First of all my apologies to DeViLbOi, who indeed told me about e107 before Phil :p I tried it out yesterday but then realized that I probably am over complicating matters by installing a CMS when all I need is a way to point people to the new areas on my site without cluttering up the interface too much. As time goes on and I add the new stuff that I have in mind, a portal site may make sense but for the moment, I really should be OK with the current set up – if I can come up with a good interface 🙂

So speaking of interfaces, I’ve been working on layouts for both my sites – The Developer’s Corner and SM. You can see the new layout for SM at the site itself since I created it, liked it and put it up already :p The layout for this site is however something that I have been working on (on and off) for a while now. You can find the almost finished result here. Personally, I don’t like it much for some reason – maybe it tries too hard :p I don’t know if I really want to use that layout or come up with something a bit more simpler and clean-cut that I would like to use. I guess I’ll see what all of you think before I go one way or another on that one. In the meantime, the changes at the site keep on – slowly but surely. Unfortunately, due to the lack of time, I guess it’ll take a while for all of it to be finally in place and when it is, it will take a little more time for me to get back into coding. So bear with me 🙂

I’ve consolidated all the little adjuncts to this site into one place – now the forums are at forums.farook.org (sorry about the logging in problem that some people may have experienced during the changeover but it’s now fixed) and Solipsistic Meanderings is at sm.farook.org while the picture gallery I recently put up is at album.farook.org 🙂 I intend to add a couple of more sub-domains in the future which will add further functionality to the site but for the moment I think I am done with adding sub-domains and will now have to think about navigation.

I have been toying with either making the UI for this Blog a little more categorized so that people can get to all of these locations easily instead of having to hunt through a bunch of links on the sidebar. I did do the UI a while back and kind of worked out the kinks yesterday but have not uploaded it yet. Maybe I will do so today. If I don’t go with a revamped UI, then the other solution that I have had is to use a CMS (Content Management System) to do the main page and make this Blog just a part of that CMS. I don’t want to lose all my old entries and comments however (otherwise I would have simply switched over the main page to an MT blog maintained using BlogMan) and so will try to find a CMS which allows you to display external pages in some manner or form.

In my quest for such a CMS, I did try PostNuke yesterday but while I did get it to install, it seems a bit too bulky (and a bit buggy too since I could get the user page and the admin page working but not the main page) for my purposes. So I’ll probably drop PostNuke and look into XOOPS and e107 (which was suggested to me yesterday by Phil). If one of them works out, that would be good but if not, I can always use the layout that I’ve already created :p Speaking of layouts, I also want to do a new layout for SM but I’ll talk about that plus a few changes at SM itself over there – if I get the time that is :p

Things are moving and shaking at my site though you can’t see any changes :p I’ve been installing/experimenting with a lot of stuff and I intend to add a quite a bit of new functionality to the site. Unfortunately, all of these new things will mean that I have a new entry page or at least redesign the current main page since it’s getting way too crowded with all those links in the sidebar 🙂 I’m not sure how I am going to go about it but for the moment, I am not too worried about that since I am still in the throes of installing and customizing stuff.

Yesterday I worked with QBoard. Now I know that QBoard is usually a remote server-based tagboard solution but they have also open sourced it and called it Free QBoard. When I first downloaded it and read the installation instructions, it said something along the lines of “use a shell account and run the install.sh file” and I was daunted since I did not have shell access. Yesterday however, I decided to go through the actual install.sh file and see what it had and was able to duplicate all the steps without any shell access. I installed it but it wouldn’t work since there were database names hardcoded in the code and I was not using the default database :p So then I introduced a configuration file to the system and removed all the database name, host, user and password stuff from the code and made it always use the config file settings. I then discovered that even though the system was supposed to be free, it still used the general interface from the original site and still had an ad banner at the top, so I removed that too :p It now works fine and anybody can get their own free QBoard from my site (though I don’t think I’ll be offering that service generally … at least not yet :p) but I am now consumed by the desire to do further PHP/mySQL hacking <g>

