I have a small confession to make: I had an ulterior motive when creating this website. Back then, I knew that I wanted to start and run my own company one day, and that the company's website would be a very important part of the overall system. In order to prepare for this, I wanted to learn how to run a website with online services; both the technical and human aspects (websites are, after all designed to be used by humans). So, this website served as the platform by which I could learn and experiment with building and running a website.

It is now possible to log in to this website and post on the forums using your Facebook account. This was added so that people don't have to create and remember yet another user and password combination. Like many people, I have an increasing number of accounts on multiple websites, and remembering all of those usernames and passwords gets harder and harder (particularly with websites that have "special" rules regarding what a password should have). Special thanks to Will Rossiter for developing the Silverstripe Facebook Connect module.

I haven't posted to this blog in a long while, so I thought that I would share some interesting traffic data related to the newest section of the website. Just over a month ago I released GfxBench2D, a 2D benchmarking tool and web-application. This tool measures 2D graphics performance and can (optionally) upload results to this website for display. Well, this triggered the biggest traffic spike that this website has ever seen. Take a look a graph of the number of daily visits that have occurred since this website was first created (up to 10 July 2011):

I got an email this morning from someone who tried to use the search functionality of this website, and got a "Generated with the default ContentController.ss template" error. Apparently, the search function has been broken since I upgraded to Silverstripe 2.4.0, and no-one noticed (obviously, I didn't), or bothered to tell me up to now. Anyway, it is now fixed, and I have updated the Silverstripe JRank Integration page with a new archive.

This post may seem a bit out of place in this blog, but seeing as it relates to health, I think that it's important enough to post anyway. It is also an example of how good design and attention to small details makes a difference. The short story is that I recently bought a new heater, and it has done wonders to the air quality in my room. One small change has made the room so much more pleasant to work in.

I got a bit of a scare today when my AmigaOne XE G4 computer stopped working. Unlike standard PCs, this computer cannot be replaced by simply walking down to a computer store and buying another machine. If this machine did have to be replaced, I would have to order one from overseas. Since I am hard at work with various Amiga projects (particularly this one), this would have been quite a setback.

This website has just been upgraded to Silverstripe 2.4.0, which adds (amongst other things) hierarchical URLs. While the effort has been worth it, this upgrade was more problematic than previous ones due to version 2.4 including a cleanup of the API, and some rather major changes. Fortunately I now have a test server that I can do trial runs on before making changes to the live website. Here's a quick rundown of the problems that I experienced, and the solutions.

It's been a while since I have posted anything to this blog, mainly because I have been busy with other things. I have, however, still kept an eye on it, deleting spam when necessary, and monitoring how the advertising programs are performing. Today I made the decision to dump Adbrite.

Several weeks ago I mentioned that spammers had found a weakness in Mollom. Well, Mollom's learning algorithm has successfully learnt the new tricks that spammers were using, and the spam comments have stopped. The number of spam attempts has not decreased, but I have now had over a week without a single spam comment coming through.

Last night I had bit of a battle with my Linux server. The evening had already started out badly with a backup of this website failing due to some mysterious Sqlite error (note, that is was on a Windows machine). Next, backups from my laptop to the server failed, and I could suddenly no longer access network shares on the server by the server's name. So, I logged on to the server from my laptop, opened the Samba config file, and added an entry, specifying its netbios name, and then restarted Samba. At this point, the server was visible in the "network neighbourhood" again, and the backups could proceed. Little did I know that this was only the first problem that I was going to be dealing with that evening.