Ken Guest’s online diary

Here’s a summation of changes made to linux.ie website system since my update of the site last month.

News Search Engine
The title of a posted item has been made a part of the search criteria.
Not all pages of search results are displayed at once – only about twenty at a
time.
Link to Who’s Who pages has been fixed so that there are no problems with
apostrophes in the names, O’Bryan for example.
Details of edit are shown.

News Archive
Each year of archives, For example /news/index.php/2005 now has links for each
month of that year. eg /news/index.php/2005/01….
Added Donncha’s link to all postings to the version in CVS.

Editor
Reduce the number of clicks required to validate edits to a page.
Actions are logged to the new audit trail.

VCards
Indicate telephone number in vcard as the preferred vCard. Firstname and
Surname are included properly in the vCard and a version number is supplied.
Improved SQL injection detection.

Users
display more appropriate details if viewing own details.
Display summary of assigned access rights.
If session isn’t secure when user tries to download vcard file containing
details of all users then redirect to the login page.
Improved SQL injection detection.

Contacts
Name has been broken down into two parts, surname and firstname. Both of which
are required.

User Record creation and registration
Name has been broken down into two parts, surname and firstname. Both of which
are required.

Localisation
Character set is now defined to be dependant on the language.
Localised some more areas of the site. Just for the heck of it.
Fixed problem of filename not being defined for english language and ensured it
is supported correctly when appropriate [see log for more details].
Charset now included as part of the Content-Type header; required updates to
en.php and ga.php

HTML
Ran main page through tidy and updated code accordingly.

CSS/Styles
Moved CSS defined in nav.inc.php to /styles/styles-generic.css

Ever since I got my piece of Big Blue last December I’ve been quitely working on the code behind the linux.ie website. I ‘pushed’ my new version of the site to live today – some changes should be apparent and others are infrastructural.
Anybody who emailed webmaster@linux.ie for improvements to the site over the past few months should spot what they’ve asked for!
A summary of changes is available.

Not a lot of people may know this, but if you are registered on the linux.ie website you are automatically given a vcard that contains all the pertinent information that you entered at registration.

Meaning if you want to give people a simple way to enter your details into Evolution,Outlook or any other vcard aware program you give them the URL to your vcard, they enter it and voila all those details show up in their contacts list.

Depending on how ‘with it’ you are you might have a FreeBusy URL too. This is a way of informing people when you are available for a chat (or whatever). Look at RFC 2739 for more details if you are so inclined.

In a mad burst of inspiration following from the talk on ‘Fun with Calendars’ Stuart Guthrie gave at the Sydney LUG meeting last night. I decided to add a FBURL field to the vcards that are generated on linux.ie.

Who knows, you might even use it.

Is there anything else people would like in their vcards?

The “State of the GnuCash Project” article has me thinking that the ILUG
website is not pulling its weight where informing people of good (read
‘rock-solid’) Open Source projects they may not be aware of is concerned.

I think the best way to do this is through rotating banners at the top of the webpages,
between the ‘linux.ie’ graphic and Tux.

I don’t want to add to the confusion that newbies tend to feel, so only one
project in each field will get through to having a rotating banner on the site.

I’m looking for nominations and contact details to get this rolling, so send
them to banners@linux.ie.