So we've been down a few days due to one hell of an email flood. Some 10,000 random address emails have been hitting the server a day, which was doing BAD THINGS(tm) to the server.

Right now, the web is back in operation thanks to the nice people at deltawebhosting.com, however email itself is still down. Also if you have sent me any mails in the last few days, they'll probly be lost before I can read them. For now, yahoo IM me, or go low tech and call me on the phone.

If you are in dire need of sending me a viagra add, please simple shoot yourself in both kneecaps.

Updates to follow as I actually get information myself!

Update #1
It seems the web portion of the site is still hit and miss, with it sometimes being here and sometimes not. For the moment I'm assuming it's the delta folks poking at the problem from thier end of things. Obviously alot of the dynamic content is going to be dodgy till things settle down, so if you are having trouble with a specific bit, go grab some coffee and try again in 20 minutes.

Update #2
For the moment, things are working again! This will probably change the moment I post this story, but hey, right this second email works! Once more, a big ‘thank you’ is in order for the folks at deltawebhosting.com

Also: Jonathon, the problem you are having with your web page layout is due to setting your widths by percentages, it’s causing the sliced images to break up with different browser sizes. To fix it quickly, you’ll have to switch over and define absolute values for your widths.

The good news, anonymous comments are now enabled! The bad news, all comments now require approval before they are visible. This will cause a few delays when posting, but on the whole should not add to much waiting. We’ll see how this works out for ease of moderation.

In other news, I’m playing with some additional forum modules. If one works out, more news will follow.

EDIT: Apparently comment replies are not currently working. I'll look into it. To answer AverageJoe, "soon."

This will be another light updating week, for which you can blame World of Warcraft. More specifically, you can blame my nearly empty in game bank and the high cost of epic flying mount.

For those of you using Second Life (free basic membership), recent updates have added a truly new prim type able to accept uploads from 3d modelers for their shape. This is going to be BIG, in the same way that custom user animations was big. It’s also currently torture to do, but I suppose you can’t have everything right off. If anyone wants to play with this feature, Blender supports the needed tools and is also free. See http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims for info on the prim itself.

Congratulations to pcnax32314 for being the first user to get his account canceled due to massive amounts of meaningless spam! I’m encouraged by how easy it is within Xoops to press delete a few times to fix a problem. Other Xoops users, do you have any suggestions on an even easier and faster comment manager module?

The WWII3D archives will be going live again this month. Also for anyone trying to contact Greg, I have a new email which will be posted around the same time. If you need to get a hold of him sooner, drop me a line and I’ll forward it to him.

In other news, Bryce 5.5 just went free! Swing by Download.com for your copy.

It’s been a busy week for web related things! New things in no particular order:

News commenting should now be enabled. You will need to be a registered user (and logged in) to leave comments, but at least there won’t be 15 pages of Viagra ads attached to each article. By the same token, the forum is running. It’s more or less in a place holder mode while everything else is built around it, however it is usable if you want to leave an error report and just random musing.

The Art Gallery is more or less ported to PHP. There are a lot of things I’d like to add feature wise, but it’s going to be a bit down the road.

Poser wise, figures are not yet updated. Blame apathy. Also, I’ll need to reformat all the figure pages in the process, and I’m just not quite up to the task yet. I considered trying to cheat and just setting up a dynamic download manager, but I really hate those things from a user standpoint. It may yet come to that, but for now I’m holding off pending the PHP work.

There is an Amazon.com sales block on the page, so feel free to click in for some shopping. It’s mostly up for my own amusement. I find it fascinating watching their poor code trying to dynamically select links relevant to the site. I don’t even know what’s relevant to this site half the time!

For those of you who are wanting the gaming sites updated and enhanced, I’m not ignoring you! I just haven’t figured out exactly how I’m going to do it. With a little luck, inspiration will hit while module shopping.

Next week is probably going to be update light. I feel the urge rising to take a step back and just play with some of the features, and hunt down a few new toys to use.

As some of you may have noticed, the Poser archive is partly operational in PHP format now. In the process of creating and updating, an interesting thing happened. Something on the morphs and poses pages decided to trip the built in phishing filter in internet explorer. (Click HERE if you need the definition of phishing.)

