Just a quick update on me, KittenAuth and ThePCSpy.com. (Edit after typing) Well its quite a detailed look on what’s going on, actually.
I’ve been immensely busy and even more afk (away from keyboard) recently and that’s why I’ve not been able to get back to some people via email and why I haven’t been blogging on here. I’ve also been on holiday in France for a few days and will be returning in a few weeks. I took a nice panoramic picture of where we’ve been staying that you can see a smallish version (500-and-something k). I’ll get a better quality version up when I’ve got the colour-balancing sorted. Here’s a slightly smaller view but a bigger picture (666k — EEK!) that I took last year from a different viewpoint.
To those of you who have emailed me and I haven’t replied, I’m really sorry. The internet connection in france is a 56k modem that was connecting at 14kbps. My webmail just tells you where to shove it at that speed. I’m trying to rectify my absences for email over the next few days.
Even though I’ve been busy, I’ve been working through several design considerations for KittenAuth. The biggest is session handling for KittenAuth. Its fine in plain PHP but gets a little dodgier around 3rd party applications like Drupal — which I’m unfortunately building my test versions under. It has its hiccoughs around Drupal (and probably other applications) because they override the default PHP $_SESSION variable/handler. I’m therefore left with trying to adapt to each automatically, or building my own session handler that works alongside whichever handler that’s being used on the host application. It’s a bit of a nightmare to be honest, but I’ll get somewhere in the end.
If anyone can help me out by consulting via email on the best method to provide comparability around 3rd part applications, I’d really like to hear from you. Just reply to this and make sure you put your email address in the box. Only I can see it and I don’t spam.
The same goes for graphic designers =). HumanAuth (see below) has a damned nice logo. KittenAuth still has HTML-text.
There’s recently been a new project setup called HumanAuth. It’s main difference is supporting accessibility standards like Section 508 and ADA — something that I’ve sworn not to support, for what I still believe is a good reason. I aired my views/concerns to the author in the KittenAuth forums.
If you don’t want to read the forum, the gist of it was, by telling the user what’s in the images, in plaintext, you’re effectively removing the whole point of the images. Problem is it’s the images that make KittenAuth as secure as it is by utilising the associative image processing units we all have in our brains. I also brought up the problem with the massive amount of JS being pushed on users and the famous 9*9-cell-not-being-secure-enough problem.
And onto the site update. I’ve just been notified (thanks to mamboview) and subsequently a fixed a massive bug in the login script for new users. Its probably been around since I wrote it and it’s a pity nobody pointed it out sooner but its fixed nonetheless.
I also added some features last month that I didn’t really publisise… Including:
- Paging on comments with AJAX to hop between pages.
- Some image optimisation.
- Rejigged the comment style to something bolder.
- A nifty method of improving the caching for articles and blogs.
- Started developing the business-logic-code behind forums.
Some features that are planned for the summer months are:
- Allowing multiple pages for articles and having AJAX transitions between them.
- Finish the forums off.
- Implementing KittenAuth V2 for ASP.NET (and subsequently releasing it as a control)
- More updates, tutorials, rants and everything else I pride myself for when I’m near a computer than I’ve been providing in the last couple of months.
And there it is. Two months of updates crammed into one unhealthy looking post. Time to get back to emailing and coding.