Category: MacVillage.net

Your (My) Macintosh Portal

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MacVillage.net

Quick shoutout to standards

Just a real quick shoutout to standards. MacVillage.net’s News System… currently in development, will support valid RSS feeds. That’s right. Valid. I implemented the feature last night. It’s working with relative success (still not complete, but valid).

Still to be done is indexing, searching, mailing, and several dozen bugs. Not to mention the mentioned features to be done are going to be buggy at first.

Standards are a wonderful thing no?

Any suggestions on other feed formats other than RSS? Would something else be recommended in addition? I’ll most likely implement a JavaScript feed (just insert a javascript line to output headlines to a page). Other formats? Let me know, I’m open to making it a very standards compliant system. When I’m done it should be 100% valid CSS, HTML, RSS, anything else.

I’m a fan of standards (as you can tell). I think they make the net what it is. And will make the net what it’s capable of. Standards are what make the Internet special. Millions of computers, many different types. All connecting to the same data source. All interpreting the same data. Pretty cool no? Wasn’t to long ago 2 computers made by different companies couldn’t do anything together.

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MacVillage.net

Tons of work tomorrow

Tomorrow I’m hoping to get a lot done on MacVillage.net to get it ready. Still no launch date. But hopefully I will have one soon. It’s going slow. I’m getting frustrated, but will bring it back.

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MacVillage.net

New News System

The new News System for MacVillage.net 4.0 (Daemon of the Abiss) is coming along smoothly, but slowly.

Indexing, searching WAP interface, and RSS Syndication are still to be tackled. They are the more complex, and tedious tasks.

What’s nice is that’s it’s pretty portable and easy to upgrade. Once I get all the necessary stuff plugged in for it to be ready for use, I will beta test for a while (perhaps solicit others to take a look), and put it in production for 3.0, to get the last bugs out.

I can easily revamp the entire system, and put a new version out, with minimal downtime, unless the DB needs serious work (which I doubt).

Once the new system is in place, I can begin the final process of moving over the old site into the new framework and complete the transition.

Then we can start rolling.

So it’s still a while off, but it’s coming along. Each day is a step forward (thankfully). It’s not a moonwalk, but actual forward progress.

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MacVillage.net

Apple Ads

Lately I’ve been seeing quite a few Apple ads on MacVillage.net. Since it’s done through an ad broker, I don’t know exactly what’s up. But I hope they keep it up.

With the relaunch, I hope to have things churning real soon. Unfortunately things are going a bit slower than I wanted. But they are moving. MacVillage.net should be ported to the new system within the next 6-8 weeks. The rest of the site (with the exception of a few seconds) should follow soon after. By years end Mac PR should move to the new system.

The new system is nice… believe me. It’s worth the wait.

Mac Village.net 4.0 “Daemon of the Abiss” WILL BE WORTH THE WAIT!

That is my promise. It will be worth the wait.

Thanks to all who have been so supportive of the site. It’s coming back, and I will be making up for lost time. The new system will be managable, meaning I could give the site the treatment it deserves. The old system required to much manual effort. It was a losing battle. Rather than suffer and die, I killed the old system, in hopes of a new one. One that is turning out to be pretty dang good if you ask me.

It’s going to be something. A lot has changed already behind the scenes. And quite a bit more will be changing in the near future.

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MacVillage.net

Slow progress

MacVillage.net 4 (Daemon of the Abiss) is moving along slowly, but surely. Redoing pretty much the entire site. HTML and all. As well as new architecture and backend. So it’s massive and slow.

Several pages are running in staging (without a design). Somre more complex pages including Mac PR, and News should be done this weekend. Then it’s the homepage, my page, as well as a few more “complex” pages. Then it’s time to tie up the lose ends in the authentication system, rebuild the wirless site. (template, content, the works), template all remaining pages (several hundred). Create a design/stylesheet, debug, test, deploy.

Then my normal mantainance/R&D job begins. It’s a labor of love I guess.

So good progress, but slow progress. More updates soon.

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MacVillage.net

Daemon of the Abiss Update

Several Key developments today:

  • Site Status Page is now working. The first template with any form of logic. Sitting on staging, and performing exactly as planned (thanks to CMS system’s creator’s help).
  • WAP Authentication is now roughed in, and working. This opens up a whole new can of worms. I found several inefficiencies, and tons of bad coding in the system while working to put this in. It’s patched for now. But before MV Authentication 1.4 goes into full production use (like it isn’t in “production” use now), it’s going to need some reworking on login and logout.
  • Breakdown of work to be done (TONS OF IT). Should cruise when I’m off from work and hanging out home with family.
  • Lots of other little “tweaks” to the already templated pages, as well as file system layout.
  • New IDE is making life a lot easier. Coding has never been so easy. And to think there was a time when I used Simple Text. Then BBEdit Light, then PHP Edit (which I still like, but is way to buggy).
  • To go with the above, download (and backup) of entire website file system including CMS.
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MacVillage.net

New Backend showing signs of promise

MacVillage.net behind the scenes is starting to show signs of promise again. The backend’s core is in place, and so is the general file architecture. Now comes the hard part:

  1. Porting the existing contents over to the new architecture
  2. Redesigning the site
  3. Finishing the authentication system upgrades
  4. Deployment
  5. The 10 billion other things I won’t bother mentioning, since they are all trivial, yet critical.

Boy do I have my work cut out for me the next few weeks.

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MacVillage.net

Content Management Systems are good

Yes they are. I finally have selected a free CMS that will be implemented across MacVillage.net for now (and eventually on all other “Sub sites” of Accettura Media. This is great news, since it now clears the way for finally redoing the design for something more standards compliant and browser friendly. Time to put the creative hat on now.

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MacVillage.net

MacVillage.net 4.0 Commencement

I’ve started work on MacVillage.net 4.0. Can’t say much… but the new design is in the works. It will include the capacity for more features to be implemented, without so much work. And better navigation abilities. Will be good. No idea when it will be done… I’m in real early stages.

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MacVillage.net

MacVillage.net News and such

Well, macvillage.net is starting to come back to life again. After a week of server chaos. The backend is starting to look OK, less database errors due to mySQL timeouts, mail seems to be slightly more reliable (admin mail), and such. The NewsEngine 3.0 Project is nearing completion, after 2 days of work. Most of the news sources are found, and building properly, although crontab for some odd reason is acting up (again). Go figure. As soon as I can call and get that straitened out, we should be up and running with news in most categories. Then I need to fix the VersionTracker updates being out of sync.

After that, I will repair/update/remodel/someotherverb the Channel Pages, and move weather into a channel. And fix that annoying mail bug in weather. Perhaps a few layout fixes as well, while I’m digging through the code.

Then onward… to the next project(s).