When you're creating a program from scratch, never build the layout into the code. Find another way around it so that the coding and design don't intertwine. This is something I should have known, but I guess it's one of those times where you have to learn from your mistakes. This layout, lovely as it is, is too damn compressed. Fixed width layouts should be avoided at all costs, especially if the widths are small. I'll be changing the theme of this blog soon to have a more CopyBlogger type theme. So, look forwards to that!

We thought we should give you an update on exactly what we're working on at the moment, so here it is!

With the mini-Blog

• The procedure for showing posts is rather mess, so that'll have to be fixed.
• Adding polls to promote user activity and generally get ideas about what you readers think.
• A top commenter's section in the side bar, giving a link back to them as a thanks for adding to the site's content!
• On the back end, I want to make an algorithm that can quickly detect SPAM and remove it from the moderation queue.

Kingdom of Alrond

• We're continuously working on KoA; we're almost up to where we left off with Sheep Farmer. It's taken us this long because we've had to rewrite everything, obviously and make sure it's up to par with our new systems of the mapping and just generally exciting stuff!

Today we've just added the functionality so that comments have to be moderated before they're shown to the general public. This'll help keep out SPAM and just general nasty people. Of course, nothing wrong with a heated discussion.

All these additions though have started to make the scripting cramped and messy, so that will be the main focus of the next lot of updates. That does mean that there won't be any fancy front end/visible updates for you guys, but it'll make it a lot easier to implement anything else that should be added.

We also added our RSS feed! All fixed up, nice and RSS 2 valid! Subscribe to it from Feedburner, I'll probably do a proper blog post later on Feedburner later because I never realised how great it is! It comes packed with features to make your feed better. Not to mention, they cut out the problem of me having to learn how to pingback! The only reason that we bothered starting to use it was because of its acquisition by Google, who we're all a big fan of here at Shamess Productions.

We've also added ourselves to Technorati and already have an authority of four. Okay, that's not amazing but I'm sure we're getting there!

Quite a bit of fixing up has ensued since I was last here.

The "read more" functionality messed up the XHTML compliancy, but now I've fixed it. Also, you'll notice that there's now a "Read more" link, so I won't have to clutter up the front page with posts that might not interest you.

We're also currently working on an RSS feed of these posts, but there have been a few expected problems. Expected because this is the first RSS feed I've ever created (well, first XML!) so I'm sure I've done something silly wrong. That should be up pretty soon though, so get your Google Reader at the ready.

Tag view stopped working for a short while too, but I fixed that as soon as I noticed it. The majority of problems that I'm finding is because of the different file structure of nemo-serv, the development server, and SH5, the live server. But that's getting better. I really need to learn to set up vhosts on my Apache.

We've got our first spam! Well, four lots of spam actually. They seem to think that we're using BB codes, since that's how they appear to be linking to things, unfortunately, we're not using BB tags at the moment (I'm hoping to add those later). With this in mind, I've decided to push the priority of comment moderation up to first class, so I'll be adding that soon.

BEA Solutions, our sexy hosters, have just updated their site design and are now up and running again. Head over to them and they'll fix up your computer, give you dirt cheap Internet access, set up a home (or business) network for you, design your website, register your domain name and host it all at once. How do they manage it!? Go check them out.

We hadn't done much work on our simple blog lately, so I figured I'd put in an hour or so and have added new features. First, to the front end, I've made it so only ten posts are shown at a time. You can't see it at the moment, since there are only a few posts, but I've tested it on nemo-serv and it works all fine and dandy. At the bottom of the page, just like any typical blog, you'll see a link to previous posts, that'll take you back another ten posts, of course you can manually change the link to whatever amount to skip you like.

I've also added the "read more" tag. I simply type <!-- Stop reading!!! --> and when you're on a page with multiple posts, you only get to see the first section. Of course, that comment is still in the single post view, if you look at the source. Maybe it'll leave it in for if someone wants to create a crawler. Of course, I've not added a way to actually tell the user that not all of the post is showing, so the "read more" function is a bit retarded at the moment.

I've also set the auto-number in the database to start numbering from 1000. If you're running your own blog with the unique ID in the URL for a perma-link to the post I recommend you do the same. Why? Because Google says so. I'm not going to change the links I've already made for indexing purposes.

Also, I've changed the "Read comments" link to "Read # comments", so you know if someone has commented since you last looked.

The back end is coming along nicely too. Admin's can now log in, post and delete posts. Still lacking the ability to update posts, but that's at the top of my to-do list.

Look forwards to more updates soon!

As I mentioned in my last post, I've had to add nofollow to all the links in user comments in an effort to try and stop spam. However, if a blog has good anti-spam facilities, like most blogs do now thanks to WordPress having lots of plugins for it, then it really shouldn't use the nofollow tag.

