at night so I can see around my desk. I have it on blue most of the time because I find it bright enough to see objects lying on my desk but dim enough that it doesn't cause crazy eye numbing contrast. Anyways, as I was cracking open the Rockstar I noticed something very strange. The liquid inside was opaque and kind of pukey coloured. At first I thought it had gone bad or something, so I turned on the light to look at it. I poured some out into a cup and it looked normal.

That left me wondering why it had looked so strange before. Being the clever person I am I decided to shine the light on it and see what happened.

Oh god what the fuck.




Seriously, what the fuck.

I'm jordan I suck cocks

Fix BBCode so it doesn't break W3Validator with Strict dtd kay? Thx.

So my laptop overheated last week and I believe it fried its video card, forcing me to switch onto my much less powerful desktop. I ordered a new video card for my laptop off EBay a few days ago, and I'm expecting it to arrive this Monday, hopefully it will fix the problems I was having but if it doesn't I don't see myself replacing the laptop for at least a month. My desktop really can't handle WoW so I have had a lot of time to waste doing other things, and I ended up spending most of that time working on the website. I added a search tool to the Admin section, it was my first time playing with the MySQL full-text search tools which really simplified things compared to how I made the search tool by hand in PHP on the old site. User management is in for the admins now so no more messing with the DB, and the new rank system has been deployed which is pretty much the biggest feature addition so far over the old site. The new ranks allow us to give users permission to make front page post while not making them fully powered admins. We have already started being targeted by spam bots again so I put in a quick anti-spam math question in for guest comments, and we are able to ban specific IPs again. All the random site settings, like the page titles and posts per page, are controlled by the admin page now. I also setup the RSS feed for the new site which is available Here. BBcode is back, although I haven't setup quite as many tags as we used to support I stuck with things I deemed important.
Here's the list of supported tags
[ b]text[ /b] - Bold Text
[ i]text[ /i] - Italic Text
[ u]text[ /u] - Underlined Text
[ img]URL[ /img] -
[ url]URL[ /url] - http://malandaven.com
[ url=URL]text[ /url] - MalAndAven.com

Code:

[ code]text[ /code]

Quote:

“[ quote]text[ /quote]”

NickMass posted:

“[ quote=name]text[ /quote]”
With all the above complete there really isn't much more for me to do on the site, besides add new features, so I'm considering the rewrite of the old site pretty much complete which is a nice thing to have done.

So, we have been running on the new CodeIgniter based site backend for about a month now but I haven't bothered to make a post about it until now, mainly because there hasn't been anything interesting enough to post about, but now I have done something that may affect one person sometime in the future perhaps many years from now when they accidently visit this site. Because of some changes I made to the users table of the database all old user accounts have to be remade, benefits of this are passwords being stored in an ever so slightly more secure manor, and users now having registration dates associated with their accounts.

That's not all that has changed around the site though, there is a new design which you can clearly see, and I think it is the first time one of the site designs completely craps out in IE6, but I think by now everyone has had enough time to upgrade to IE7 if not, screw you. The site now actually has valid XHTML instead of spouting out a few hundred errors if you ever tried to validate it. Posts can now been sorted into categories when we create them and then can be linked to separately like you can see with most of the links in the side box. Each category can be given its own theme (example here: http://malandaven.com/index.php/blog/category/9). The archive is no longer gay as hell, and I don't need to worry about it crapping out on its self if I forget to post one month. Changing the layout of the site can now be done in separate files instead of digging through thousands of lines of PHP. Avatars are gone, they were annoying as hell to deal with and no one used them. Admin page is super sexirific but you will never see it. And many MANY other smaller optimizations, the site is 100% new code, nothing from the old crappy backend was reused.

Unfortunately there is still quite a bit left for me to get done, though I have all the vital things finished I believe. For the moment BBCode is no longer working, I'll set it up sometime but it is pretty low on my list of priorities. To manage user accounts I have to go in and mess with the DB by hand because I haven't finished that section of the Admin pages. I would also like to completely restructure the ranks system, I have a pretty good idea of how I'm going to do it but I need to finish the boring manage user crap before I get started. Simple site settings (like the title of the page and how many posts show up on each page) need to be changed within the code, no way to do it from the Admin pages yet. And I'm sure I will find many other things that need to be done as I'm messing with the site, but I will get it all finished, eventually.