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Category: LoneStar Network

New website

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As you can see, I’ve put the new website online.

Some details are still missing, some image galleries and something else, but the most has been done and so I decided it was enough to deserve being made available to the public.

As I had announced, I’ve moved off from Xoops and migrated contents to WordPress, currently version 3.0.1. Most of the work has been related to migrating old articles and then finding and configuring plugins to achieve all the functions that I wanted to enable.

Main new features are:

  • 2-columns layout on the right, in the inner column I’ve put those items related to the site itself (archives, login box, etc.), while in the outer column I’ve put those more “social” elements: links to Facebook, Twitter, Grooveshark, etc.
  • Better Facebook integration: besides logging in with your facebook account, you can comment, click on “like” button, report articles and comments on facebook, invite fb friends etc.
  • Social contents improved: there are new modules with my tweets from Twitter, my dents on Identi.ca, my books from Anobii, my music from Grooveshark and more stuff to add in the future.
  • Better handling of multilanguage: whole site is available both in italian and in english, without strict dependence among the two, which means that the english articles don’t have to be a direct translation of the italian articles but they can be totally independent, related to other arguments, etc.
  • Network community page: I’ve moved all links and functions related to users of LoneStar Network private services to a specific page named Network Community, which can be accessed from the menu bar under the header.
  • Blog look-and-feel: for many years I’ve been using a “portal” layout for the site rather than a blog layout, with the presence of forums, which I’ve always considered being more democratic. But during the years, almost nobody has ever used the forums and the few interactions I’ve seen have come from comments to my articles. So I’ve decided to remove the forums and give more relevance to my posts.

Any comment, critique, compliment, insult is well accepted, as usual 🙂

Vacation: time of changes

LoneStar 0 Comments
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I’m on vacation for three weeks starting today. It’s the best time of the year! 🙂

I want to make good use of this free time to make some changes here on LoneStar.it. Actually I’ve made up my mind thinking that there’s no more reason to keep using Xoops to manage the site. This because the most part of the site is managed by WordPress, embedded within Xoops by a module. Unfortunately this module is developed by a japanese community which doesn’t publish much in english, and it takes a lot of work to adjust the latest versions. Furtherly, if I’m using WordPress for the most, then why not moving to bare WordPress and quit dealing with adjustments?

Another thing is that most of recent modules which integrate content from the most famous social network sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. are mainly developed for WordPress. I do use many social networks and I’d like to add content from them on my site without too much hassle.

WordPress will also give me better tools for a bilingual website, allowing to easily write posts in two languages and link posts in italian to their translated version in english, manage bilingual categories and tags, etc.

That’s why in the upcoming days I’m going to migrate LoneStar.it to WordPress, trying to save previous content and taking the chance to experiment some new aestetics.

Wish me good work!

New WordPress and Facebook Connect

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I’ve just completed an important update on the site, and I’m rather happy for the result.

First of all I’ve removed the old Xpress 2.0.5 module, that is WordPress for Xoops, which was not being updated since years ago and contained a very old version of WordPress. I was using this module to manage the News and Articles section.

Yesterday I discovered a new module developed by a japanese guy, which is named XpressME. This module seems to be an evolution of the previous one, and it’s rather updated, considering it contains WordPress 2.7, the latest version available.

This allows me to use all the most recent WP plugins, and particularly it helped me achieving Facebook Connect integration, something that I’ve been wanting to do for some time.

With Facebook Connect users can comment news and articles with no need to register on the portal, but rather using their Facebook account. When a user authenticates through Connect, his/her name and profile picture are automatically recognized and appended, and his/her comment is made visible on Facebook’s newsfeed to be visible to his/her friends on social network. Furtherly it’s possible to invite Facebook friends to join discussions on the site.

As soon as I’m done with testing, I will add same functions to UnixPortal.

Qmail updated

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I’ve just done an update to Qmail’s patches. Qmail is the MTA handling mail in our network.

Lately a new release of SPAMCONTROL came out. SPAMCONTROL is a set of patches developed in Germany by Erwin Hoffman, oriented to spam handling, and improving Qmail’s features to make it usable on a current mail server. I prefer it over the other branch of development that Qmail’s community has taken, which lead to the netqmail-1.0x package.

For those ignoring Qmail history, it can be interesting to say that latest official release 1.03 came out in ancient 1998. After that, just unofficial patches have been developed, both by the original author and other users, and they have become essential to use Qmail in a modern enviroment. As a matter of fact, original sources didn’t include any spam handling support excluding some mild provision for RBLs, no SMTP-AUTH or SMTP-after-POP support, and other limitations. Very few bugs have come out until now, and most of them show when using the software in a 64 bit enviroment, an option that was not even predictable at the time of code writing. A common legend is that Dan J. Bernstein is working on a mithical Qmail 2.0 since 1998.

Obviously I hope there will be no issue due to this update, but in case any should show up, users are invited to report me by mail.

Hardware issues

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Because of an electric problem happened this afternoon, LoneStar Network’s server has been shut down for some hours.

I’ve found that the power supply unit has some issues, and I’ve had to hack it to turn it on again. Anyway the power supply unit will have to be replaced, because it doesn’t keep up with voltage when turned on.

I hope there won’t be other interruptions during this weekend, since I’m not in Ragusa and I would not be able to fix them.

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