Category: Web

After doing a bunch of research on different types of discussion boards, I went ahead and decided to try out PunBB. It got good reviews as a small and easy-to-manage bulletin board system. I thought it would be a real challenge, but actually it wasn’t bad. Even the installation was fairly simple. The file itself was under 300k. I had to create a MySQL database at my host first, and I wasn’t sure what to use as the database server hostname (I left it as “localhost” and it seemed to work). It went surprisingly smoothly and I had a discussion group before long.

Also, in the control panel for the website I set up a subdomain so that visitors can go to:

http://forums.gdotea.com

Right now it is very plain. And I don’t think it has a lot of options. One thing I wanted to do was to approve members manually so that I don’t get interlopers or robots visiting. It seems the only thing I can do is require a confirmation e-mail. That should help anyway.

I got kind of mad at first because I told it not to show my e-mail address in my posts, and when I went to look, there it was plain as day. But it turns out I could see it because I was a moderator. When I logged out and viewed it as a guest, I could not see the e-mail address.

Continue reading “Bulletin Board”

When I moved the website from the old host, the old CGI Perl web counter stopped working. Because the new host supports php, I decided to try some php web counters. I found a simple one and had to do a couple of things to make it work. First I had to add a file to my www root called .htaccess that enabled php code on html files by adding this line of text:

Addhandler application/x-httpd-php .html .php

Next I had to set the CHMOD permissions for the file containing the page count to 777 or else it would read the file but be unable to increment the number and generated a bunch of error codes.

Continue reading “Counter”

I am still the webmaster for the employees’ association at work. Currently their website is hosted by hostway.com. They charge $13.95 per month for hosting the website and $19 per year for registering the domain name. In reading up on the subject some people say that you should not have the same company host the site and register the domain. I found an inexpensive and well regarded registrar called namecheap.com (GoDaddy is a more famous one; like most of these companies they also host websites) that charges $8.88 per year. I also found a well regarded web hosting company called A Small Orange that charges only $25 per year for their smallest web hosting package (75 MB of storage space 3 GB per month of traffic). It turns out that ASO’s servers are located in Atlanta, so that’s even better.

Continue reading “New Web Host”

I’ve spent a chunk of the last two weekends going through all of my movie reviews and fixing them up. A lot of times when I write a review, I might reference another movie I’ve reviewed and I’m too lazy at the time to put in a hyperlink reference. Also, because I usually write these on AMUG and then just copy them into a separate file for my web page, I don’t italicize movie titles like I’m supposed to. So I went through all of my reviews (I’m up to 238 movies reviewed over the last 10 years) and fixed them up. It took a lot of time, but at least this weekend I was doing it while I was encoding new episodes from Seinfeld Seasons 3 and 7 DVD’s (which I got a good deal on at Fry’s yesterday; now I have everything through Season 7 and will wait to buy the just-released Season 8 when the price comes down).

Continue reading “Fixing the Movies”

I have a savings account and some CD’s with ING. They had pretty good interest rates and it was convenient dealing with them online. Then they started instituting different security measures. Whereas most places let you choose a username that makes sense, they assigned an 8-digit number that you had to use. Then you picked out a PIN. That was okay and eventually I memorized my number. Then they started a keypad thing where they would have the number pad with letters on each number key on screen and you would type in each corresponding letter instead of the number for your PIN. The letters changed every time. This made you think a lot harder, but I guess protected you from programs that capture key strokes.

Continue reading “Stupid SiteKey”