Ajira.eu

I’ve been doing a little bit of research (read: I’ve been reading other people’s blogs), and came to the conclusion that my site has too much whitespace. One of the things that didn’t please me, is that my video’s and photo’s were small, which didn’t really look very good.

I’ve changed some code, added some code, and spanked the web server a bit; with the result being that the video’s and pictures will be more visible, and thus making the site a bit more pleasing to the eye. Both the pictures and the videos will be shown at 540x405 pixel resolution, except when there are multiple pictures of course. In those cases they will still be thumb nailed.

After lots of grumbles and annoyances with updating libraries and packages when trying to install a decent spam filter on FreeBSD (which is - in my opinion - still the best Unix/Linux in the world, though…), I decided to reinstall the server with Microsoft Windows Server 2003.

On its own, FreeBSD ran fine. Performance was super, stability was just awesome and the server ran flawless for almost a year and a half without rebooting. The only thing that always annoyed me was updating packages and libraries. It’s the curse of open source software. Each developer wants to use his/her own libraries, which means that you end up installing 3 or 4 versions of the exact same library, just because Programmer A wants to use a function that is used in version 1.0.7, but was removed in version 1.0.8; and Programmer B uses a function that didn’t exist in 1.0.7 yet, but does exist in 1.0.9, etc, etc… it’s just highly annoying.

On Windows servers that whole issue is non-existing, since all the libraries are either included with the software package, or are included in Windows Update. The same goes for security updates and new features; they’re just much easier to deploy on Windows. So from a manageability point of view, Windows definitely has the upper hand on FreeBSD.

The installation was a bit of a pickle. The hosting company installed the server promptly, but sent the welcome letter to an email address that was going to be hosted on the very same server that they just reinstalled. After a lot of poking, prodding and nudging they finally agreed to send the welcome mail to an alternative e-mail address so I could log on to the server and do my installation.

The initial setup went flawless, and the server was up and running in a couple of hours. The only things that are left to do for the next couple of days are fine tuning/tweaking and getting an upgrade for the memory. As opposed to FreeBSD, Windows 2003 doesn’t run optimal with just 512 MB. The website and server run ok, but there’s some delays and lowered performance issues that can easily be fixed by adding some RAM.

I will ask the hosting company to upgrade it to 2- or 4GB, depending on the costs of course.

I’ve decided to merge my old website (http://www.allodox.nl) and my new/current website (http://www.ajira.eu) together. I haven’t identified as AllodoX for nearly 2 years now, but I don’t want to just forget and scrap my past; It’s part of who I am today, so it deserves a place.

I’ve rebuilt most of the site from scratch (still some work left...), and added all the old content to it. The old content is posted by the user AllodoX, and the new/future content will be posted by the user Ajira. Don’t worry... I’m still the same person, just with a new/different style

A little overview of what’s on the site:

• Home - the page you first saw. This is the news/blog area.
  • Projects - here I’ll post writings, tutorials and information about projects I’m working on.
  • Photos - speaks for itself, I guess... Just photo’s of me, photos made by me and/or screenshots of games I’m active in.
  • FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions. Here you can ask me pretty much any question - there are exceptions of course - and I will try to answer them.
  • Downloads - Here you can download files that are associated to the projects section.
  • Sitemap - a quick overview of what’s on the site.
  The site as you see it is basically how it will look... I just need to make a new logo and add some content of course

I started working on my new site today. Previously I used a phpbb-based portal site, but I came to the conclusion that it’s major overkill for what I’m doing. So, I’m going to start from scratch, and make my own blogsite. No more 2mb patchfiles, no more weird spagetticode, no more known exploits, just pure functionality wrapped in a decent package. Stay tuned for more

Due to various reasons I’ve decided to dismantle my current web server and host my website on my server at home. My ADSL line has more than sufficient bandwidth to support it. The transition will be done sometime in the next 3 weeks.

One of the sites hosted behind my firewall was in the news. This caused a massive traffic spike, because pretty much everybody that heard about the site on the news visited the site to see what was going on.

As you can see, I’ve performed a little cleanup of the website. I rewrote the whole framework from scratch. In the old format, the layout of the site was made using plain HTML tables. In the new format, it is made using DHTML layers. Not only does it make updates (e.g. adding menus) a lot easier, but it also cuts down the size of the code by about 70 %. I’m converting some pages to the new format, so please be patient.

Yeah baby yeah!

Today my new webserver came online. Raceman and I had already put the server on location at the datacenter, but had to wait for the uplink to become active. Today it finally became active, woohoo!

I’ve translated te site to Dutch, and made it a bit more structured.

After much thinking and haggling, it was decided to rebuild the site. The next few weeks I will be working fulltime on the design of the website, but all help is welcome for the content (reviews, tips, etc...).