Alternative energy solutions paving the way

October 10, 2007 | 0 Responses

Did you know that an area 200 miles square covered with solar panels could provide all the electricity the world needs? Thats’ pretty heavy stuff.

Its’ no secret that I spend many waking hours worrying about the environment and what the future holds for it and the children of tomorrow. So when an event like the BP Solar Decathlon comes along, I take notice. Continue reading Alternative energy solutions paving the way…

PressRiot almost ready for beta

September 18, 2007 | 1 Response

When I dropped the music format here, I promised a new site was coming. I even went as far as to register a domain and post the occasional link to this upcoming Canadian music review spot (see? I just did it again). Well that is about all the progress anyone has seen so I thought I would let you all in on how it is coming along.

The site will be in blog format, but divided by monthly issues. I’m either going to release each issue in bulk, or set them to be autoposted in weekly or daily intervals. I am almost ready to go live with a beta preview version of pressriot.ca, which means a scaled back version to gain some user input before the big release. The site will go live and people will be able to read and rate all the articles.

As far as the writing and content production, it is going pretty well. I have enough articles on my own and I’m waiting on some other submissions, I have just about enough to do the first issue.

The development stages are basically finished, save for once people actually get in and start to try it out. It was relatively simple to get a working model going being that I planned on using Wordpress as the core.

The inlying challenge was to get it up and running with enough distinction from section to section. I wanted to have the main blog page more category oriented  rather than just laying out all the freshest posts in reverse chronological order. Sounds like exactly the opposite of WordPress doesn’t it? Well it can be done.

Once again, its all in the theme. The theme essentially structures everything using the loop. You can call anything from just the post content of a single post, single category, anything really. I’ll get more into this when I talk about the awesome theme I discovered in a later post. When will it be? You’ll have to subscribe to the feed if you don’t want to miss it.

I’ve been testing the core of the site in a far away secret location, nobody will ever find in order to keep things under wraps. Nothing is currently hosted under the pressriot domain. Its all on a secret account hosted an a sea-barren shanty, floating in uncharted off the coast of Zürich. It is guarded by a one-eyed crow with a hooked beak. He will peck out the eyes of anyone who attempts to spoil the surprise.

New header image (as if you didn’t know)

August 26, 2007 | 0 Responses

This is beyond a poor excuse for posting as it is really quite obvious. I made a new header image. The photo came from SxC, a free image site where you can download high-resolution photos/images for non-commercial use.

The old image, which drew up a lot of question from visitors, was a photo of my 3 year old neice playing with a friend on her Tigger Bike. I cropped it to make it look ‘artsy. Some people though it was really weird to have a photo of two kids with their heads cropped out of the pic. I just thought it looked cool.

I wanted to go with the sunflower image because I think they are a really nice looking flower. Also, my sister has an extensive collection of sunflower knick-knacks in her home, which I think is really cool. Collections are fun.

Hacking attempt on Needless Productions

August 23, 2007 | 2 Responses

So somebody tried to hack Needless Productions today. I had just finished validating all the markup in the theme too. It isn’t quite clear to me just how they got in at this point. But the theme was the only thing they managed to mess with. The database was left completely unharmed.

Yup. They even let a calling card. I don’t see the point of this at all. Fuck you system? I’ve never been referred to as part of the system before. I know attack was proably random and uncalculated, but, in its’ own way, this is kind of flattering.

To be honest I wasn’t all that upset when I first logged on and saw the alerts. Something about the whole things immediately screamed “minor damage”. The whole thing just seems really amateur.  I don’t really know about hacking but it was pretty easy to recover from the attack. No problem really. At least it gave me an excuse to post at 1:30 in the morning.

In case any of you spambots out there can’t read that, the email is resnado@casus-team.org

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