The SysOp's Blog
Greetings! I am the "SysOp" of this website, a title bestowed upon those who operated the BBSes of yesteryear. I plan to capture the adventuring and sharing spirit of those dial-up systems within this site and add on a slew of modern conveniences for us digital pioneers.
Within this blog I'll document my trials, adventures and progress
in building the site. Actually this will be the first DIY project to
be discussed within this site. Unfortunately for the time being its going
to be an awfully one-sided discussion.
To that end as soon as I had the machinery in place I started writing blog entries, going back to the beginning and hitting the highlights of my progress. With the software I've written it should be fairly easy to keep updating this as I progress.
Stay tuned...
I've made the switch to CppCMS
As much as I believe the FreePascal compiler has the best combination of features of the languages I've seen, the libraries available for it are limited and usually of poor quality. I finally decided to take a look around and see if there was another language that had higher quality and larger availability of code. I've spent an awful lot of time fixing every FPC library I get involved with and the bugs seem never ending. On top of that there seems to be a prevailing attitude to add more features long before the current ones are fixed.
Law 2 is a butt kicker in software development and when launching a new software system having good foundational software is a huge contributor to how well things will turn out. So I took a look around, decided to jump back into the C++ pool and take some libraries for a test drive.
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Another BIG Milestone: For/Empty tags and the start of Blogs
Armed with my new template variable and OPF systems I've built a simple module to store and retrieve webpages by URL in a database. Its reminiscent of the Django "flatpages" app. This works pretty good. I have moved the "coming soon" page into the DB using this new module.
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Going live with the blog
I couldn't go live with all of the previous stuff that makes the blog work until I had two very important things:
- Durable MySQL connections
- EMailed error reports
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HUGE Milestone: RTTI Enabled Context and OPF
A couple of big milestones here. I've known for quite some time that Object Pascal (Delphi, FreePascal, ...) keeps type information for published object properties available for run-time inspection (RTTI). I've just not had the occasion to jump in and check out what's there. But it definitely seemed like what I needed here. So in I dove.
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Computer Quotes, JS and data to go with it
Woohoo! I've added a simple little amusement to the top of the "Coming Soon" page. A "quote of the moment" bubble that rotates every minute. Quotes have been pulled mostly from chain-eMails that used to make the rounds years ago. I think that's been replaced by facebook now. I'll be updating the list as I find interesting fodder and this widget will have a home on the finished site. I like it so much I'll have to add it to my in-office server's "home page"! 
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