Saturday, February 19, 2005

 

Enough is enough !



My patience finally ran out, the www.glug.org.za has been down for a long time now. I decided to see if there was anyone else that would consider hosting the site. I posted a message to the mailing list...
To my surprise I got a whole flood of messages of people that was willing to host the site. Gavin McDougall arranged a login to his server within minutes. Thanks!
So I proceeded to host the site temprarily on ww.ostech.co.za.

The next day the glug site was back up. I also decided to also make available the source to the site here.

Some history on the site
Originally the site was hosted on a php nuke cms. It was badly neglected and it seemed that nothing was going on (an abandoned idea). There were some complaints but no one was willing to make a commitment to design a new site. I decided that I would give it a shot, but I am not renowned for finishing projects I start.
I got my original idea from the www.ossn.co.za website. Jonathan Carter from the Shuttleworth Foundation was friendly enough to send me the source to his site.
I used the basic layout as a base and started filling in the details, the most important thing to me would be the information supplied. The site started taking form, at some stage I release a preview for people to comment on.
Everyone had some form of criticism, but overall people liked the design. One issue was the use of tables which I then converted to 100% css. A painful experience to make it IE compatible.
Most of the criticism was on my graphic design skills. Luckily Chris Piek armed with Gimp stepped in an upgraded the look. Shortly after, people wanted to replace the existing site with the preview site, so it was launched without being finished. Still isn't finished, probably never will be. ;)
Not long after someone posted a exploit to the list and the site was taken down. I fixed it, but it but the site remained down. Ross was not convinced that it was actually fixed and refused to put the site back up. I had to make the source available so that other people could review it. For that I had to host the site somewhere and I do not own any server capable of hosting php. Luckily there are people that would donate to a good cause.
So now I challenge anyone to send me any other exploits (if they do exist).

Chris also added tux holding a South African flag. Thanks Chris!

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