An Update On The Updates
I've finally started to make some progress with this place now that the battle to get e-mail from my domain to be delivered is almost over. Here's what's been done and what's to come.
Thanks to several factors, progress here had been rather slow. The two most significant factors being that I had an article to write for Webreference.com and I've been battling on many fronts in an attempt to get e-mail from my domain to be delivered to its intended destination with a reliably high success rate. It would appear that a previous occupant of the IP address that my domain resides upon had been a little shady. As a consequence some considered my MTA (the program that send mail out) to be untrustworthy before I'd even installed and configured it. On top of that, it seems that some of the mail I'd sent to some of my own webmail inboxes, for nothing more than simply testing my MTA, had triggered the webmail provider to tell maintainers of e-mail block-lists that I was a spammer. (Thanks for that, Microsoft.)
I've done what I can to get off the black-lists and I'm doing more background stuff to try to ensure I stay off them. I don't think I've been listed for a few weeks now, but I'm still in a bit of a precarious position. It'd probably only take a small typo in a section of code that's involved some way in mailing and I'd be straight back on the block-lists. For now, though, things seem reasonably stable. I can use my own mail addresses for this domain properly now and registrations appear to be working more-or-less correctly. Hotmail now accepts mail from here, but the last time I checked, it still chucks it straight in the Junk
folder. Something is better than nothing, though.
So now that the considerable headache of the mail systems is mostly over, registrations and logging in/out should be fully working. I'll also be making a small contact form that people can use to send mail directly to me, but not just yet. As I said earlier in the post, I've finished an article for Webreference.com which — if all is in order — should be published at the end of the week. Some of you may have noticed that for pretty much as long as I've had this place open to the public, there's been a crossed-out Articles
link in the menu at the top. I've been planning on getting it built reasonably soon for a while, but given that the version of the article that is due to be published on Webreference.com has been so heavily edited (or mauled
as I call it) I thought it would be best to make the articles section priority #1. I should have content to put in it once it's built, but I'll have to check the dates; any article I write that is to be published on a site owned by Jupitermedia Corporation must be on the site for 120 days before I am able to publish it on my own site. So I won't be able to publish my latest article on my own site until about June, but it should hopefully at least make a bit more sense and be easier to follow when it is published here.
I'm working on the articles section right now, but it may be a week or two until any change becomes apparent because I've still to build all the back-end administration stuff before I can build any front-end stuff that normal visitors can see and use. Once that's out of the way, then I'll build that contact form for mailing me and then add some other bits and bobs like searching through entries and articles etc.. If I play my cards right, I might even get to start playing around with code a bit more and posting up proper examples in a few months, but until then, I'll just be trudging through the mundane code that forms the core of this place.
Oh and most of the code that runs this place needs a major overhaul too. I'm not looking forward to that one.
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