There are two halves to the story from this point. First, the frantic and panicked half! There is a thrill to finally getting things working, especially when you can then show it to people. This thrill can be very successfully doused when the people start asking “Why are there windows opening with security warning about phishing?” Even now we aren’t 100% positive why those two pages decided to trigger the warning, but we do have a working theory. The two pages in question have the main body almost 100% identical to their original HTML counterparts. Thus the suspicion is that IE decided we were trying to trick you into believing the PHP version was the HTML version.

The other half of the story is surprisingly pleasant. It turns out the Microsoft has a very simple and nice backend to protest classifications, and an easy system to request a real human look at the site. It only took a few hours for them to check and respond, with a promise that the system will stop complaining in around 24 hours. For a Saturday night, this is pretty amazing service.

Regarding the login function to the upper right, you will never be required to register or log in to download or browse the site. The login is primarily for news notifications, and eventually for forum and comment posting once those features are turned back on. As usual, never give passwords to anyone. This includes site admins! The only thing you should ever have to give us is a valid email address should you choose to register with our site.

Let’s talk about modernizing a moment. Today I finally updated my FTP client. One of the reasons my updating habits in the past slowed and occasionally stopped was because ftp uploads were often somewhat painful. This is actually my fault.

Waaaaaaaaaaaay back in the early 90’s when I started doing a lot of internet activity, there weren’t many choices for FTP clients, and the ones that were around tended to cost a bit. Thus at the time it was a grand trek to find just the right program and make it yours. Think “Quest for Fire”, only with slightly less cavemen. Eventually I settled on WS_FTP pro 6.0, which at the time was the best thing since sliced bread, and even worked on that nifty new Windows 95 OS.

Today I’m struggling with some mass uploads for new modules, and encountering the same brick walls that have become more and more common as time has changed the average work habits for the internet. Suddenly it occurs to me; I’m still using exactly the same FTP program as I always have, the exact same one I dimly remember battling savage tribes to win. It’s a crazy thought, but what if the best FTP program for win95 was no longer the best as we move towards Vista? What if it was time for a new FTP client?

Dreading the surely epic task ahead, I grab my trusty stone tipped spear and set out! 15 minutes later, I’m sitting here writing this story as a shiny new copy of FileZilla happily chews it’s way through several thousand uploads.

As a side note, Source Forge gets my vote as one of Humanity’s redeeming features.

“Right Said Fred” may have been right about one thing, and that is prettiness makes up for the occasional lapse of substance. In this case I have given up for a time on all the behind the scenes work, and swapped focus back to things that can be seen. As such, don’t be surprised if the PHP portions of the site occasionally freak out on a page load. This is just me working with the templates and figuring out how to port normal HTML tricks over into the dynamic environment. As the work progresses, you should notice a transition of the site away from the disgruntled kindergartener look.

In other news, I have actually been fixing some of the links on the older version of the site. (You know, the one that actually has content! Found HERE as always.) While doing these edits, I find myself very much wishing Aptana had the same extended find and replace capabilities of Homesite. The price tag of “free” does however go a long ways towards soothing any Aptana related woes.

Speaking of woes… Release the damn core modules already Xoops! I realize our procrastination and apathy patterns are rather similar, but there are way less people standing in line waiting for my archives to go back to production level polish! (Hopefully.)

And now a junk mail story…

I get a lot of junk mail. A LOT. With my old host, I could get an easy three to four thousand a day, most of which arrived at my inbox due to aliasing for the domain. With the new account, I set up a new user who’s email matches the addresses I actually read, and all was well with the world. I still got spam, but 30 or 40 a day is nothing to worry about. So it came to pass that I forgot about the shear volume that hits my domain a day.

After a few weeks of blissful small loads, I began to notice that web space was being used up at a strange rate. After checking many things, I thought to check the mail server settings. You guessed it! A root account had been receiving all the badly addressed junk mail.

How many mails do you think were waiting after that two week break? Go on, guess!

Ready for it?

51,333 junk emails. I was impressed too…

Due to a busy week, the site has not gotten much work. With a bit of luck I can start on some of the theme design this weekend.

Server wise I’m quite happy with the current provider. Should you be curious, I am now running the site through Delta Web Hosting. I’ll let you all know how it progresses.

For those few of you checking in on the progress, you’ll notice quite a few things changing. These changes are sometimes even for the better! New additions for the day include learning to clone and edit the menu block, installing a few new modules, getting the theme system to work and finding one that won’t require huge amounts of editing, wrapping an html page inside php, and a large amount of general tweaking. Not bad for a Monday, eh?