Since the source for QBoard has not been worked on at all since it was released (at least as far as I can tell by looking at the SourceForge site) I was thinking of contacting the developers and submitting the changes I’d already made and to further customize the code so that no shell access is necessary at all. Currently the shell access is needed to replace hard coded paths with your own paths and this could easily be handled by the config file – I’ll just have to wade through about twenty files and replace hundreds of occurrences of the path with the variable representing it. I think I would like to do that since that would get me into a new area of development since I haven’t done much PHP but that would also mean another detour for me – why oh why can’t I just continue on one path of development? :p

Things have been rather hectic for me the last few days on the work front but I’ve decided to keep this journal to development related stuff and so you’ll have to read the other journal if you want the dope about why I’ve had a hectic week/New Year :p I wasn’t sure that this stuff I’m going to write should be on this journal either but since it’s about “site development” I guess it qualifies 🙂

First of all, I installed 4Image (sorry, don’t have a link handy and not even sure that’s the right name for the script set) which provides an online image gallery. If anybody’s interested, you can see a couple of shots of my ugly mug here :p I did it at first as a sort of test to see how good 4Image was but now I’m actually thinking of adding more pictures of family and perhaps even of Sri Lanka so that people can see where I live and the people around me of whom I talk all the time – or not so much :p

I’ve also been thinking of discontinuing the mirror sites and consolidating all the different areas of my web presence into one location so that I avoid some of the problems involved with multiple sites currently – such as the problems with updating and keeping multiple sites consistent. I also would like to bring all the mailing lists under my own control since the domain supports mailing lists but I don’t know how much of a support mechanism there is for mailing lists since I kinda like the archival features provided by Yahoo Groups. Existing users would not have to resubscribe since I can simply take the list from Yahoo and recreate the list here at farook.org – at least I hope so.

There are other things I want to do – new efforts I’d like to launch along the GroupHug lines to try and help people in our own little ways but I will not get into it all since I need something to write about tomorrow too – plus, I obviously will not get around to doing this all so soon :p

My efforts at site redesign still continue :p I’d give you a link to a sample but I don’t like the way the original layout turned out and would rather wait till I can get the second effort up today with the actual look I wanted. I’ll probably go back and redo bits of the layout but working in layers in PhotoShop has it’s advantages in that that I don’t have to redo all of my work – just certain bits 🙂 I’ve actually been enjoying my work in PhotoShop – it’s different from coding but gives you the same kind of satisfaction when something comes together just the way you wanted it. Of course, my problem usually is that I can imagine it but don’t have enough graphics knowledge to implement it :p Oh, I just realized why my layout doesn’t look the way I wanted it to – and now I realized why I can’t do it that way and retain a good HTML page which works at all resolutions :p Ah well, I still don’t know if it’s any good but I’ll be interested in your reactions when I can put up the next test page today …

In the meantime, I’ve also been turning over the idea of doing some PHP-based behind the scenes manipulation to let users choose different colored variations of the same style for the site. The code is definitely doable (heck other people are doing it :p) but I realized that at least one of the mirror sites would have to run off one of the other servers because it doesn’t have PHP installed on it. The problem there is that if the server with PHP were to be offline, the mirror server would not display the page properly either – unless I put in some sort of mechanism in place for that eventuality too. That seems to complicate things but I guess I should first get the layout out, then look into theme switching and then worry about using that on all of my sites :p

As for actual coding on Scope, Blog or BlogMan, I’m afraid that I’ve done nothing :p I still think there is some sort of a problem in my migration to Delphi 7.0 but can’t put my finger on it. I need to work on it but at the moment the call of PhotoShop is greater and so bear with me while I get PhotoShop out of my system and get back to coding :p

Well what do you know, another year :p I do wish everybody who reads this a very happy new year and hope that all your endeavours are successful and that all your dreams come true this year, even though I don’t really celebrate new years and stuff like that 🙂 But on to other matters – I’ve been working on some buttons for the site in PhotoShop and they kinda look nice – but I did them at a larger size and then resized them and after resizing, they don’t look *that* nice :p I am kind of considering using them as part of the new layout I plan to use for The Developer’s Corner and then have a matching colored site layout instead of the plain white I have had all these years. Then I thought, hey why not make each of the mirror sites a variation on a different color? And *then* I thought, why don’t I skin all my sites so that the visitors can select the color scheme they want but keep the default color scheme for each mirror site a different one? All of these seem pretty good ideas but will probably take up a lot of my time for the next few days if I’m going to implement them. I’m really not sure how much of it will get implemented and how much will not due to various constraints but I’m working on it …

