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.

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.