You might not have noticed (no drastic changes) that yesterday we updated our blogging system to Wordpress 2.5.  It was quite exciting and scary at the same time to be honest. I had absolutely no idea if the project would be compatible with the new release and was quite worried that i would have to start out from scratch one again.

As you can tell, the transition went quite smoothly and we are now running on Wordpress 2.5. The only problem that i hit during the transition was relating to the login cookies. Wordpress 2.5 uses a new, secure method for storing cookies and so the pages sorta went haywire even if a user was logged in. I’m trying to figure out at the moment what changed were made to the login system and am configuring the functions as we speak.

Other than this, productivity has been at its peak level behind the scenes.. Oh yeah, I just bought a Garmin Nuvi 650 GPS unit a couple of days a go. The GPS is wild, it took me all around America without a single hassle whatsoever! Definitely recommend the unit to anyone who is direction challenged like myself.

Ahplace (our original host) is currently in the process of closing down for good, so that leaves us with the challenge to find a reliable and fast host with plans that match our specifications. Currently we are looking at two great hosts, one is Directspace Networks, and the other one is i6networks. You may notice some downtime as we test both the hosts out and decide once and for all which we will transfer the project to.

It’s shocking just how fast things change on the web. Just today i was introduced to a brand new concept of user management called, “Open-id”. The basic idea of open-id is fairly simple (Alcutally i had thought about making something like this years back but was discouraged by friends…). User signs up for a open-id account from various sites such as https://www.myopenid.com/. Now they may log-in into any site on the web accepting open-id’s without having to register! Its brilliant.

As we speak i am figuring out a way that i can implement this onto darknesfallz, and allow users to post using their open-id. If you notice any errors on the page, or something like that don’t be freaked out, its just me working on the script

Update:

My friend has advised me not to use openid at the moment as it poses a huge security flaw and in many ways he is right. The goal for Openid as i stated is to have a common user/password for all the websites you regularly visit. Now get this. What is someone manages to get into your openid account? Now that person has access to all the sites that you possibly use and can potentially cause huge amount of damage. Password leakages are not rare and even large companies like valve had been a victim of them!

Just a thought.

Hey guys,

as most of you can probably guess, i was extremely busy the previous week working on the site and other assignments from school. As Christmas closes in things tend go become a bit more stressful as just two weeks after the break we will have the final exam and semester two will start up. My plan is to update this blog at least once a week from now on, just so all our loyal visitors have something to look at while the site is still under construction.

To the subscribers that emailed us regarding when the registrations will be open, we thank you for the email as it motivates us to work on this project. To answer the question, we could actually open registrations at the moment i post, but currently we have decided not to as lots of adjustments are being made to the databases, the code for writing your own posts has not been written yet, and lots of other features that make the site easy to navigate have still yet to be configured.

As you can probably already see, the site is still in its bare bone stage, so expect Massive, Huge changes as we progress with the project! We are aiming at opening this site by next year for sure, so until then we hope you enjoy reading the articles!

So what exactly have i worked on this week? For starters i added a page which makes individual RSS feeds for each user, theres a navigation at top now (pretty) and the site was running a bit slow (Servers seem to be slow) so i had to recode some parts of the site and amazingly i managed to reduce some coding to half the original size! I am also currently working on an avatar system which allows users to individualize themselves, and i am also working on a profile page (What kind of a social networking site does not have a profile page?).

Another question i have received is, how long have i been programming with PHP. To tell you the truth, this is actually my first project (probably why i am so excited). I have only known php now for about 4 months. Overall it is a great language that i would recommend to anyone wanting to build dynamic websites.

The last thing that i would like to talk about before i sign-off is, “Why am i showing users the site instead of a random splash screen or something like that saying that it is currently in private beta?” The reason towards this is, i want to show people the amount of time and energy it takes to code one little thing. My friends/colleagues who know slim to none about making websites think that it is as easy as ordering a Big Mac from a local Mcdonalds… Really 40% goes into thinking how i am going to code a function, the other 40% goes into how to make the tool/function as easy to use as possible, 10% goes into actual coding, and the other 10% goes into fixing issues that Internet Explorer has… Going off topic, its sad that majority of people still use internet explorer 6 in order to browse the net. Internet Explorer has a history for making it a pain in the ass for designers as things always seem to render incorrectly in that browser than they do in opera and firefox. If you still use internet explorer 6, please upgrade to 7 today or switch to opera or firefox. Trust me on this one, they run a lot smoother and have less security vulnerabilities.

