2241

Technology & Information / Re: Adobe pushing McAfee crapware

« on: December 03, 2013, 11:12:20 PM »

It always boggles my mind when people use proprietary bloatware and then act surprised when this kind of thing happens.

2242

Announcements / Re: Comments wanted: Switching domain to tfes.org

« on: December 03, 2013, 11:10:01 PM »

I see 'flatearthsociety.org' is up for auction.  Parsifal, I don't know how you feel about it, but I'd be happy to bid if people think it would be better.

Seems like everyone else is in favour, so if you get that, I'll configure the web server to use it. My main concern would be the length, though; since I want to use subdomains for different sites, forum.flatearthsociety.org is getting quite long.

2243

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: "newbie", "jr. member"

« on: December 03, 2013, 06:51:50 PM »

I don't want this place to be exactly the same as the old FES. There were lots of things that needed improving.

If there's one thing we don't need more of, it's recognising people for the number of times they've spammed The Number Game, which is what post counts often amount to. Post quality, not quantity.

2244

Announcements / Re: Help wanted to make this place better

« on: December 03, 2013, 06:48:34 PM »

Also, if people want more traffic then maybe we should make a video with the site's link and start posting it around. People could write up the script while someone else is the spokesman.

As long as other people are writing the words for him to say, I nominate Thork as the spokesperson.

2245

Announcements / Re: Help wanted to make this place better

« on: December 03, 2013, 06:36:04 PM »

I've put a list of things that need help for the CMS site in the CMS thread.

2246

Announcements / Re: Intention to set up CMS homepage

« on: December 03, 2013, 06:28:27 PM »

Okay, so I've updated the theme and worked out how to use Blaze Blogger a little better:

http://cms.theflatearthsociety.sjm.so/

What I'd like here is:

• an About blurb that isn't just lorem ipsum;
• preferably, an About page with a little more detail;
• an introductory blog post explaining what this site is about;
• a theme that isn't just me dicking around with a generic theme for half an hour to make it look vaguely FES-ish.

I can probably do the first three myself after a bit of sleep, but I'll happily take contributions from others. The last one I'd really like Tintagel to do, but since she doesn't come here anymore, I'll take any volunteers I can get. I suck at web design, as you can probably tell from that page.


Edit: And before you ask, there is a robots.txt protecting this page, so it won't get crawled by Google until we decide we're ready.

2247

Announcements / Re: Help wanted to make this place better

« on: December 03, 2013, 06:19:57 PM »

I had done a lot of research and entries into the FEIR board on the old site so I deleted them there and posted them all here. Hopefully that will be helpful.

That's awesome. Thanks.

2248

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: "newbie", "jr. member"

« on: December 03, 2013, 06:18:20 PM »

I share my lemonyness with all. I am a benevolent lemon.

There's no need to get sour about it.

2249

Announcements / Re: Help wanted to make this place better

« on: December 03, 2013, 05:43:24 PM »

Any of you kindly volunteers feel like writing an introductory blog post for the FES homepage? I seem to have contracted writer's block.

This is going to be the first thing RE noobs see when they look at our new site, so choose your words carefully if you take on this task.

2250

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: "newbie", "jr. member"

« on: December 03, 2013, 05:38:03 PM »

Gone.

Still have a yellow square.

It's because you're a lemon.

2251

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: "newbie", "jr. member"

« on: December 03, 2013, 05:34:03 PM »

Gone.

2252

Announcements / Server timezone changed

« on: December 03, 2013, 05:26:16 PM »

I have changed the server timezone to UTC, which should get rid of those pesky jumps when daylight savings starts or ends in a specific timezone. This will mean that if you had already set your time offset, you will need to set it again. The trade-off is that, since UTC doesn't jump around, you won't need to set it again after that (except when DST changes for you -- hopefully I can find a way to make that work properly for everyone).