I actually looked into skinning my site already. I installed Land Down Under (LDU) which provides a complete skinning engine for your site as well as forums, IRC chat and a host of other features and uses PHP and mySQL. The problem? Updates have to be done in the LDU interface itself and goes into the database and so bypasses my Blog-based system. I can easily overcome that by modifying the LDU code so that the main page articles are not taken from a database but instead are retrieved either by including an HTML file or a properly formatted text file which Blog created (and Blog can do that). However, that would still leave the two mirror sites out of the loop since they don’t have both PHP and mySQL installed on them to run LDU – at least, I don’t think so. So I scrapped the idea of LDU even though it is tempting to have the whole site with one common look and feel and have all the functionality I would need in one package. Oh well ..

I also managed to get some work done on the coding front and did manage to compile Scope again after some effort. I am still not sure of the new addressbar component and have no idea whether I’ve lost some features with this particular build of Scope or not since I haven’t had time to test. I do intend to do some work on Scope soon so that it isn’t so quirky and I also need to get cracking on BlogMan again so that I can finish the work and do a final release :p There’s just so much to do – how come nobody’s invented the 48-hour day yet? 🙂

While I can get a job done in any of the graphics editing programs – PhotoShop, PaintShop Pro or Fireworks to name a few – I’ve never been what you’d call a graphics person. I’m basically a dilettante who flits from one area of computer related stuff to another – graphics to 3D animation to web design and back but never stays with one thing except for programming :p However, I recently got some free PhotoShop tutorials for a couple of friends at work and then they asked me a few things about the tutorials and that got me searching for more tutorials and I suddenly find myself fully interested in graphics again 🙂 Of course, I have no idea how long this streak will last but I am tempted to actually utilize this interest this time and do a redesign of at least some of my sites and perhaps even go for variations on the same theme for the different mirror sites so that they can each be distinctive and yet retain a synonymous look. Will this happen or not? I really have no idea since I haven’t begun doing the actual work but at the moment I’m planning to :p

Speaking of work, I finally did get off my posterior and started doing some coding. I’ve been meaning to shift my development work to Delphi 7.0 for a while now because I hope that the toolbar problems in both Blog and BlogMan can be rectified in Delphi 7.0 and because Scope cannot be worked on under Delphi 6.0 if I’m running on Windows XP. The only reason that I kept on putting off the move to Delphi 7.0 was the fact that I would have to recompile a lot of the components that I use and also find Delphi 7.0 versions for the ones for which I don’t have the source. I decided that I’d put it off for long enough and finally did the move – at least as far as Blog and BlogMan are concerned. Scope is another story …

I discovered that I no longer have the custom addressbar component that I’d developed for Scope because the original addressbar component that I’d used was quirky. I did a full hard disk search and came up with two possible versions but now have no idea whether either of them is the correct one or if neither one is correct because they weren’t in the correct location. Ah well, I might have to go through doing the addressbar component all over again and I don’t even remember what I did originally. Plus, I still have to recompile one last component under Delphi 7.0 for which I didn’t have the source yesterday – I remember that being a problem under Delphi 6.0 and since I’m starting again from scratch for Delphi 7.0, that should prove to be a lot of fun too – oh joy, joy :p

In the meantime, I must say that I am not too impressed with the move to Delphi 7.0 either. A full compile of Blog used to take less than a minute under Delphi 6.0 but it takes several minutes now. I am not sure if that’s because this was my first run or not but I’ll have to do some further testing soon to see how long it takes. Plus, the final output file is slightly bigger in size! I am not too happy with these minor quirks and unless I find something on the plus-side to offset these problems, I may decide to stick with Delphi 6.0 for the time being – especially considering that I will have to stick with Delphi 6.0 anyway for some of my apps (like Nailer) which don’t have equivalent components for Delphi 7.0 yet …

