Blog Closing

As I now have my blog setup completed on the Alanaktion Developer Network, I won't be posting here anymore unless I encounter a problem with my blog.  I've also got a blog set up for my partner, Eliel Ledezma, you can view his blog at alex.alanaktion.net.

Alanaktion Developer Network

I am happy to announce the official opening of the Alanaktion Developer Network!  After a few years of hard work, the network is finally open to the public and awaiting new users to contribute to the community.  We will frequently post about the development of the Xusix Network, Webity, and Smart Sites, as well as a few of our unofficial services such as the Alanaktion Image Board, and Aurora Empires.

Visit the Alanaktion Developer Network

Along with the completion of the Alanaktion Developer Network, running on my Webity framework, I decided to start my new blog, now on my own server, also running on Webity.  You can see it at www.alanaktion.net/blog.

Alanaktion Rebuilt

Okay, I decided to rebuild Alanaktion again...  this time it's Alanaktion Technologies, but I really don't know what all is going to happen with it.  I'm replacing most of the site's UI with a smooth black version of the Smart Sites UI.  I'll update My Journal and Chat to reflect the changes soon.

PenTech goes Insane

PenTech, hosted by my own service Smart Sites, is now offering some useful features!  The most unique and complicated of the new features is the Identity Generator, which generates a complete fake identity, including a full name, valid address, zip code, phone number, credit card number, social security number, birthdate, user password, and sample occupation.  Big list, lots of combinations, it uses around 40 MB of database resources...

Smart Sites Themes

Smart Sites now has a basic theme builder!  I will be working to perfect it over time, but for now, there's a theme builder that allows you to choose custom colors, fonts, and sizes for everything on your page.  Advanced layouts and images are my next goal for the builder, but that's not my current project...

[Update] Developer Network Hacked

It appears that all of the GoDaddy servers had a fun little virus editing PHP and HTML files.  I wrote a PHP-based virus protection program that I'll be running weekly on each site to repair any files infected in the future, but for now, all of the sites are clean and safe.  After only a few hours, each of the Alanaktion sites had been infected, but the changes were easy to repair.  Hopefully GoDaddy figured out their "problem" soon enough to stop it from rewriting every file in over 300,000 web sites...  that'd be bad news for them.

Developer Network Hacked

The Alanaktion Developer Network was hacked today, not causing any major issues, simply adding a tracker script to every single PHP file on the entire server (over 3,000 that I've fixed so far...) so Google Chrome will warn you about it, but the site will be completely restored within the week...  It looks as if either GoDaddy was hacked completely (unlikely) or my FTP/WEBDAV service was hacked.  I'll be upgrading the security on all the login pages within the developer network, more carefully scanning uploaded files, and validating upload locations.

More of Smart Sites

Smart Sites is most definitely my biggest project yet, and it has a lot of key features that need to be perfected before a large amount of use.  Manually correcting a few user's errors isn't a big deal, but as the site grows, it will get extremely tedious to update each user's files individually to add new features, and that is why I've rebuilt the entire Smart Sites inner framework.  To any user, no change was ever made, as the site is accessed and used in exactly the same way, however, the entire setup of every user-created file is completely different.  Before, each user got a sub-directory in the root of the site, where the main framework for Smart Sites was copied to when the site was set up.  Now, when a user sets up a site, the framework is not copied, but linked to from a secure directory, making every user's site run off of the exact same file.  This way, if a change is necessary, only a single file needs to be changed, and every user's site will be updated automatically the next time it is accessed.
Users will soon have the ability to more accurately control their site's layout, introducing options of fonts, widths and heights, sidebar location, and basic color schemes.

Alanaktion Chat

I've started yet another service, Alanaktion Chat.  It is simply a public instant messaging client with a single stream.  Users log in to view and add to the public stream, either from a web page, the Windows client, or by a mobile web device.

The only unfixed problem so far in the development is a small memory leak that occurs when the chat opens the stream to the server to check for new messages.  Even if no new messages are present, the client will load a small amount of data continuously, meaning that if the web page or Windows client is left open for a long period of time, it will use a large amount of memory and stop responding to user input.  Luckily, this is contained within the application and does not affect any other applications unless running on a very old browser.

www.alanaktion.com/chat

Major Smart Sites Update

Over the last few days, Smart Sites has been updated several hundred times with new features and bug fixes.  Most recently, I repaired a very serious problem regarding opening a user's site.  The sites are each saved in a sub-folder inside the site's root, however they are using a custom-built Apache server mod to display pages without confusing, complicated addresses.  The problem was that when you entered a site's address, if you did not include a slash at the end, the site would not load, and would give you a Bad Request error.  This is obviously a problem as very few users would think to add a slash to the end without being told to.  The final solution took several hours of messing around, sometimes messing up the entire site, to get working.  This is the solved mod:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.smartsites.us/$1/ [L,R=301]

Nice, huh?  That was incredibly complicated, I really don't quite understand it entirely myself, but it works absolutely perfectly, loading files exactly the way they are intended, without giving any unnecessary data in the address.


A few other things I've been working on with this are mobile access, themes, page builder updates, security patches, and performance upgrades.  The mobile access has been built to allow every site's page to retain all of the content and features that the original page had, but make it all in a mobile formatted view, while keeping the site's theme as well.  It also has a very limited Smart Sites account editor and database viewer for mobile devices.  I've also been doing quite a bit of work on themes, making each one unique, attractive, and very cross-compatible.  The builder has been updated to allow you to save the page you are editing without having to reload the entire page and editor, instead saving in the background with no noticeable page change for the user.