Tag Archives: setup

RTML Services for sale?

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Well, I’ve added a WordPress plugin for e-commerce, but at the same time, I am also building two websites (one professionally, one as a hobby) using Yahoo Store’s RTML and Zen Cart, respectively.

However, with the downturn in the economy (and my slightly-better-than-arbitrary prediction of a <7,000 point stock market by the end of the month…Spring Break at the latest), I figure it’s time to start taking into consideration other possible sources of income. Not for fear of losing my job, but rather to help get my bills in check Credit Cards, primarily, who have decided it is time to raise the minimum payment – which is the only thing enabling me to devote a greater portion of my money to one in order to pay it off, while keeping the others at par until it is their turn. Continue reading →

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New RSS Code in the works

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After spending some time thinking about different ways to re-enable the RSS feature for the-spot.net, I’ve finally hit on an idea that I’ve started writing the code for.

The original code would hit the main database to grab the newest posts on the forums…after it sorted all 77000 posts by date, and then grabbed the top 15-20 of them and their data. Since the entire site runs off of that one database, you can imagine how that would slow down everything when even just 10 people hit the site every 15 minutes.

So I am going to attempt my first distributed database scenario. Continue reading →

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A few enhancements worth mentioning

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I’ve come to the point where I have nothing else to do with my time, but sit here and work on long-standing projects. So with that time, I have done a little bit of tweaking on the-spot.net. I’ve fixed a couple things on the MySpot page, for one…

- It no longer redirects you to the forum index if there are no new posts since you last visit…instead it lets you stay on the MySpot page, so you can go about you business checking the other features of the site.
- At the top of the window, where it says “the-spot.net :: MySpot” it now says “MySpot (35)” or some other number in parenthesis to denote how many new topics have been posted to since you last checked the MySpot page. I tried to incorporate it into the header, but it did not work because I was not willing to have every page load run a search for new posts. That feature will come later with some ajax that I am going to integrate into the site…so that it loads stuff in the background, not affecting your ability to load the page.
- I put the Jumpbox (which you can select your forum, and click go, from a drop down menu) and put it inside the New Posts table, to consolidate that part of the site. It didn’t deserve its own box.
- I fixed the mini-calendar on the MySpot page to show the correct date, once the time reaches past 6pm. It was running the regular GMT – 0 intead of the GMT-6 like we’re in, for the most part. I haven’t figured out how to fix the big calendar though…still looking into that.

Also, a couple days ago, I made some other changes…
- I brought back the Photobook stream at the bottom of the MySpot page. I’m debating whether or not to just go with the flickr setup or run both, or just do the Photobook. flickr is easier to use, but Photobook is ours.
- I moved the tsn Network table to the other side, in preparation for the return of the User Pic on the MySpot page on the left column.
- I’m also looking into a personalized page for people to use…where they would see their private messages, draft-posts, watched topics, their online buddies, new posts, photostream, and other things.

the future plans are all contingent on what I can think of and figure out the code for. These improvements that have already happened were simply because I’ve either already had the code, and just plugged it in, or I had a burst of thought and figured out the cause of the problem so I could fix it.

Sorry I don’t update this thing much…there hasn’t been a whole lot of stuff going on behind the scenes of tsn – I’ve been looking into other services and websites and technologies for the past 7 months.

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[[Oracle]] and tsnlocal.net

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I’ve spent the last two weeks working on getting [[Oracle]] into the role she was designed to play…but have found it to be a bit more involved than I realized.

Originally, I set up the server to be a web server with php and sql capabilities. Then I realized I needed to FTP files to the web server, so I installed FileZilla Server. Once that was done, I started working on the webpage for tsnlocal.net. I got it up, and then wanted to play around with some other type of server, and decided on a Jabber server for instant messaging. I installed Wildfire.

Wildfire is extremely easy to setup and install – so once I finished that, I looked for a Jabber client. My first choice was a VoIP client called Jabbin, but I couldn’t get it to connect to the server – probably because I don’t have a VoIP Protocol on the server to support it. So I went with what we use at work, Exodus. It’s a fairly functional Jabber client – with chat rooms, IM rosters, subscriptions, and file transfer…and a bunch of other stuff, including plugins.

Once the Jabber service was set up, and I figured out how to connect to it, I realized that telling people to use my dyndns domain name was not going to work. So I had to figure out how to get my Godaddy.com domain name to link directly to my IP address. But, come to find out, I have to have a Top Level Domain for an IP address, or my dyndns must be a nameserver registered with the NS Registry, in order to use it as a nameserver. I spent 2 days setting up BIND on Windows XP (because there was very little help on the internet for how to do it). Then I jacked around with the Total DNS control settings on godaddy, and got the webserver to work like it should – almost.

So now you can join the jabber server with yourname@jabber.tsnlocal.net. Now that I had that working, I noticed that there were email settings like pop.tsnlocal.net and smtp.tsnlocal.net that could be set up, so I decided to look into running my own email server. I got in #bloodshotgamer on irc.gamesurge.net and asked some of the tecky people I talk to in there what they’d recommend. Duck-Lap recommended qmail for linux, but mentined MailEnable for Windows. I was hoping for an IMAP service so I could run the webpage side of it, but that was not included with this. I might upgrade the service to something new later on, but for now, this was easy to install, and has easy administration, which is what I’m looking for since most of these other services aren’t critical to the function of the server. BIND was about the only thing that was hell to configure…everything else was easily figured out once I had the info and a general grasp of what it does and how it does it.

So now, [[Oracle]] does these things:
- Web Server (Apache, PHP, MySQL)
- FTP Server
- DNS Server
- Email Server
- Jabber Server
- TeamSpeak Voicechat Server
- Hamachi server
- Google Desktop distributed indexing server for the hamachi shares (the essence of tsnlocal)
- and a keep-alive for the dyndns service linking my IP to the dynamic domain

That’s a lot for a little box…but I’m not done yet – I need to put ssh on it so I can telnet into it. I’m sure there are other things that I will find to do with it as time goes on too.

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Update: Since I’ve been gone

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I haven’t been gone, so much as I have been out of the personal-teck loop. Over the summer, I took a “forced vacation” when work let me go. I was fine with it – I didn’t like the job anyway. But during that time, my drive for doing personal teck went down as I spent most of my time working on tsnX.

I got a job as a PC Tech and IT Consultant at the end of June and have it still today. And it’s great. It’s not that I don’t do as much work, but more that the work comes so natural to me that most of it flies by without a hitch. I like having the spare time, and ability to use some of the stuff that I have learned at home to make money here.

I’ve been spending about the last month working on upgrading my computer, and will continue to do so until the middle of October. I’m buying a Intel Core 2 Duo at the end of September, and will rebuild the computer once again. But in the meantime, I’m sleeving and moding the wiring on my computer to work with the “UV Capable” setup that I have going in the case.

I’ve got 2 green cold cathodes and 4 green fans…one of which is green UV plastic itself. When that fan has its LEDs on, the UV is drown out. So I have had to split the wiring, and put a 120mm hole in the top of the case to mount a fan there, in order to effectively be able to stop the fan on the side – since the LEDs are dependent on the fan’s power. Now, I can switch between bright green fan lights or UV lights.

I’m also creating a molex array, which I am having to do some re-wiring on, and is getting a little more involved than I would like – soldering, and such. I considered blogging, but decided to wait until I make a second one for [wizard], so that I have the process down.

I’ll post pics of the case when I get it done later this week.

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