2253

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Use CloudFront for serving static content

« on: December 03, 2013, 04:56:43 PM »

I've had a chance to think about this a bit, and Amazon is definitely the best fit for our needs. I'll move our DNS across to Route 53 in the coming days, which will allow me to begin working on setting up CloudFront.

2254

Announcements / Re: Comments wanted: Switching domain to tfes.org

« on: December 03, 2013, 04:55:51 PM »

Are the posts here going to transfer to tfes.org, or are the posts going to start from scratch again?

All content, including the posts, will remain the same. Only the domain will change.

2255

Suggestions & Concerns / Get a StartSSL wildcard SSL certificate

« on: December 03, 2013, 03:38:07 PM »

Yep, another reminder thread. It'd be nice to have the option of HTTPS on FES.

2256

Announcements / Re: Comments wanted: Switching domain to tfes.org

« on: December 03, 2013, 03:23:30 PM »

Given all the links we've posted on .org, though, we should make sure that the current URL redirects to tfes.org.  We don't want anyone following a dead link and getting confused.

That goes without saying. I'm not Daniel.

2257

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Use CloudFront for serving static content

« on: December 03, 2013, 02:56:11 PM »

CloudFlare would be another option, but I have some reservations. It would have some additional benefits (both for performance and security) over CloudFront, though, so I'll look into that option further before making a decision.

Edit: One of the performance benefits of CloudFlare could be equally satisfied with Amazon's Route 53 DNS service, so now I'm torn again.

2258

Announcements / Comments wanted: Switching domain to tfes.org

« on: December 03, 2013, 02:40:24 PM »

Junker has kindly given me control of the tfes.org domain name, and I'm thinking of switching to it as our primary name. The main advantage is that it's shorter, although uncommon domain names sometimes scare people for inexplicable reasons too.

Specifically, we would have:

forum.tfes.org -- This forum.
wiki.tfes.org -- Flat Earth Wiki.
library.tfes.org -- Flat Earth Library.
www.tfes.org -- Homepage (CMS/blog, still being set up).
tfes.org -- Redirect to the forum, but probably eventually to the CMS/blog.

Any comments/suggestions? This is as much your site as it is mine, so I don't want to make a unilateral decision here.

2259

Suggestions & Concerns / Set up server monitoring

« on: December 03, 2013, 02:24:47 PM »

Again, just a reminder for myself. Ideally I'd set up my own monitoring system, but for a website this small, New Relic will do nicely.

2260

Announcements / Intention to set up CMS homepage

« on: December 03, 2013, 02:00:50 PM »

I already posted this in The Lounge, but it can't hurt to put it in Announcements too:

In the long term, I want to work things out with Daniel in some way that does not compromise the running of this forum. This may mean that he continues to run the CMS site, while the forum and wiki live here.

In the short term, Daniel's constant absence makes negotiating with him impossible, so we're going to try and drive more traffic to this site. I don't take this decision lightly, as I would rather not make an enemy of the powers that be on .org, but I'm going to begin working on a homepage similar to .org's CMS so we can hopefully improve our Google ranking. Without RE noobs, there will be no debates, and this website will fail.

It's going to be tough walking the line between alienating us from the .org administration and doing too little to boost popularity, and I will undoubtedly be pissing someone off, somewhere. I would appreciate any and all opinions people have to offer in the next few days.

Finally, I'd like to thank you all for posting here. I've been frustrated by the situation on .org for a very long time, mostly because I know I can do things better, so I appreciate the chance to run this site properly. I hope I don't let you down.

I've done some initial setup of a CMS called BlazeBlogger to begin with:

http://cms.theflatearthsociety.sjm.so/

It's just got a test post up at the moment, but with some custom theming it could be a decent homepage. It's also very efficient at generating and serving pages; once it's up and running, I want to serve the entire CMS through CloudFront for insanely fast loading times, since the entire blog is static content once it's generated.

Anyway, that's just me being a computer nerd. For the rest of you, suffice it to say we'll have a homepage that isn't the forum soon.