I know there would have been some confusion with the site yesterday if you’d come over because you would have been in a constant redirect since the site would try to redirect you to itself :p Ah well, that’s all my stupidity :p What happened was that Jen became a hosting reseller and she was so sweet as to offer me free domain hosting and ask me to move in with her 🙂 So I took her up on her offer and set up farook.org as it’s own domain and moved all my files from Tripod over to farook.org. What I had forgotten though was that the index page for Tripod is now a redirection page and I didn’t realize this till just now when I checked to see if the site was up. So hopefully, I should get that fixed as soon as I post this entry but there maybe some slight site anomalies for the rest of the day while I bring farook.org up to date. And if anybody wants to get their own domain hosted at a pretty low cost and have all the trimmings that they could want (PHP, CGI, mySQL etc.) you might want to go see Jen at her hosting place. And since a lot of people have been kind enough to provide me space over the years, I might be willing to host a few development related sites/blogs for anybody who might want a subdomain at farook.org as well – totally free but space would be kind of limited and so it would have to be a small site 🙂

Hackers, viruses … what’s up with all this recent malicious activity? :p Now there seems to be a virus going around with my e-mail as the from address – or I might be getting bombarded with virus e-mails in the hope that at least one gets through :p Two of the messages were addressed directly to me and the other one was a returned from a mail server saying that the message was infected. Either way, if you do get an e-mail from me with attachments, do not open them unless I told you that I was sending you an attachment. I usually do not send an attachment to anybody unless we had discussed it and I’d gotten specific permission to send them an attachment. I just hate it when somebody uses my e-mail address to spread their viruses. Ah well, another joy of living in the global village I guess :p

I am still continuing to work on BlogMan. I’ve done some more bugfixes and removed a few annoyances that I’d come to be aware of as I continued to use it. I’ve also added a new feature to BlogMan that some may like but some may hate :p While it is possible to have multiple authors for a blog with Blogger and Movable Type, I have not seen either provide a facility for each individual user to have their own signature at the end of a post and so I added a new feature to BlogMan where you can define your own signature and it will be appended to the end of each post made by you 🙂 That particular feature seems to be working fine since Jen has already tested it out over at Solipsistic Meanderings.

I finally updated the Downloads page yesterday so that it is up-to-date and displays all the downloads that were missing from it and I also did some tinkering with the forums so that almost all the styles for the forums now display the RookSoft logo instead of their individual logos. Hopefully, I’ll have more time to devote to coding from tomorrow onwards since we are going to have the whole week off for Christmas but then again, you never know what will come up …

I know it’s been almost a week with no updates – sorry about that 🙁 There really hasn’t been much to write about for a while since I hadn’t done any development work at all and the only things to talk about were the same old stuff about bugs and user support :p But I’ve finally gotten out of the rut of inactivity and have gotten back into coding and so have stuff to write about – plus, there are new suggestions for Blog to be discussed by all and sundry 🙂

I’ve been coding BlogMan again – not with a vengeance but slowly whenever a new bug occurs to me :p Since the underlying code for BlogMan is based on Blog, there are a lot of artifacts left over from Blog that are either unnecessary or irritating. For instance, if you run both Blog and BlogMan at the same time and exit one and try to publish with the other, you will get an error because both still share the same temporary folder and the one to exit first deletes the temporary folder :p I need to fix that one still – I just remembered it. Then BlogMan has this irritating problem where it fills it’s INI file with icon information which is not there – this was something for the custom code snippets but there is a slight difference between Blog and BlogMan which causes this buggy behaviour in BlogMan. Then there are all those extra options in the Options dialog that BlogMan has no need for. So I intend to fix all of these things slowly and at the same time try to do UI changes so that depending on the type of server you connect to, the displayed UI elements would change.

In the meantime, I received an e-mail from a new Blog user who had some very interesting suggestions. She wanted the ability to have a title for each entry as well as a summary title for each day. Now I can’t even think of how to implement this UI-wise but has anybody ever needed to do such a thing before? If so, do you think this is something that Blog needs to implement? This user was actually full of a lot of good ideas – some asked fro before and some not. She also wanted the ability to insert some HTML code at the end of a set of entries for a given date – this would necessitate a BlogFooter section similar to the current BlogHeader section. This has been requested before but I never bothered to implement it since only one person needed it but I think I’ll open both issues to debate now – either here or on the forums .. over to you guys :p