I’m still looking for a suitable CMS for Jan’s site. I found a great web site during my investigations today: opensource CMS. This site is great! They have nearly 40 CMS applications installed on their server which you can play with; login as admin, add pages and articles, edit menus, etc. Most of the features seem to be enabled. All systems are reset once an hour on the hour but that is plenty to get a good feel for how the application works. They also have reviews of some of the systems, tons of useful information, CMS news, a forum, and so on. Highly recommended.

I forgot to mention that wildcard subdomains are now working on zed1.net. It’s only taken them 13 days since my original support request to sort this out. I was that close ( *holds up two touching fingers* ) to cancelling and looking for yet another hosting service.

Hey, guess what! There’s a new version of B2Links. You can find the announcement on the b2 forum. Download from the B2Links home page.
Changes are: A new name, and some minor bug fixes already posted on the forum.

By the way, If you have a link to my B2Links home page with the words “B2 Link Manager” could I ask you to change it to read “B2Links”, please. There are some new Powered By buttons on the B2Links home page too.

Zed1.net is being moved to a different hosting service. I can’t yet go into what happened with the previous one, more when things are settled. I’ve found a reseller account I can afford which has all the facilities I want and am just waiting for my account to be activated. Fingers crossed it won’t take too long.

I just saw this story over at slashdot.

“There’s some considerable argy-bargy in progress over whether or not GNU’s own GFDL is a Free documentation license at all. At issue are “invariant sections” which cannot be removed from derivative works.”

It took me about 60 seconds to read the relevant portion of the GFDL to see that someone has the wrong end of the stick.

“A “Secondary Section” is a named appendix or a front-matter section of the Document that deals exclusively with the relationship of the publishers or authors of the Document to the Document’s overall subject (or to related matters) and contains nothing that could fall directly within that overall subject. (Thus, if the Document is in part a textbook of mathematics, a Secondary Section may not explain any mathematics.) The relationship could be a matter of historical connection with the subject or with related matters, or of legal, commercial, philosophical, ethical or political position regarding them.
The “Invariant Sections” are certain Secondary Sections whose titles are designated, as being those of Invariant Sections, in the notice that says that the Document is released under this License. If a section does not fit the above definition of Secondary then it is not allowed to be designated as Invariant. The Document may contain zero Invariant Sections. If the Document does not identify any Invariant Sections then there are none. “

In other words if, for example, you were to write a book entitled “Hacking The GIMP“, license it under the GFDL, and include a section stating “The author is not a developer of the GIMP and cannot guarantee that your copy of the program will continue to work after following the instructions in this book.”, you could declare that section as invariant. This seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Without the invariant section a later author could take your work and modify that section to read “The author guarantees your GIMP will run faster and better after reading this book.” A trivial example, but without the ability to mark the given section that “deals exclusively with the relationship of the publishers or authors of the Document to the Document’s overall subject (or to related matters)” as invariant a more serious subject matter could land an author in a lot of trouble as a result of someone’s (legal) modification of the text.

Cool! My simple page counter has just passed the 250,000 mark! That’s since 25/08/2002. I make that over 1050 ‘views’ per day. Just this year it’s nearly 1400 per day. In this case views are a full request for the page. It doesn’t mean just humans viewing the page in a browser, it also includes all the search engine crawlers, metablog crawlers, spam email rippers, etc. Real people viewing the various pages on the site is running at about 100 per day.

It looks like my hosting service for zed1.net has been compromised! 🙁
I’ve been in touch with the support people when I discovered my sites were unavailable and they were already working on it. More when I know more.

Too Much Time On Your Hands? Here’s something to occupy you for a few minutes.
how to make a starship enterprise out of an old floppy disk.