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Alumni Updates, Part 1
Posted by Adrian Caulfield [3/1/2008 11:45:36 PM] Tonight I posted the first of a series of updates to the Alumni site, TritonAlumni.info. This update includes the following changes: *The site has been converted to C#, from VB. *Updated to .NET Framework 3.5 *The database has been redesigned, making it more flexible and extensible *Several new fields were added to the profiles, including Interests, Activities, a Website URL, and the ability to have as many IM accounts as you wish *All accounts were shifted to use a new multi-site login system I've been working on. *Validation checks on entered data were improved *An option to no display your email address was added *Color scheme was updated on some of the pages The new login system allows one user to have a single login that can be used across many sites, in much the same way as Microsoft LiveID (passport). Currently there are only a few sites of mine using this, but if you've got an alumni profile, you can now login to MyBarMonkey.net and eventually this site. Several profiles were skipped during the update from the old site to the new one, this was the result of restrictions that each profile must have a unique email address. The option to not display an email address is the first step in a plan allowing one alumni to send a message to another even if their email address is not displayed on the site. Basically you can send a message through the site, and the recipient will get an email. Let me know what you think, and if you find any bugs!
Hello, My Treacherous Friends Posted by Adrian Caulfield [3/1/2008 11:34:40 PM] It's always fun to catch people trying to hack your systems. In this case, I had someone running a dictionary attack on my SQL Server installation. The first thing I have to say is, the port is now closed, so don't bother checking :P. Second, if you're going to try and hack... be smart about it. By default any new installation of SQL Server 2005 only allows Windows accounts to login, not 'sa', not 'admin', just those members of the Administrators group on your server. Anyway, I've blocked the offending IPs and closed the port. Unfortunately it'll put a damper on my chuckling at the few hundred events a minute. I saw an article about SQL attacks the other day which stated that about 70% of all mallicious traffic on the net is targeted at SQL servers, even though there are very few remaining exposed servers.
Updating the Alumni Site Posted by Adrian Caulfield [2/8/2008 11:47:06 PM] I've decided to revamp the alumni site. Since it was originally brought online in 2003, the site hasn't changed much except for the odd bug fix and message change a few times a year. I hope to attract more alumni by adding new features and making it easier for people to connect and stay in touch. If you've got any suggestions for features you'd like to see, let me know and I'll try and work them in. There's a lot of work to be done bringing the site up to date, but the first order of business is translating all of the code into C# and refreshing a lot of the backend that makes the site run. Because most of the work is on the backend of the site, it'll be a while before the first changes are visible on the site. But it'll be much easier to maintain and extend once this work is done.
Experiments with Ads Posted by Adrian Caulfield [1/17/2008 9:06:43 PM] I've begun a small experiment with putting ads on my various websites to help cover the cost of replacing hardware and hosting them. We'll see if anyone is interested in clicking on them, and whether anyone really visits these sites in the first place :P.
Site back up! Posted by Adrian Caulfield [1/10/2008 10:34:00 PM] Site back up. After some trouble with server relocation and internet access woes, I've managed to get my site back up. Not everything is working yet, and it'll probably be a while, but I am working on it slowly. In the mean time go check out MyBarMonkey.net, which is another project I've been toying with for the last few months.
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