My test bed for new features for System3CS, and for me to ramble on about general random crap that interests me http://visualante.org/s3cs/ http://visualante.org/s3cs/?id=13 - http://visualante.org/s3cs/?id=15 I have made as RSS feed available today for Visualante.org. It will only contain public pages for now, and only the latest five at that. You can get the feed from here. If you have any problems with the feed, make sure that your reader supports RSS 2. If so then please feel free to contact me and tell me all about your woes I must admit that RSS is something that's fairly new to me, but I'm quickly appreciating the advantages of RSS. System3CS will soon have an integrated RSS system that will allow you to build your own homepage from the systems own RSS feeds:Imagine that you have an application based System3CS installation. Your modules could each be generating their own statistics. Your discussion forum could be handing out information on unread threads and your email module could be telling you about each of your unread messages. You could use these internal feeds on your personal System3CS homepage with ease. They would also be available for other modules to read where necessary. Do you see why this is something I'm keen to explore? http://visualante.org/s3cs/?id=12 Years ago I worked in a call centre dealing with Microsoft Windows based PCs. I was on the phone when the MSBLAST/Blaster virus hit in August 2003 and we saw the call queue sky-rocket from about 20 in the queue, to well over 100. At that point a select few of us were taken off of taking calls and tasked with finding a solution. I was one of those agents, and within the hour we had a guide sent around the call centre to advise agents on both the hardware and software lines. Today I speak to agents who had received that guide and it turns out that it's somewhat legendary. Well, I came home that night and I wrote up what information I had. I screen grabbed the process, including the errors you would see and published it on Visualante.org. Search Google for "Visualante MSBlast" and you'll find loads of mention of my article, including one on The Register that sent average visits to Visualante.org up from about 100 a day to over 7000 by 9am that morning. I continued to add to the information that I had for a few months, and even added more information when the Welchia variant, which had the same side effect (restarting unpatched PCs) while removing Blaster itself, appeared. Eventually I realised that Visualante just wasn't the place for this kind of information and I set up a new site; NewTechHelp. For a while NTH prospered, but after I moved on from the call centre I was no longer in a position to maintain the site. I asked for help but nobody responded. I put a poll on the site asking whether anyone would miss the site and still, nobody responded. So, I let the domain lapse and the information disappeared forever. Recently, the same people who told me that my guides were legendary, told me that the information I had on NTH and Visualante in those days was sorely missed when removed and it got me thinking that I could put some of it back. OK, so it's five years old at the time of writing, but maybe some people still find it useful? Well, I've got to admit that I'm tempted, but I'm not going to. If you're still suffering the effects of viruses like Blaster then consider the fact that it only affected PCs with the original version of Windows XP and Windows 2000. There was a patch released in late July 2003 that fixed the vulnerability that allowed Blaster on to your PC. Let this be a lesson to you. A simple firewall would block it, as would a router. Or having Service Pack (SP) 1, 2 or 3 installed on your Windows XP. There is no good reason for you to still be at risk. Turn automatic updates on and let Windows XP protect you. If you've got Vista, or a Mac, then this is of no consequence to you, but people, really, if you still need this information then you are WAY behind the times! Catch up! http://visualante.org/s3cs/?id=18 Progress is good. I've now implemented a whole raft of features in to System3CS that I hadn't even thought of originally, never mind the ones that I really wanted to get done:Offline Switch: I can now turn the site offline and only allow administrators and installers access to the site for maintenanceRewrite: The Apache webserver supports a module called mod_rewrite. It allows me to trick the client in to thinking it is looking at a completely different page to what it actually is. What that means to you is that now, not only does index.php?id=home take you to the home page, but also home.htm, home.html and just plain home works. This applies to any page with a namePer-Page Tags: System3CS supports meta-tags, and has a site-wide setting stored in the site configuration. It is now possible to override these tags on a per-page basis. So the tags for this page are different to the tags for pages without specific tagsTag Counter: On a related subject to the previous point, each tag is now recorded for how many times it is used. This allows quick searching on common tags, as well as producing tag clouds where wantedDatabase Based Config: I have moved the configuration back in to the database. The file-based system wasn't flexible enough, so it had to go. The configuration file at present contains the actual database connection information, and processes the values retrieved from the database. This function will be moved to another page in due courseAll in all I'm pleased with the progress. I still have a way to go before I'm happy to call it finished (as in I can leave people to operate it themselves, without requiring manual input), but it's close enough to being able to be released to the masses now