Seeing this message means that your isp has updated its DNS records and you can see t3-design.com on the new server. I used to have 4-5 sites in the past, under certain circumstances the only active site left is T3. So keep paying the extreme costs of a dedicated server was stupid.

Even though this is a serious downgrade the site should still be fast enough, specially for those living in the U.S.

That was just a heads up, in case you were wondering (yeah right).

It’s been a while, ain’t that right ? Since my last post many things have changed, first of all i decided to finally sit down and work on getting my IT degree, parents, friends all nagging me to move on from my beloved college years lmao. I took a couple jobs small scale just to keep my touch with php/mysql. For the most part i was working on my college papers and homeworks, i even wrote my very first serious java desktop application.

Nothing extraordinary, just a small desktop application with embedded database to archive your cd/dvd collection stored in cakeboxes. Hopefully this project will get my degree as my final exam. I still don’t work on custom works as i did this post is just to give you a heads up on what is going on with me, as i took some time today to update the wordpress on T3-Design.

I had promissed to give you some information on my last big project “soccer statistics system” but still my friend/client hasn’t been able to work on it as much as he wanted and hasn’t managed to keep it updated and to enable people to browse it in any other language except greek. Just in case this is the site www.paizempala.gr and here are some highlights: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. There is some much more to the whole project, everything about socccer on the site is part of the project.  Anyway i hope in a few months i can make a proper presentation.
About the comments on the site don’t worry i keep up with them from time to time just in case a serious bug is found but any other features release isn’t on schedule for quite some time, you can keep asking but don’t get your hopes up. lol

I hope you people are doing fine, until the next time cya!

I hope you missed me a little, i have been working on a client’s project for more than two months and i have totally ignored pretty much everything else. I haven’t been answering to any emails or other job requests for so long. Many of them are too old and i am a little embarrassed to reply now, so if you still love me and you still want to request my coding services feel free to text me.

There were a couple of cases that i have ignored with rudeness, the people i mention will understand who they are, i feel really sorry but that time i was really pushed by ETA’s and work load i had to leave everything aside for a while if i wanted that job to end well.

After i take permission from my client i will write a small presentation of my work there so you can see i wasn’t just lazy screwing around. It was the biggest project i have ever taken and with a little luck and effort i will be finally a well established php/mysql programmer in my country. You might even find a link to that site somewhere on T3, guss it won’t be hard to find it, trust me.

I look forward to hear from anyone who emailed me these past two months.

The new version of the wordpress is out, for those using the wp 2.5 the upgrade is painless, no major changes in skins and the plugin system. Here is a list of the new features

• Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits.
• Shift Gears: Turbo-speed your blogging.
• Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web
• Theme Previews: See it before your audience does
• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
• Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

Here is a brief video tour of 2.6, it doesn’t show everything but it’s a good start to see what’s new

vBSed development is in a state where you can check back see what you did good or bad or really really bad. I have so many ideas to implement and to start seriously thinking about a release. Don’t ask if it will be a paid product or a free mod. It’s true when I started the project I didn’t give a shit about that but now i regret it and I see how a few mistakes will keep me behind some time schedules.

Firstly the name. vBSed it sounded cool that time but now people think i just ripped seditio, they are terrible wrong on that but i can’t prove it yet. So i am on a name hunt to replace vbsed. I want something without any prefixes cause i don’t want to brand this project as a vbulletin product only. Who knows maybe on some point with only a few changes it will be available for so many other bb forum software out there. I don’t want any fancy things or something meaningless F.C.G.T.H.J.Y lol. It must be unique of course and attractive.

My biggest problem is the structure of the current vbsed which comes with various section but they all interact with each other. The categories/pages, the SFS site file space, Terminology, Portal Page and a few other less important to mention. What i have to do it break these sections apart and make them work independently from the other apps.  It sounds easy but it’s not, they all share some common functions, they all share some common phrases even templates, don’t metion the configuration options.  It’s not hard to do it after you think some unique product ids, it’s mostly search and replace, move this and copy that. I kinda hate these things. I wish i had some new, young underling for that, but hey in my work i am the underling so no luck with that.

If you get over with these “minor” problems we have the portal page problem which everything is hardcoded with no option to change things. I have big plans for this and it will be proved really enjoyable as it will be something new. Widgetize everything, custom layouts for each section with a million options, show this for lists but only for a few categories and only if the user is logged in or not. If i get over this i will try to convert or build new addons/widgets from the vbadvanced. People often mistake it for a cms but it’s not. The truth is that it’s a simple portal page, with a few nice options like adding some custom pages or adding sidebars to specific sections, and it has hundreds of addons for almost every single content addon of vbulletin. It’s funny cause 2/3 people i know hate it bad really bad but they can’t live without it cause of the 3rd party modules.

Before the early stages behind a release, i will have to re-examine the weak points of vbsed. The very few permission rules. eg for pages 1. can view, 2. can submit, 3. can admin. Pretty much ridiculous if you ask me, as i write this i can think at least 6-7 more permissions.  I don’t think vbsed has other so important weak points.  People will always find some but the as it is now vbsed is working as it’s made to be. Of course all parts of the project need to be revisited, don’t forget vbsed it was still is supposed to be a custom cms for my 3dacc.net

I also need to come up or ask help from professionals for some serious logo work, have you noticed how empty this post is?