Google was the one to start the nofollow tag and then following their recommendation, others joined the initiative too. Basically, the nofollow tag is written like so: <a href="http://www.allroundnews.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">. This tells search engines to not give that link any "credit" towards how it's ranked in the search results page. It's supposed to be used to make sure that comments don't allow spammers to get any advantage by flooding your blog, whilst still letting users click the link just as normal.

This is a great idea in theory. However, in the page I link to above, Google said that every comment, traceback, guest book or just any user generated content should have it's links parsed with the nofollow attribute. I don't think that's nice at all. The user's comment is great content added to the article or page and they shouldn't all be treated as spammers; the link to their website is the only pay back that a web master can offer to say "thanks for the unique content" without actually giving them money.

If the user generated content is moderated before it's shown publicly, then the nofollow tag shouldn't even be added at all. If comments aren't moderated at all, for any reason, then I propose that the nofollow tag be added, but only for a week or so. After that time, any spam should have been deleted anyway so the nofollow tag should be removed. That's the way I'm intending comments here are going to be handled.

So, give back to your users if they give you content that others would pay for; give them a link!

We've added comments! Just as simple as the rest of the site really. At the moment, since there's not really any moderation (other than us refreshing randomly because we have nothing better to do) all links are set to nofollow links, to keep spam down as much as we can. Also, you can't use HTML or any other rich text devices at the moment, though be sure that they'll be added soon.

Next thing we have to add is the back end, since there's nothing horribly important at the user end. With the back end though, we'll be able to make it so we can ping Technorati and do trace backs on blogs, set up RSS feeds and just manage the site more easily. For a template that was intended to just be temporary, it ain't 'alf turned into a growingly complex blog!

So, we've accomplished the simplest blogging software we could have in a day or two; currently it consists of one file, a .htaccess mod and a few fake directories. In fact, it's so simple we don't even have a back end yet, all the updating has to be done straight into the database so that'll be the next thing I'll be adding. However, all the front end should be working fine! If you find a bug or anything then be sure to let us know. (Actually, we don't have anyway for you to contact us just yet... maybe I'll make that first priority. So, with that spur of the moment thought, expect the ability to comment on posts soon! Oh, and the CSS should be fixed up shortly!

Also we've decided that the articles might be better suited just as a blog post here, so expect those soon.

What we were planning on doing was do a substantial amount of work to KoA, just enough to make it usable, and then make the site live for BETA users to use in it's not-yet-finished form. However, in KoA's coding we've used some PHP5 and MySQL5 features that our hosts, BEA Solutions' shared server doesn't currently have as I mentioned before. This means that I'll have to either wait till they upgrade, switch to another host or purchase a dedicated server.

Switching to another host is really out of the question. We've been with BEA Solutions from the start and have set up a pretty good relationship with them. Also, I doubt that we'd find anywhere as cheap as they're doing our package, so yay for them!

Waiting seems like the easiest thing to do. Though I don't think they'll be upgrading in the foreseeable future, so it may be a bit of time. In any case, KoA is no where near finished enough for even BETA users to see so it's not really us having to wait, since we have to carry on coding it up anyway.

My final option was to get our own server, rather than a shared one. These start at around £150 a month, so KoA would have to be a finish product for us to release it and be able to have enough money from advertising to cover that. Here at Shamess Productions, we all love the idea of having our own server to manage our selves and have complete control of. The only limiting factor here is the price.

It looks like we're going with option two at the moment, wait for BEA Solutions to upgrade. But we're only settling for this option by default.

I'm in the process of changing this static front page over into a dynamic blog, thus tags don't work yet. Bear with us on that front. To be fair, with two posts why do you even need tags just yet?

Finally, the article section is down pending... well, pending me fixing that page!

Whilst our new design is being written, we've adopted a lovely little CSS theme thanks to CSSFill.com. Don't expect the layout to be changing any time soon; we're still in the really early stages of redesign (in fact, we haven't thought of even a rough idea of what we want yet). Meanwhile, I'll be changing the rest of the site over to this layout shortly.

Initially, I was going to have a blog on this page, and I still might do that. However, our hosts, BEA Solutions, don't currently have PHP 5 or MySQL 4 (for compatability reasons mostly) so I can't run a WordPress blog just yet. This could, however, spur me onto continue writing DataBank FMS and adding the blogging functionality I wanted to.

Speaking of DataBank, because of us not wanting to run into copyright issues, DataBank is now called DataBank FMS. It'll be the next Mambo. Maybe? I'll be changing all the names and stuff when I can too.