That’s all for this week, ill be sure to keep you all updated on the progress!

Can windows ever last more than two months?

Yesterday, after running flawlessly for two entire months, windows decided that it had enough. I boot the computer and receive a blue screen of death. That really scared the crap out of me as all the work on this site was placed on the computer. Thankfully the partition where all my “very” important data was is still safe. I think i have learned a lesson or two about being prepared for worst case scenarios though.

Now to the site. As you may have noticed, i have been very busy for the past few days. I haven’t had time to work on the website much as i have tons of studies to finish. However i should be able to start working once again probably starting Friday. Jeez… Lots of things to fix and lots of things to program still before we are up and running. Oh yeah, and if you are good at AJAX, drop me an email @ darknesfallz@gmail.com as i sure can use some help (My ajax skills aren’t that good either).

Please be aware while visiting Metacafe as it seems that their site has been hit with a Trojan horse of some type. While viewing videos, random prompt messages seem to pop up asking you to install “Registry Cleaner” software. If you press no to the prompt, the site closes. It seems that you can get past this by disabling Java support on the browser.

Users at Digg.com seem to have the same problem as reported.

As much as i hate ads next to the other guy, as humans we all have that little greed for money and so i will be placing ads on the site. That being said, NO i will not be a ad horde and fill the entire site will these “Ads”!


Being a design fanatic that i am, i am sick and tired of seeing some web designers jam in a bunch of ugly ads into random places in their site, just so they can earn a few more dollars a month. For this reason, i have decided to wait on designing my site until i am accepted by a ad publishing program such as Doubleclick.


If you truly hate ads

You may have notices for a past few days that our site was having a bit of downtime. The reason towards this was a faulty raid driver. The part has been replaced by the Ahplace team, and hopefully no more downtime will follow.

Update: The ftp seems to be not functioning at the moment. I am sure the team will get that fixed within little to no time. We should be up and ready within no time so hang tight and probably grab a coffee, tea, or w/e suits your style…

Regards,
Darknesfallz

Although Flash based storage is very reliable, like always things tend so go wrong. Today i plugged my USB thumb-drive into a school computer to access my project files, only to find later on that it something (Probably a Trojan Horse or a Virus) had corrupted my drive to a point where i could not access the drive and retrieve

any file. This was pretty damn scary as projects i had spent endless hours on were all on the thumbdrive and i had not made any backups! (Lesson one: Always have backups) Fortunately enough i managed to extract the data from the drive and had to format it in order for it to function again like it was brand new out-of-the-box

Below is a list of steps i had to go through in order to recover my data and to fix the drive:

First i used a piece of software by the name of Get Data Back For NTFS Ver 3.03. I tried quiet a few different programs before finding this one and none of the others functioned properly. Some would analyze the drive and were able to extract the files, but all the files were corrupted and were basically useless! Other programs did not even detect the drive! Get Data Back for NTFS was able to retrieve 100% of the files on the drive, and to my surprise they all functioned perfectly.

Now that i had my data stored on my desktop, i needed to fix my corrupt 4gb thumbdrive as at this point i really cannot afford to purchase another. From basic computer knowledge, the first thing that i tried to do with the drive was to format it. I went into My computer, right clicked on the drive and clicked format. Unfourtanetly, this did not work as planned and i recieved the message, “Write Protected Thumb Drive, Cannot Format.” This was sort of odd as my thumb drive had no switches to disable or enable write protection. After a few minutes of Googling, it was astonishing to see how many other users had the same problem with their thumb drives.

The solution to fixing the, “Write protected Drive” was pretty simple:

First click on the Start Button -> Run and type -> regedit. Then navigate to

My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet

\Control\StorageDevicePolicies

On the right hand side you should see a registry key by the name of WriteProtect and it should have a value of 1. The one means that it is enabled, so disable it and voila! the “Write Protected” messages you were recieving are history. Now all you have to do is format the drive perhaps using the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool and your corrupt drive is as good as new!

Preventing Drive Failures from occurring:

Do not pull your drive physically out without first safely removing it (Taskbar->Safely Remove Hardware)
Do not pull the drive out when data is being transfered.