DBC Backup, is a simple way to schedule daily database backups using the wp cron system. You can select when and where your backup will be generated. If your server has support you can select between three different compression formats: none, Gzip and Bzip2. The plugin will try to auto create the export directory, the .htaccess and an empty index.html file to protect your backups.

The backup file is also protected by a small hash key which make it impossible for someone to guess the backup name and download it.

During generation, a log will be generated which includes, the generation date, file, filesize, status amd the duration of the generation.

Except the cron backup, you have also the ability to take backups immediately. The backups are identical of what phpmyadmin produces because DBC Backup is using the key procedures of phpmyadmin.

DBC Backup was built to be fast, flexible and as simple as possible.
Read the full post

WP Explorer is an easy way to list directories and files on your server. Through a simple shortcode you can transform your posts and pages to file browsers.

Features
- Easy Configuration.
- Easy modification since you have control over templates from the options page.
- Exclude files, folders, extensions from listing.
- Protection from listing directories outside the specified one.
- Hot-linking protection through htaccess.
- Pretty links.
- 100% Ready for translations.
- Ability to include file version through a specific filename format. Read the full post

vBulletin 3.7.0

Today, the vBulletin team is proud to declare version 3.7.0 to be our stable, supported release.

vBulletin 3.7.0 is available immediately from the Members’ Area to all customers with active vBulletin licenses, and will be offered as the primary choice to those making new purchases.

This release supercedes the 3.6.x branch as our primary product. vBulletin 3.6.x will continue to be maintained for a limited time, as outlined in the end-of-life announcement posted today. We recommend that all customers with active licenses upgrade to vBulletin 3.7.0.

There are many new features and improvements to existing functionality in vBulletin 3.7.0 over vBulletin 3.6.x, most of which have already been described in the release announcements for the various pre-release versions, and in the First Look thread that was posted at the beginning of the beta process, but here is a brief list of just a few of the highlights.

• Inline spam management & prevention
• Thread tagging
• Search cloud / tag cloud
• Thread prefixes
• Reciprocal friendships between users
• Public visitor messaging on profile pages with ‘conversation’ feature
• User picture galleries with user comment facility
• User-created social groups with invite only and moderated membership options
• Extended member profile pages
• Customizable member profile pages with admin-controlled styling abilities
• Inline editing of custom user profile fields
• Lightbox viewer for attached images
• Viewable and comparable history maintained for post edits
• Extended re-authentication for inline moderation actions
• Notices system for navigation bar
• Multiple human-verification systems including reCAPTCHA, image verification and Q/A
• User change history
• Social bookmarking integration

Read the full post

Version 2.5.1 of WordPress is now available. It includes a number of bug fixes, performance enhancements, and one very important security fix. We recommend everyone update immediately, particularly if your blog has open registration. The vulnerability is not public but it will be shortly.

In addition to the security fix, 2.5.1 contains many bug fixes. If you are interested only in the security fixes, you can download these corrected copies of wp-includes/pluggable.php, wp-admin/includes/media.php, and wp-admin/media.php. Replace your existing copies of these files with these new copies.

If you download the entire 2.5.1 release, you will be getting over 70 other fixes. 2.5.1 focuses on fixing the most annoying bugs and improving performance. Here are some highlights:

• Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• Better performance for those who have many categories
• Media Uploader fixes
• An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• Widget Administration fixes
• Various usability improvements
• Layout fixes for IE

Secret lives of blogs

Since 2.5 your wp-config.php file allows a new constant called SECRET_KEY which basically is meant to introduce a little permanent randomness into the cryptographic functions used for cookies in WordPress. You can visit this link we set up to get a unique secret key for your config file. (It’s unique and random on every page load.) Having this line in your config file helps secure your blog.

vBulletin Blog 1.0.5 Released

vBulletin Blog 1.0.5 is a maintenance release to our second vBulletin add-on. It contains a number of bug fixes since the release of 1.0.4. This release will work with vBulletin 3.6.8+ and vBulletin 3.7.0+.

Some of the bugs fixed include:

• 24750 – Trackbacks not working
• 25182 – Imagetags with parameters in blog description won’t work
• 24734 – IP-Link showing even IPs are turned off

See a full list of bugs fixed between Blog 1.0.4 and 1.0.5

Upgrading/Installing the Blog

Upgrades and new installations of the Blog follow the same process: upload the files and import the XML. After this, you will see a message that your upgrade or install was successful. For full instructions on how to upgrade or install, please see this manual entry.

About the Blog

vBulletin Blog is a fully featured blogging add-on that enables community members to create their very own online blogs within vBulletin. Giving members a place to post thoughts, ideas and musings will keep users returning to the community again and again, and advanced administration features allow forum owners and moderators to keep control and integrate Blog into vBulletin’s existing look and feel.

vBulletin Blog makes it simple for community members to create their own space within the community. Getting started is as simple as posting the first message (using the same familiar vBulletin editor). There is no lengthy setup process – blog owners are free to personalise their blog at any time by defining a title and a description that will appear at the top of every blog post.

• Find out more about the Blog
• View the Blog’s’ manual
• See the Blog in action on the vBulletin.com community forums

vBulletin 3.6.8 or newer is required to install the Blog. vBulletin 3.7.0 requires Blog version 1.0.3 or higher.