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.

Smart Sites is Complete

As promised, the main services of Smart Sites are complete for 2011.  Sign up for your own free web site at SmartSites.us to start off the new year with a new web site!

Now for the real entry

The hardest thing with this so far, ridiculously enough, is building the Links editor.  It allows you to enter an unlimited number of links to outside pages on your site, and runs flawlessly, allowing you to view the current items, add items, edit items, and delete items.  The hard part was not so much the client-side operation as trying to find a safe way to post an unspecified number of titles and addresses and save them in HTML format.  Attempting to take an HTML file, load only the Links section, and split the Title from the URL was difficult, but surprisingly putting it back together was near impossible.  I accidentally got my server stuck in several infinite loops attempting to assemble the file from the posted links, once using over 63MB of RAM.  In the end, the way  it worked out was to run a for loop based on the number of items in the posted Title array, then assemble each item from both posted arrays into one line of the HTML, repeat n times, then save it all to the inc file.

Next, I'll be building hundreds of CSS-based themes, adding database and file support, and finishing up the Pro account features.

Smart Sites

Smart Sites by Alanaktion is the new ultimate service for web site development.  I am working to finish up the editor's new security layer based on mod_rewrite and other Apache HTACCESS modules.  The main site builder service officially opens on January 1, 2011 to mark the new year, and I guarantee I'll have it working to the point where basic pages are possible at that time.  Extended features such as database integration, Smart Media plugins and secure direct-link file access will come soon after.

Some basic updates on my life (and by life I mean my company, which to me is my life :D)

lol i totally just bought another new domain two hours ago for no reason at all!!!

I bought MyOS.us just because...    yeah, it was really stupid.

But....    SmartSites.us is now nearly completed, and so far, the tests are showing that the site works faster and more dynamically than I had hoped.  I've written a lot of custom PHP and JavaScript for this, as it's technically an assignment from Mr. Long.  I wrote everything myself, and it works awesome.  I should have almost everything working and plan to officially open it in 2011.  It will be project for 2010, then I plan to rebuild Xusix OS on a lighter, faster, and more powerful framework, under the name MyOS, hence the domain name I bought for no reason...

Wow, I typed that whole paragraph in 2 minutes....

Continuing...  I plan to start the Alanaktion Web Portal on Alanaktion.com, which is basically just going to be a simplistic search engine with a table-based index.  Alanaktion.net, as you may have noticed, is now the Alanaktion Developer Network, which works well using the .net domain extension.  As a side project of Smart Sites, Smart Media and Smart Stock are two new services I should have up soon. Smart Media is a free-use photography community, which will mainly be for embedding images in a user's Smart Sites page for free, with us taking care of the licensing.  Smart Stock is a powerful program I'm writing that evaluates trends in the stock market and determines the expected values of stocks in specific fields, while allowing user-controlled influence toward specific stocks if the user chooses. Yeps.  That's what I've got right now, we'll see where this goes from there.

See ya! :D I'm so insane...     I love this pointless crap.

Corruption of Math Classes

I just spent an entire hour evaluating massive, complicated logarithms by hand. Not only is this extremely annoying, but after some thought, the only reason a high school math class would teach advanced math by hand is because colleges and universities don't allow use of calculators and other utilities on most tests. What I really can't understand, is why the colleges use this method. In any situation where advanced mathematics would be used in a career, an advanced calculator, or more likely a computer would be available. The only conceivable use for learning advanced mathematics by hand would be to become a math teacher, which would only really need to teach basic usage of these methods, and how to properly use a computational utility. Mathematics is being taught (in most cases) in the most difficult and unnecessary ways possible. I make the assumption that this is only because of this: before computational technology became widely available, it was necessary to teach methods of all mathematics by hand, and as technology has become more available, math classes have just retained the traditional methods of teaching.

Alanaktion Search and Business Solutions

The Alanaktion Search Engine has been completed, and it searches the entire Alanaktion network including the Developer Center, Forums, and Xusix websites.  I may add the ability to search our partner's web sites that we host in the future.

Alanaktion Business Solutions is a new service that I am getting started that will allow small businesses and organizations to easily keep secure client/customer databases directly integrated with a basic company web page.  Security maintaining usability has been the main focus while developing this project, to make sure account login data is transfered as few times as possible and, whenever possible, is heavily encrypted.

Alanaktion.net is now the Alanaktion Developer Network, and will have a new home page reflecting that change in the near future.  I'm also accepting design ideas, but it should be a simple, fast-loading, portal-style design for the home page.

I would like to recreate the CloudOS that our hosting provide restricted access to, however it will be a difficult and possibly unneccessary change.  It is likely that any change I make will just make it more difficult to ensure usability in the future.

New Search Engine

Ok, so I decided not to use the stupid Projects blog on Alanaktion.com...   It was such a pain to maintain, I figured I may as well just stay with Blogger, since it's so fast and easy.  Anyway, that's beside the point.

I'm starting up a new web site!  The Alanaktion Search, which was previously just a tiny redirect script on Alanaktion.net, is now being built at www.alanaktion.com!  When completed, it will allow fast, easy searching of several common web sites, as well as all of the Alanaktion and Xusix products and services.  With time, it may even search my blog!  Be sure to check it out and comment on how you like it!  Any suggestions are welcome and helpful.

Recent Projects

It's been a while since I last posted, and since then I've started work on several new projects, one of which will actually tell you about the others, so I'll just link to it (it's a new self-hosted blog for my company projects).

Alanaktion Projects Blog
Note: this link may need to be updated as I add new features to the blog.

I Need New Music

I've grown somewhat tired of my current music collection, regardless of the fact that I have over 17,000 songs on my laptop...  If you've got any music I may be interested in, feel free to post a comment.

My School Site

For my Computer Applications class (which is likely somewhat below my level of experience), I created a new personal website.  I think it's very nice, and blalalabl sjdl kf jlskd fjsl...

There it is!
CLICK HERE (big long url)

Please don't spend too much time on this site, as it is run off of a small server, and I assume could be overloaded quite easily.  Large PHP scripts (like the countdown or Hangman game), especially may take a lot of server power to execute.

For server stats, click here. (this is quite laggy too)