Funktastic Programming Adventures in Web Development

A news report on the Internet mentioned that a lot of sites were being hacked due to vulnerabilities in phpBB forum software. I believe that I have been a victim of this malicious virus. Somebody broke into our server about 8 months ago and wiped out a lot of our files. Specifically, they targetted all “index.html” and “index.php” files on the server.

It really makes me angry to see poorly written code such as this on software that was so widely used. Open-source software writers should work harder to maintain security in their products in order to promote industry acceptance. It’s events like these that give Microsoft another good excuse to badmouth Open Source and free software.

I’m glad that I have switched to Phorum instead of phpBB. It runs a lot faster than phpBB and has a large number of plug-ins to extend the functionality. I converted my forum site: WinXP Forum to this software just last month.

I now have a great deal of respect for anybody that builds a site where the layout is controlled entirely by CSS. That’s what I have attempted to do for this blog and so far it has been anything but easy. I may just through everything out the window and just go with HTML tables.

The problem is that every browser supports and implements CSS differently. In order to make the site look consistant across multiple browsers, you have to create “hacks” in the CSS definition file. This is largely the fault of the companies that develop web browsers. Even though there may be similar issues with HTML tables, I’m sure it’s a lot less of a problem than CSS because the standards have been established a long time ago and more of the bugs have been worked out.

So my next task in developing the site templates for this blog will be to do away with all of the “layout-specific” css and convert that into tables. I hope to have most of the site converted to the new look within the next week. I’ll keep you posted of course.

As you can see, I have recently imported my blog entries from Blogger into this (my new blog). The process went pretty well and I got all my blog posts in here. That should be the last time that I move my blog for a long while. I might buy a new domain name for this blog but the physical location will not change anytime soon.

I need to get a site design done on this blog. Right now it is just showing the standard Moveable Type template which is basically a boring blue square. I need to get a hang of the template system and then decide on a design I want to use.

Next step after that will be to submit this blog site to the search engines. I thought having my blog on blogger.com which was just bought by Google would help my blog get listed faster. Months later, it still hasn’t shown up on their index. Because of this and the fact that I want to have more control over the code that runs the blog by using an open-source solution, I switched to Moveable Type.

I previously had a blog posted on blogger.com which I have had running for the past couple of months or so. However, I wanted more control over my blog space and I couldn’t get that by using a “pre-packaged” blog-hosting service. I needed to look for a new solution.

So I decided to host my own blog using our own servers. I work for a very small web design and hosting company called Orvado Technologies that builds and develops dynamic web sites. Actually, I don’t just work for them, I am an owner and partner in the company.

In this blog I will relate my many experiences developing code for our web hosting company and developing products that will help launch our company to the next level of profitability. You may also find some of my personal experiences posted here.

This blog is run on a Unix server that is running Movable Type web log software. So far I am very pleased with it but at this point I have barely scratched the surface. This should be the permanent home for my web log for some time to come. That is, unless I decide to buy a second-level domain name for this site… Stay Tuned!

I’ve just been poring over the code for Phorum, the php message board
code. The code is easy to follow and well written. I commend the folks
who put this together. In addition to using this forum code to run my
site (http://www.winxpforum.com),
I have also planning on porting a lot of code from ASP to PHP. This code
is an excellent primer for how to write a PHP application for the
Web.

In particular, it excels at creating a modular architecture
with templates for each page on the site. You can change the site by
simply editting the templates. By keeping the code and the templates
separate, it makes it a heckuva lot easer on the HTML developer to mold
the forum to fit their site’s template.

Another thing the code does
well is to provide common “hooks” which you can attach events to. An
event can be either a PHP script to include at the appropriate location,
or a PHP function to be called. Using this system, it allows others to
create plug-ins that can easily be integrated into the system. I will
definitely be using this architecture when porting my site administration
tools from ASP to PHP.

Heh, I bet you thought that I had died. Nope, sorry to disappoint you - I’m still alive and kicking. Haven’t felt like updating my blog for a while. Maybe I just wanted the previous story to stay up on top of my blog for a little bit longer. I was actually considering giving up this blog for one of my own.

The reason why is that it is much better to have complete control over your blogging software. Especially if you are a programmer such as myself who owns his own hosting business. By running my own blog software, I can add new features whenever I like, I can host paid advertisements here and I can get detailed web statistics about the traffic to my site and search engines.

Recently I have been really busy dealing with Linux configuration issues with our server. We are going to be migrating some of our applications to Linux in the very near future. It’s imperitive that we get everything switched over during the course of the upcoming new year. Our hosting contract will expire in about a year and we are thinking of going entirely Unix. There is a lot of work ahead of us (especially for me) so I’d
better get crackin!