Cameron's Thoughts

Site Title: Cameron's Thought's
First Online: June 22, 2003
Hosting Provider: Liquid Web
Software that powers this site: CentOS Linux, Apache, Perl, PHP, MySQL, Movable Type 3.2
Software for developing content: Movable Type, w.bloggar
Software used to build site: HTML-Kit, EditCSS, Vim
Standards: All pages are valid XHMTL 1.0 Transitional, and each entry at the time of writing this contains valid code. All CSS and RSS is valid, site uses no tables for layout. I have attempted to make site fully compliant to web accessibility standards and have passed all automated tests for Section 508 and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

To Do List:

• Create mobile style sheet for main page
• Add accessibility features to site and conform to those standards
• Create a WAP version of site for cell phones
• Add archive of past version's of my websites (Omega's Lair, CBulock.com)
• Update Stylesheets
• Maybe use TypeKey for comment authentication. Wouldn't be required, but might offer it as an option. Have tried this already, but there are some conflicts with my current code
• Looks like a complete redesign of this site from the ground up might be underway again
• Finish CommentAPI implementation by allowing posting of comments through CommentAPI

Update History

06/20/2008
Added images to the mobile site.

03/30/2008
On Friday, this site was moved over to a new server.

03/24/2008
Made some minor changes to the registration and login system to eventually allow anonymous comments and to stop spam accounts from signing up. That broke the mobile site logins though. Corrected that now.

01/07/2008
Expanded sites language support. Included new support for non-Roman languages. Language bar now supports Chinese, Korean, Russian, Japanese and Arabic.

01/07/2008
Added new 'Rainy Day' style and set as the default stylesheet.

09/24/2007
Created a stylesheet that loads when visiting page on a Nintendo Wii.

09/08/2007
Made updates to the mobile site. Now uses new comment system. Also uses new auth system and allows comments to be posted.

08/25/2007
Registration system now allows account registrations and logins. Along with this, the comments have been migrated to my own homemade system that is linked to the user logins.

08/15/2007
All the comments displayed on the site are now done using my own comment system I have written. Soon I will have restored the ability to post comments.

05/28/2007
Added some icons to the site from http://famfamfam.com.

02/25/2007
Made a number of modifications to the ad system. Now individual entries can have customized ads as well as individual category pages. These changes were made to accommodate some sponsorships for the site.

02/10/2007
Added ability to post picture messages straight to the site from my phone.

12/08/2006
Went through the long list of Movable Type plugins and checked for updates. Since almost all of them have had updates since I've last checked, I went through and updated everything.

11/19/2006
I created a backend of the ads on this site. I can now easily swap advertisements and add new ones to the site without having to tinker with the code.

09/06/2006
I now have full CommentAPI support here. You can view and post comments from any newsreader that supports CommentAPI.

07/07/2006
Fixed some known bugs in the search page. There was one bug involuving a possible injection attack, and also an issue with the way quotes were encoded. These are resolved. Also, the page is back up now as yesterday someone was hitting that page every couple of seconds from different hosts each time. I don't know what they were doing, they weren't exploiting the hole I fixed because it would have been logged if they did. I turned the page off and the attacked stopped within minutes.
Later on this day, I also changed some things with the image system and implemented Lightbox. It's looks amazing when you click on thumbnails now.

06/13/2006
Finished all the coding for my new site image system. This was mostly completed last weekend, I had to integrate some of the other code from this site into it, like the stylesheet system. Now, I have an easy to use web interface for uploading images, it will create automatic thumbnails and favorite icons for all the images. I can then easily add the images to my site using PHP. It will then insert either the full image, or a thumbnail with a link to a preview page containing the full image. I did this for a couple reasons. For one, I never had to think about HTML when dealing with images on my site. Also, I never had to deal with using Irfanview to resize images before uploading. A bonus, since 90% of the traffic here comes from Google and MSN image searches, I can better control my revenue from that. I plan on some future enhancements such as auto watermarking images that are being hotlinked.

05/14/2006
Implemented a new security system for this site. The main feature is an IP blocking system. The reason I created this was to block access to this site from my work. It features a password override so I and a few people there that I trust are able to still gain access. There could be other uses I imagine. I had previously setup a system to block only certain entries to my site that had some relation to my job. I think I will rewrite that code and use it to disable Google caching on those entries. Seems that some people were getting around my previous block attempts by looking at the Google cache. I knew this was possible, but I can't think why someone would be snooping around so much.

05/05/2006
Updated stylesheet code again. Code is now compatible with browsers that support the rel='alternate stylesheet' tags such as Mozilla based browsers. What this means is now you can use the stylesheet switcher on my navigation menu, or just use the built in style switcher in your browser.

04/02/2006
Added some language detection to the site. If your default browser language is German, Spanish, French, Italian, or Portuguese, then you will now see a link at the top of every page offering an option to automatically translate the page to your native language using Google Translate. Also added a new page style option, 'Naked'. This is just a way to view the site stylesheet-less. I added this option as it will be the sites default style on April 5th for the First Annual Naked Day.

03/26/2006
Had to modify code that handled smilies and the acronyms for this site. That was automated, but I tried posting an entry tonight that had the same text as a smiley, but it was code. I had to setup a way to turn off the auto smiley processing per entry. Also, found a bug earlier today that involves a security hole in my search engine. It's pretty obsure and if someone tried to use it, it would be logged, so I will fix it in the near future.

