the-spot.net

Well, the copyright at the bottom says 2011...but we all know I haven't touched this thing really since 2009. Hell, it even has the Aero theme-style that was announced with Windows Vista.

While getting the theme to appear translucent in areas, and have different shadings for the top left vs top right sides of the pages was a feat in itself at the time...and getting various things on the My Spot page to load asynchronously was equally technical, I'm way beyond those types of skills now, and getting paid a smurf-poo-ton more money to do the type of work I learned how to do by creating this website.

With that, I announce the intention to bring this site up-to-date with some current technology, and if possible, some facebook/twitter/social media integration.

My goals when this thing is said and done is to hopefully bring back at least some of the members and allow new threads made here to be syndicated to various social networks, and anything else I can tie into the forums.

It's time for me to expand my technical know-how, and without any other worthwhile project on the table, this is the only test bed of code that I've got.

Everything will be open-sourced, as I mentioned on the new tsnBlog, which http://www.the-spot.net now redirects to. Consequently that blog will also be the home of the new TSN Special Report announcements...and hopefully I can integrate some type of comment system where posts made in one place will appear as replies made in the other.

But first thing's first...a face-lift and version update...hopefully by Summer 2014.

It'd be a great project to work on!

Is there anything you'd like for me to do (outside of the obvious "attract more people here")? Since I'm back in Texas, we can see if we can rally into doing a "Retro" LAN Party like old times with new pics

Not yet - I'm only working on the site casually, since I have to re-learn everything about how it functions, and write new code for the new features I want. Surprisingly phpbb hasn't moved past version 3 since it was created in 2005. I figured there would be at least 2 versions created since then.

I have no idea when in the summer it'll be done, and no idea what a "Retro" LAN Party would even look like - I'd hate to have everyone fill up your folks' house again and drive up their electricity bill...especially in the miserable heat of the summer where the A/C couldn't even pretend to keep up with all those bodies and computers.

Regardless, it would be nice to get this place back to a working state that doesn't attempt to monopolize people's social interaction but is capable of complimenting them instead.

We'll have to see as work progresses.

It occurs to me there is in fact something you can do that will help the development... that would be to make random posts in the various forums, so that I can show activity from someone other than myself. At some point, I'll need someone to also test the site as a user with lower permissions. I have a couple alias accounts on here that I use during development, but once I have read them, they stop showing up as new posts.

So...if you can find the time every day or two days, swing by make a few random posts in various forums please. It wouldn't hurt if you were able to convince any of the previous members to come back to the site and do the same.

That shouldn't be too hard of a request, I'm in then, although I'm not entirely sure about the entire forum, but majority for sure

Well, I've gotten the My Spot, board index, view forum, and view topic pages pretty much squared away with the new design.

The one I was going to work on next is the New Topic/Post page. My idea for it is to open the creation form in a popup modal (not a popup window, but a box inside the current window) so the user doesn't have to leave the page to create a new post.

Unfortunately, the posting.php page is a smurfin' mess and trying to create a version of that which can be loaded on-demand without refreshing the page is going to be something of a challenge to read through the nearly 1500 lines of code (just on that page, not counting the stuff it includes/references) to figure out either: what parts are relevant to extract, or what parts are actually needed to display the minimum required.

The ajax version might have to go to the back burner for now, and instead, focus on updating the original page to use the plugins I wanted to replace (like a better editor, and color picker) and add the ajax post in here (so the user doesn't potentially lose everything they typed on a failed post).

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I took a look at rewriting some of the code, but there is just so smurfin' much of it required to make this site, rewriting it without introducing security holes and covering all the bases is a huge task - one that I may not ever finish in a reasonable amount of time - even if I set my mind to it.

Right now, there is a newer version of the code available (which is scary, since I've made so many changes to this code already to get it to display what I want) but it is unavailable for me, since the webhost we're on won't upgrade my server's PHP to something past 5.2.17. I think they want me to upgrade my plan or something, but they don't offer what I want at a price I want it.

I have been considering other web hosts, and found a couple that would be suitable for my needs - however, moving the site is not an easy task, not to mention my email configuration and the time for DNS to propagate to the new server.

I guess I should make the move though, before I announce the site as complete for tsn8, while no one but UPS and I are posting (though lately it's only been me...which makes me wonder if all this will be wasted, or if people will actually come back).