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Django & The Million Things I Do
While I seem to have seriously neglected this site for quite some time now, I am giving thought to it’s rebirth. I am unsure exactly what turn I will take with it, but it is in for a serious redesign at some point. (I just, as always, have to find the time to do it.)
In the mean time, I’m working on Django! :) Well, that is to say that I’m learning it; and in the process I am developing a minute amount of experience in Python. (Which is nice, since I’ve been saying that I was going to learn that particular language for several years now.)
What projects do I have in store for the new framework / programming language? Well, I really have no idea. I doubt that I will replace the existing CMS on my site (WordPress), since that’s just so darn handy and easily maintainable, and has required little to no attention from me whatsoever for the past while. (Perhaps that’s the problem?)
At any rate, I continue my work over at URU Exploration, developing the MO:URU Live fan-site, which will be launched to a new address at http://www.uruexploration.net in the next few weeks. (I’m rather looking forward to it.) As it is, between that and other projects that I’m working on, I don’t exactly have a lot of spare time to work on all the things I want to. (Broken record, I know.) :)
I am working on one project in Django, however, that once I get it put together and working much the way I’d like it to, I may even post for download: A Project Log application for tracking one’s hours spent on a project.
I realize this isn’t exactly the most unique app in he world, however, it’ll be decent enough that I expect I will be able to integrate it into a billing system that I also am now thinking of constructing.
Well, I’ve likely ranted long enough here for one sit. I’ll be off to the land of nod for this evening, though I may be back here in the near future. We’ll have to see.
CB
Current Projects
It has been a bit hectic and insane lately, what with the various different projects I’m working on, and the other job. So, I thought a quick update might be in order.
Currently, in addition to pushing forward on the Guild Bank Manager, I am developing a Community Resource Management service. The idea will be to provide services for various groups on the internet to take advantage of, with the focus on gaming. I will have more details on this at a later date, but you are welcome to check out some of the beta sites by linking here:
PHP, Sessions, and Development Servers
Since the inception of my control panel, I have had development servers set up for a number of sites, to test designs, provide backups of my existing site, or just messing around. In the past few months, I instituted a “lock-down” of sorts for the development servers, requiring that you be logged into the control panel, and be granted permission to view specific servers. (This way, if you’re a client of mine, your site doesn’t get leaked to the web before you choose to release it, or, if it happens to be something that is just there for me, only I have access to it.)
The problem with the setup that I’ve got going is this: it uses sessions on two different boxes. Why is that a problem? Well, actually sharing the session id across multiple servers isn’t a problem. I’ve simply set it up so that the session id is the same for all of my subdomains. The problem is that the information stored in PHP’s $_SESSION variable, is only stored on the live server, and database access is restricted to the servers the script(s) are being run on. (i.e. if you’re not running a script on my host’s servers, you can’t access your host-provided database.)
Now I’m faced with a dilmna: how do I make it work that, once you’re logged in on my control panel, you have access to the off-host development server(s)? At the moment, I am not sure. I am considering a few ideas: mainly, the POST header. I could record the user’s encrypted password, have a mirrored copy of my live database on the development server and use that to match things up and re-create the basic login information on the development server. That’s one idea. (Which, however, has some interesting problems in itself. Mainly, the necessary incongruity between the live and development databases.)
There is, of course, another option: special headers with encrypted information. A ‘key’ if you will. I think I will look into this method, which seems the best solution possible at this moment, if not the most secure. (Regardless, at the moment, it is better to have a stop-gap method in place than no true security at all.)
Chaos Reigns MOO Redesign
I’m not particularly enamoured of the original Chaos Reigns MOO site design, so I’ve decided to redo it. (Not that the game is actually up and running at the moment, but entirely because you’ve just got to have good-looking stuff in your portfolio.)
I’ve come up with something that’s a lot cleaner, and would lend itself much more easily to incorporating the types of features that the game would require. With ‘latest activity’ logs for the type of role-play happening in the game to Guild pages, where individual Guilds would have access to a blog of their own for posting different bits of guild-like information. As well, Staff pages would allow collaboration on MOO expansion projects and meetings. (Being able to pull up a meeting log at the click of your mouse would be very handy. As well, being able to get a copy of the game database as backup whenever desired.)
In my opinion, there were a lot of shortcomings in the capability of the Chaos Reigns MOO website. So, with the redesign (which will take me a while to get together,) I plan to build something quite phenomenal.
Thoughts on a Hack
Well, it’s about 24 hours (give or take) into my WordPress 2 installation, and I have to say that I still love it way more than I did that older version. :) That said, I’ve already come up with something that I’d like to add to the software. (Those end-users are a picky lot aren’t they? You give them this great new software package to work with, and they still aren’t satisfied.) ;)
I’m thinking that it would be great if it were possible to allow for comments on a Page. Right now, Pages are completely separate from the rest of the blog, so there’s no possibility of users commenting on an article or policy or whatever that you may have posted. (I’m presently using a Page for an article I’ve written about getting PHP5 installed as a CGI handler. However, there’s no way for users to add comments to that article to expand on the knowledgeset that’s there.)
I admit that I haven’t got the foggiest clue how I’m going to make this happen yet; only that I would like to. Thus, this idea is very likely going to be a while in coming along. (Unless, of course, someone beats me to it and writes a plugin for this feature.)
We shall have to see how this pans out. I will have to do a little reading up on WordPress’s plugin options and what I’d have to do to make this happen. (Could be interesting.)
