Today’s exam (implementation and power of computer languages) was quite possibly the worse experience since taking Continuous Mathematics last year. I just had a total mind blank when I was looking at the questions, despite the fact that one of them was similar to a lab exercise that I got good marks on. I don’t know why, but I just couldn’t think straight and as a result I have the uneasy feeling that I screwed up big time. 🙁
Anyway, nothing can be done about that now, just have to wait until I get my results and see if (or rather when) I have to resit.
In other news I’ve been working on my blog today, managed to get a two column layout working that I’ll be pushing live in the next few days (possibly this weekend). I’m just removing all the surplus CSS that isn’t needed and getting ready to convert the header and footer templates to reflect the new structure (one of the great things about using templates is that I can change the look of the whole site by just editing two or three files). The site will still have the same basic look and feel, but I’ll be able to put things like links in the right hand column to spread things about a bit. The purple theme is here to stay though. 🙂
Next on the list after the design change is to write a simple user management system that will let people create an account on the site that they can use for commenting on entries. Why you might ask? Well, once you’ve signed up and selected to stay logged in permanently (using a cookie), you’ll be able to comment on entries with all the required fields already filled in. There will also be the option to search for all comments by a particular user, to be notified when a new entry is posted and be emailed automatically whenever someone comments on an entry you’ve subscribed to (either all entries on just the ones you choose).
After this it’s back to working on my other sites, in particular I want to have a good stab at getting Potmaster up and running in some shape or form. For those of you who don’t know, Potmaster is going to (eventually!) be a free email system with potmaster.com addresses that can be accessed from the web in a similar way to Hotmail and Yahoo! mail. The difference is that you'll be able to get a half-decent address (namepostmaster.com instead of name53453578979879@hotmail.com) and there won’t be anything like as many advertisements, and those that do exist will be as non-obtrusive as possible. The idea is to make a site will a relatively small userbase that I can use to get some more experience of providing a service to others and user management, which should help bolster my CV. Also, hopefully the site will make a small trickle of money that I can save or put towards new hardware.
I know Dan will probably say “you’ve said you’d work on Potmaster for ages now” and he’s right, but I’ve finally got the time and skills to put things into action (hey, I got Rogue Students up eventually didn’t I? :).
Anyway, more updates will be posted here when I get round to writing them, so watch this space!
Whoa. Potmaster/Postmaster (whatever you’re going to call it; personally potmaster sounds good to me) sounds pretty neat. Is the idea to write the whole thing or just throw together some already-existing stuff? I mean… you could just buy a domain and install SquirrelMail and be away…
If not, and you’re going to do it the right way, can I join in? Maybe I could write a really sexy SQL backend for you and then there could be uber-searching facilities such as those provided by Google 😛
It will be called Potmaster because that’s the name of the site and the domain. 😉
I’m hoping to use as many existing tools as possible, I certainly don’t want to have to write a whole webmail system by myself – it took Google long enough to get Gmail out of the door and they have some pretty clever people working for them. I think I could do it using PHP and Postgresql, but it would take me an awfully long time.
On the other hand, I’m not going to just grab SquirrelMail, install that and hope everything works. Apart from anything else, I need something that can create new mail accounts on the system, and I need to be able to use virtual domains to allow me to run several mail services on the same box. I also need to figure out how to get Postfix working to handle incoming and outgoing mail for several domains (something which I’m learning at the moment).
If you want to chip in, that’s cool, catch me next time you’re in the department to ask me about it. There’s only one rule: we’re not running sendmail! 😉
Ah, you’re a cheat!
You could throw that together in about ten minutes. Seriously.
Log in with your uber administrator account on xeon’s Horde and you’ll see it supports it all.
I think you/we should write it ourselves. MUA, MTA and backend included. That would look good on your CV!
Does it support automatic account creation though (i.e. you fill in a web form and two minutes later everything is done with no manual intervention)? Although I guess I could probably write some sort of script to handle that.
I do like the setup we have on xeon though, it looks very nice (it’s a long time since I’ve used Horde and the last impression I had was that it looked horrible). I’m not too keen on pop-up windows for mail composition, but that might be partially down to the fact that I’m so used to mutt now anyway.
I also notice it adds a tagline to every mail it sends, which I could edit to add a ‘Powered by Potmaster: http://www.potmaster.com/’ link or something.
I’d have to add quite a few wrapper scripts around it though so I could differentiate between different account types, or perhaps I could just rely on donations, not sure yet. I’ll have to check out the wiki at some point next week to see how we’re handling mail.