03/03/2006
Implemented my own backend statistics software on this site.

02/18/2006
Stylesheet tweeks. Made for area for the main page content.

02/13/2006
Yesterday I went through my list of site bugs and cleared out most of them. These were minor things related to the comment rss icons I recently added and some cleanup of code and bugs with the alternate stylesheets. I think I have completed all the work on that. That was just some stuff that wasn't important to the working of the site, but now this site runs a bit more efficently. If anyone notices bugs with the site, let me know by clicking my contact link. If it's vital, it should be fixed within a day, minor cosmetic stuff I will eventually get to. But, I like to make sure everything is taken care of at some point.

02/04/2006
Corrected a bug in the alternate stylesheet code. If you are experiencing any problems with the stylesheets, clear your cookies for this site and things should save properly from now on. Also, the switching of stylesheets will only work from the menu on this site now, this change hasn't happened yet, but will soon. There is no longer a need for every page to take the query to allow stylesheet changes and that contributed to the problems I had before. I also made a minor change to the order of the menu items on the top nav menu. I also added feed icons to the individual pages to show there are comment feeds for those items. The interesting links on the right hand side will have an icon soon, probably later tonight.

01/29/2006
Very minor thing, but took lots of coding. Now, all the horizontal ads that show up with the entries will have borders that match the border color of the entry. This will be the same as whatever stylesheet is in use. This is how it used to be before I added the code that allowed the stylesheet changes.

01/08/2006
Completed a server move today. This site is now being hosted by Sulphur Web Hosting. This is a hosting company that a friend of mine, Dan, started over the summer.

12/27/2005
As now a majority of hits are coming from Google Images and only looking at the images in a frame at the top and my site in a bottom frame, I have adjusted my ads so that visitors from Google Images will now see a banner text ad at the top of the bottom frame above my site. This is part of some different ad tests that I have been running. I'm not trying to profit off this site, but I believe that someday it will at least be self-sufficent. Also, I started using Feedburner to track my main RSS feed for this site. No need to update links or anything, I have it setup as a redirect, so no one should notice any changes.

12/19/2005
More non visable changes. Tighted up security on my new site backend. Also changed the way I handle blocking access to parts of the site from certain locations.

12/15/2005
As my job is not very stable right now, I have made some changes to block certain pages from being viewed from computers at my work. I still need to add some override feature to that so I can access those pages. I might not really need to though.

12/13/2005
Updated OpenSearch on this site to version 1.1.

12/10/2005
Made some updates on the backend with reguards to the advertising. I can now have easier and more detailed control than before over the ad placement. Right now for instance, I have it set to place the banner ad that was on the bottom of posts to randomly display at the top or bottom of posts. I can then track and see what placement is better. Recently most of the site updates haven't really been visual for the end user. But, I have a really nice control panel I have been improving that lets me change all kinds of little settings here and there without having to go in and change the code like I had to with many things before.

11/27/2005
Opps. I made an update to the code that supports alternate stylesheets, and I did this right before leaving for work and I never actually tested it. Of course, it broke my site and it was down for about five hours. It's back up now, and I have also changed the default stylesheet of this page to my Christmas theme. I also added a style switcher to the top navigation bar so it's now easy to switch stylesheets on this site.

11/13/2005
Have went through all entries and they all now validate with an XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype. I don't actually serve the pages with that yet as some other improvements to the site will need to be done as I will need to serve the pages using the application/xhtml+xml mime type. I could technically do it now, but I need to make a few more updates to make sure all pages will stay valid XML. I am still not sure if I really want to do that anyway due to other possible issues serving pages as true XML.

10/30/2005
Made some minor bug fixes to the code I added recently for people arriving from search engines. Works better with some incoming query strings that were causing some trouble. Also, I added a number of more supported search engines earlier this week. Google, MSN, Yahoo!, Altavista, Ask Jeeves, AlltheWeb, and Blogger are now all supported.

10/23/2005
Added a feature for people who come into this site from Google, MSN and Yahoo searches. This site will show additional results based on whatever search query the visitors used to come to this site.

10/19/2005
Corrected a security hole in the alternate stylesheet system.

10/18/2005
Made a small backend update to the update history list.

10/15/2005
Started a Christmas stylesheet for page. Will likley be the default around that time.
Set the Christmas style as the current style.
Set back to normal stylesheet.

09/07/2005
More fun search bugs fixed. I fixed some things related to using multiple search terms including fixing the RSS search feed when mulitple terms are used.

09/01/2005
Added OpenID authentication support for comments. Thanks to Dan for help with that and helping me setup an OpenID server.

08/28/2005
Created a system to use alternate stylesheets. Add ?altstyle=css_url to any page and all pages will have that style. To set back to default, add ?altstyle=none.

08/15/2005
Upgraded Movable Type to version 3.2 beta 4 from Movable Type 3.16.

08/06/2005
Minor update to XML feeds autodetect header code.

07/13/2005
Fixed bug in new search engine that didn't allow spaces in search query's.

07/07/2005
Updated search results page. Now includes an excerpt of the entries. Also added a link to the search RSS feed in the XML feeds dropdown of any search results.

07/06/2005
Updated the pictures in the About Me and My Family pages.

06/21/2005
Too many updates to count to this point. Didn't keep track. This day, the completely redesigned Cameron's Thoughts 2.0 is launched.

06/22/2003
Cameron's Thoughts is launched.

06/21/2003
Files are first uploaded to server and my first Movable Type journey begins.