Yes, you heard right: tsn is now open-source.

Technically the code base has always been made from open source software – it was simply a modified version of phpBB. I just never uploaded it to a version system because I had my code distributed to several different computers via Microsoft Groove/Mesh/Sync and was the only person working on the code. I had all my bases covered.

These days though, I rarely touch the code, and when I do, I have to dig through archives that I *hope* are the latest (there are several on my computer) and find the piece I want to edit, and hope it doesn’t overwrite something newer on the server.

Unfortunately that didn’t work out with my most recent change, and I had to dig through all my image directories to find the tsn7 splash image when I updated the splash page to remove some dead links. So, with that, I downloaded everything in the public_html directory (which turned out to be over 1GB of stuff) and split them off into 3 repositories.

Repository: tsn1

You can find the code base for tsnI here: https://github.com/neotsn/tsn1

This is the original code base for the-spot.net, before it was overhauled to include more than just me as an Admin. I created the whole thing in html and it’s very rudimentary…but that’s the best I could do at the time, with the resources I had.

There appears to be some links related to freeformfrog from the time period, but I don’t know how well it all will work if uploaded to another web server. You can see what a working version would look like over at http://the-spot.net/tsnI/.

As far as code commits and stuff, I’m definitely not accepting anything for this repository – it’s purely for entertainment purposes. However, I am slightly disappointed that our flash music pull from Benjy’s restaurant (aka “the esc-a-lata muzak”) no longer works. I’m also slightly concerned that I created a website that required people to have Java enabled in their browsers, and didn’t use JavaScript…but the times were different back then.

Repository: tsn2

You can find the code base for tsnII here: https://github.com/neotsn/tsn2

This was my first attempt at including other officers/admins on the site and trying to showcase them as founders and contributors to the whole process. For this version, I included UraniumPoppySeed as an Admin for the first time, but also ventured into Contributors with Trunk writing some journal postings about his life as a college student back at our semi-alma-mater. Some of the features link to a forum or forum feature as I worked to integrate phpBB more and more into the design of the site…or rather, as I worked to extract portions of phpBB to become the focal point of the site.

Again, with the commits and such, this release is for historical/entertainment purposes only.

Repository: tsn

You can find the code base for tsn7 here: https://github.com/neotsn/tsn. This will always be the current revision of tsn.

After tsnII, I devoted a weekend to actually sitting down to learn PHP for the first time, and created tsnIII. I had never actually modified PHP code before and every version of tsn and its previous iterations as etbustudents.cc were all HTML/JavaScript with links into a phpBB installation. With tsnIII I read through the code, figured out what changes had what effect on the website, and learned how to code PHP. From there, I spent the following week creating the myspot.php page, which pulled a mini forum list, the post-section from the latest posts page, and the first topic in a particular forum. I put it all together on a single page, including whatever needed to be included to make the errors stop and that’s when My Spot was born.

Unfortunately I don’t have code for tsnIV (which was never actually released and subsequently scrapped in favor of tsnV, which jumped to tsnX, and then back to tsn7). As those who followed my journals closely on the site may remember, every release coincided with a particular major relationship of the time, and tsnIV was with the most serious of the relationships – but also the shortest and most devastating. So it was never released, and I moved on immediately with the design work for tsnV, creating a more 3D version of everything, and to try out some new technologies of the time like AJAX and RSS. This was where the MySpot page became more dynamic and modular, and where Twitter was introduced to the site.

Then tsnX was released to become what I thought would be the final release for the site. It was the best visually-tying theme I’d released for all the different features, and I was satisfied with it. However, when Microsoft Windows Vista and subsequently Windows 7, I figured I would try my hand at creating translucent graphics to mimic the Aero interface in Windows. After all, tsnII was modeled after Hotmail (if you didn’t pick that up), and etbustudents.cc’s e3 revolution was modeled after Windows XP, even using some of the system icons for features on the site.

Thus, tsn7 was my last release, since at the same time there was a dwindling interest in using a forum as a social media platform instead of the emerging services of Facebook and MySpace.

As far as trying to get this code to work, whatever you have access to on the-spot.net/phorums you will have access to the code that makes it in this repository. To get it to work, you’re going have to install your own version of phpBB on your own web server, and then copy the corresponding code into the forums directory. There will be various aspects of the myspot page that won’t work at first because some of the features are tied directly to the forum id number from the database, which is specific to my installation. You’ll have to find those and change them. However, if none of this works, then you’ll simply need to take a look at the code I wrote for the My Spot page, and use it as a guideline for what you’ll need to write in your own version of the page.

Now, as far as commits go, I will very likely not be accepting any committed code to the repository, simply because the code base is there for archival purposes. Occasionally I will make updates to some parts of the code, so it would behoove you to keep your version updated with the master copy if you decide to make a pull.

However, you’re welcome to fork it for your own purposes – but I won’t be including any of the database with the repository, since that’s not what GitHub is about.