As the History page tells us, SUCS was founded in the summer of 1988 which, of course, means that the society will be twenty this coming academic year.
It occurred to me in June that we really ought to do something about this, and in a discussion on Milliways, I suggested that we set up a website to gather as much of SUCS's history as we can find in backups, archive.org and peoples' brains.
On Friday, Arthur set up a new subdomain for the purpose, I installed PmWiki on it, and so we got the ball rolling. After quickly creating a skin for the site in keeping with my sucs.org design, I headed off in search of SUCS history.
The vast majority of it was from 1997 and later, which is hardly surprising, given that archive.org was set up in 1996 and had only indexed our site once that year.
Having assembled a basic time line for the society, I then spent yesterday looking through my old backups for old SUCS posters and so on. Interestingly, despite being nearly ten years old, I didn't have any problem reading my backup CD-Rs.
The results are now available for all to see at http://twenty.sucs.org/. Hopefully, we'll get some contributions from other people soon and the site will start to grow!
Well, I've been busy over the last few days working on the SUCS Blogs code.
First, I moved from "RC's nasty horrible database library" which "really needs replacing with something more sane" (his words) to ADOdb, which is the database library the SUCS site uses. This made it easier to do my second task, which was to turn the Blogs system into a SUCS site component.
As part of the work on the component, I created a method of adding RSS and ATOM feeds to pages within the site, so the chckens then wrote a new Planet component to take advantage of this.
To top it all off, I then wrote two new mini-components to list the most recent blog entries (taken from the Planet ATOM feed) and SUCS forum posts, which now appear on the SUCS front page when you log in.
It's been annoying me for ages that when you post a new blog entry you get a stack of PHP warnings despite it posting the entry successfully and fixing this has been on my TODO list for a while. Finally, I got round to looking at it last night, only to find that the suphp PATH_INFO problem was preventing me from working on my own copy of the blog code.
This morning, after a fair amount of buck-passing, this issue was finally resolved (thanks sits and Arthur!) and I was able to look at the problem.
It turns out that as of PostgreSQL 8.1, the OID is not present by default and this was what was causing the problem - the db_last() function was using pg_last_oid(), which was simply not returning anything.
I've worked round this by using the shortsubject to fetch the new entry from the database instead.
Everyone will have probably noticed by now anyway, but SUCS has a new website. I've been too busy making things on it work since it went live on Sunday to get round to posting a blog entry about it :-)
There's still a lot of fixing going on, but (I hope) the most important things all work now.
I've been doing some coding on the SUCS Blog system over the last few days. First, as I mentioned before, I've upgraded TinyMCE and second, if you follow the previous link, you will see the other thing I've done - implemented a navigation bar when viewing individual entries, allowing you to browse back and forward without going back to the archive list. These changes have made it into the live system, as you probably realised.
Since then, I've improved the code used to find the previous and next items for the navigation bar, thanks to a couple of SQL queries that aeternus came up with.
TinyMCE is now at version 2.0.6.1 and we've been using an old version on the SUCS Blog for quite a while, so I've just upgraded it. It doesn't address the bug I was hoping to fix, namely that it inserts 'border="0"' into <img> tags, so I'll have to look into that separately.
This blog entry was written using the new version of TinyMCE.
One of the suggested project ideas on the new SUCS AdminWiki is ShortURL.
I've had a go at implementing this at http://sucs.org/~dez/url - it's still work in progress, but it's working. I've got to sort out a problem with its detection of invalid URLs. It currently doesn't like addresses like "http://google.co.uk" - it wants "http://google.co.uk/" instead. There's probably a PHP function somewhere to take care of this.
I've not implemented authentication on the basis that that's something the new SUCS website should be taking care of site-wide, rather than members having to log in individually to each tool.
I use the SUCS Desktop on Demand service three times a week while I'm on dialysis, as it makes the Premier Bedside consoles a lot more useful - I can use ssh, play games, use Firefox to browse the web (rather than the cripled version of mozilla that the consoles run) and generally do what I want.
It has annoyed me for quite a while that the Java VNC provided on the SUCS website doesn't capture tab key presses, so this evening, I set out to resolve this. It took several attempts, but I eventually figured it out all in the one dialysis session.
In addition to making tab presses work, I also removed the margins, extra text and buttons and made the HTML compliant. The result can be seen at http://sucs.org/~dez/vnc/
Good news on the blog front - all the Basic Completeness tickets have now been closed fixed so we're pretty much ready to launch. A new URL - http://sucs.org/blog/ has been created.
There is a lot of testing needed now, but the best way to do that is to get people using the system. We'll also need to work on the user creation and administration stuff.
Well, since the beginning of the month, there have been twelve updates to the Blog code - and half of them weren't by me either, so that's good.
It looks like we're very nearly ready to launch. There are a couple of things that need tidying up - there needs to be a switch for TinyMCE and the nl2br stuff needs turning off when TinyMCE is being used, but the other five tickets that are open are not serious.