Sci-Fi Storm

Storm stuff

by on Jul.26, 2001, under General News

Well, it’s been a bit of a slow week. Obviously, I’m not posting just anything to the site – only some of the major news items I’m catching elsewhere. Very little is being submitted, and my time is more limited now. So I need your help…

PLEASE, submit news items that you think are worthy. Post comments. Tell your friends about the site (traffic is important). Buy stuff from Amazon.com via the links on the left. It’s getting to the point that I have to question whether it is worth the energy or not. Trust me, if the load gets to be too much, I’ll deputize some of you as authors/moderators…

I do have some plans for the site. I never finished the graphics style I wanted, but I’m now thinking of migrating to PHP-Nuke instead of Slashcode 2.X, and that would allow for “themes” and easier customization. This would probably happen with a server replacement (I’ve got a new server, but I’m questioning its stability right now), but I have to figure out how much of a mess it will be to convert.


10 Comments for this entry

  • Anonymous Coward

    Security issues

    As an FYI, PHPNuke has a lot of potential security issues, and unfortunately Fransisco hasn’t been taking this aspect all that seriously.

  • Anonymous Coward

    good luck, man.

    I’ve been running a site with a similar purpose, and similar content, for a couple of years now. I’m very fortunate that, through its various iterations, I’ve never had to run things completely by myself – in the old days, it was just a mailing list archive; these days, I’ve got two incredibly cool guys writing for me as well.

    But, let’s face it, it’s a labor of love. Much of what I post, I’d be digging to find anyway, so posting it isn’t that big of a deal. But, as you no doubt realize, finding news beyond that of the one or two series/shows/whatever you really really enjoy, and trying to keep everything up-to-date, is a pain.

    And you can’t count on altruism to get you all that far – yeah, I do have two really neat guys on staff, but there’s still a lot of work for little reward.

    Unrelated meta-questions: how many readers do you have per day/month/whatever? Maybe we should find a way to work together, make both our sites suck less, et cetera.

  • Anonymous Coward

    Re:Security issues

    PHP in general has a lot of security issues – this isn’t really something specific to PHPNuke or PHPSlash or PHPlib or… See A Study In Scarlet for some painful insight.

  • Doc

    Re:good luck, man.

    Ah yes, Bureau42. I remember its previous incarnation, and I though with Sci-Fi Storm I would add to that by providing the comments area, etc. So I set about getting mod_perl to play nice, got Slashcode to work, spent time customizing it, and by the time I went online you changed your site to do the same thing… šŸ™ And there certainly is a lot of duplication of effort…I’m not sure how we could work together and maintain separate sites though. Any ideas?

    Currently “visits” average a little over 150/day for July.

    I’ll stick with it for a bit and see what happens…I’d hate to throw it away.

  • Dave

    Re:good luck, man.

    Page stats, from June: just over 15000 page-views for /view/index.php (the one-article-per-page page), or about 500 per day. Not sure how that translates into unique visitors, though. And I can’t really play with the logs that much because, as a way to save time and space, I have five Web sites dumping logs in the same file.

    For starters, we could cross-pollinate: Slashcode comes with an RDF interpreter, so you can borrow my headlines (as lots of other people are already doing – the RDF page gets about 50k hits/month). As soon as I get round to writing an RDF interpreter, I’ll gladly put your headlines on my site as well.

    I gave up on mod_perl a LONG time ago. It’s a great idea, really it is, but it tends to require a fairly beefy server. Since I’m paying next-to-nothing for the server, and sharing it with a couple dozen other Web sites, I felt like I should be kind, so I wrote and optimized my own code in PHP.

    And I’m certainly not encouraging you to “throw it away,” as you put it. Far from it, in fact. You’ll catch stuff I miss, and maybe even vice versa. I’m just trying to ponder ways to pool our resources (without too much silliness, like each of us giving the other admin access to our sites, or trying to make our databases talk to one another). I’m sure one of us will have a good idea eventually…

  • Doc

    Re:good luck, man.

    Actually, I already pick up your RDF file, as it was inherited from Slashdot. It’s coming from the old technopagan site. If there is a better address, let me know. I thought I made it a default on the right column…I’ll have to check…

  • Dave

    Re:good luck, man.

    Nope, it’s not there. My front page (not modified, and I only created this account a few hours ago) has Features, Poll, Older Stuff, Quick Links, Freshmeat and Slashdot (I think in that order).

    The current, definitive URL is http://www.bureau42.com/rdf/ .

    I’ll hopefully have your site’s RDF data on my front page in a day or two. I found a nice RDF parser, but it’s wicked insecure (it demands world-writable tempfiles and other such silliness). Hacking it to use a nice sane database won’t be too hard, but I have a day job with which I must also contend…

  • Doc

    Re:good luck, man.

    I’ve updated the block and it should now show up in the default screen…

  • Dave

    Re:good luck, man.

    Cool. You’re now on the front page of Bureau 42 as well.

  • Doc

    Just a test…

    I needed to upgrade to perl 5.6, which went OK, but something else needed mod_perl to be upgraded, which then caused Slashcode to puke…I think its OK now…

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