website

It's been a while since substantial changes were made to the website. Let me clarify that: Website development has not halted, minor updates happen from week-to-week to keep things running smoothly, but new features have not 'happened' for a while.

'New features for the website?' I hear you ask... A good while back (almost a year ago to be precise), I posted a list of things to add on this blog. Currently the most important big features are an overhaul of the IVRPA mailinglist(s) and forum, as well as an integrated chat system for our member chats.

From time to time I'm getting a message from a user of the site that the site is 'hacked' or sending out spam. In a word, you can rest assured: the site is not hacked. Unfortunately, spam is a sign of the times and there is very little we can do to stop it. I'll take this opportunity to outline ways spam can occur on the site.

The elections for the BoD 2008 are underway (vote now, if you're a current member). Like last year, I have transfered control over the 'admin' user over to our treasurer, who is not running for a position in the Board of Directors. (Major) maintenance will have to wait two weeks, until the elections are over.

Since more than a year ago, I've been meaning to move the IVRPA site over to another host. Today it finally happened. At our old host, we had MySQL issues, we could not host mailinglists, and I was generally worried about the security of the server we were on.

Since around noon GMT, we're on Bluehost.com. Sofar things are looking good over here. Less cruft, and better security all round. Let's hope the performance matches what I've seen sofar.

It's not like I don't have enough to do already, but would there be an interest to have 'our own' digg-like linkdump? Many posts on the forums and blogs on the IVRPA site, but also on the numerous lists are simple 'look what I made' or 'look what I found'-style links with a minimal explanation.

The IVRPA website is running Drupal 4.7. The site has many dependencies on contributed and custom modules, so upgrading to Drupal 5 would not be an light undertaking. Especially with the work I have been putting into the conference site, I would not fathom upgrading at this point.

Mike Quan let me know we have only 90 days left until the conference! Rest assured that we're working overtime (it's 23:09 when I type this) to make the conference work.

I am currently building a registration system for the conference website. I've been 'hacking' away at Drupal, extending the user profiles to hold extra conference information on the subsite. It's not ready yet, but we hope to be able to take your money starting this weekend.

If you look at the url for this blog post, you may notice that it in contrast to how urls to blog posts used to look, they now contain (part of) the post title. This makes blog posts stand out between the other types of nodes on the site (such as forum posts or gallery items), and it makes a url easier to recognise.

The change has been retrofitted to all current blog posts on the site.

As our current members know, we're currently running an election for the Board of Directors of our association (only members have access to that page). The elections are hosted on this site, which I built. I am not only a current member of the current BoD, I have also put myself forward as a candidate for the 2007 BoD (again, members only). Some may see a conflict there.

If nobody beat me to it, this is the 1000th 'node' on the IVRPA site. Every forum post, blog post and gallery item, as well as most of the 'static' pages of the site constitute nodes, but comments are not counted as nodes*. The posts to the photokina subsite are not included in the main node count.