A colleague introduced me to Active Server Pages (ASP) and the idea of storing web page information within a database rather than on a static web page. I started Urmston.net purely as a means of learning how to code using ASP. The fact that people started using the site was a huge bonus because it gave me the incentive to continue to improve the site by building new web applications using Dreamweaver. Years later, my skills had developed to a point where I was able to get a job working on a corporate intranet based purely on the skills that I had learnt in my spare time.
In recent years I have struggled to spend as much time as I would have liked working on the site due to other commitments - and World of Warcraft. The site was becoming outdated, the HTML code was old, there was no support for Firefox, the validations used Javascript etc, and basically the site was in serious need of a new design.
The following is an account of of the changes that have been made to the site since March 2009. The log is in descending order so you might prefer to read from the bottom up.
21st February 2010 - I've not done anything on Urmston.net recently and the property section is as I left it last month, but it's nearly finished and I'm really pleased with the multiple image upload. I've been really busy at work since the start of the year as we had a project deadline to meet. We've achieved that now, we launched a SharePoint version of our corporate intranet and have migrated a chunk of the key information from static HTML pages into SharePoint. I'm technical lead on the migration so virtually every aspect of the migration involves me. Besides being busy at work, I'm currently building another website which I've been planning for a while. It's nearly finished now so once that's live the rest of the year will be focused on Urmston.net.
12th January 2010 - As a security measure new members will not be able to contact other members until they have been a member themselves for three days.
2nd and 3rd January 2010 - I've had a really busy weekend working on the upload part of the property section. Nearly there now.
23rd December 09 - I've been really busy at work this month; I'm working on a project to migrate our static HTML based corporate intranet on to a SharePoint platform. We've reached the stage now where we need to start migrating the data so things are pretty busy. As a result, I've not been able to spend much time working on the site. The property section hasn't advanced any further but I want to finish it over the Christmas period. I need to sort out the Gallery first though but this is only a minor issue. I've actually re-built the Gallery upload pages using Pure ASP upload 3 and Smart Image Processor 2 but I just didn't get around to implementing it on the live site. So hopefully it should just be a matter of checking everything and putting the files live. The Gallery upload pages will then be compatible with all popular browsers.
I'm thinking about creating an RSS feed for the events so that anyone can view the events on their browser without having to visit the site. I'm also thinking of adding RSS feeds from the popular newspapers into the members homepage. For the Christmas period though, I want to get the Property section up and running and I'm going to extend the Classified Ads section so that items have a one month countdown instead of one week.
It's been nearly five months now since I added membership functionality to Urmston.net and I'm really pleased with the way things have gone. I could have done things better though; I should have had the option for members to choose their own encrypted passwords, and to post to the site without being logged in from the start. The biggest difference by far however is that I have almost eliminated unwanted posts to the forum - which makes my life so much easier. It is clear to me too that some people wish to use the forum for no other reason than to promote their business and it's a lot harder to do this now. So far I have suspended three members for contravening the rules.
18th November 09 - I've not done much over the past few weeks as I've been working on another website. I did make a start on the Urmston.net property section though the other week. I'm making use of Pure ASP upload 3 and Smart Image Processor 2 which I purchased earlier in the year. This excellent upload software has a Flash - multi-upload to database feature which basically allows the user to browse for and select multiple images on their drive and it will upload all the images automatically and write the filenames to a database. The property section should be up and running for the new year.
3rd October 09 - I've been working on an application for work this week to allow our global intranet authors to upload a photo and obtain an optimised main image and thumbnail. I've added a few extra features so that they can select the size of the image and thumb, and also choose to square up the thumbnail by having it entered and cropped.
There are a few things that I need to look at on Urmston.net this month. The forum is stored on an MySQL database and compared to the MSSQL database it seems a bit sluggish. I have a Windows hosting account and as such, the MSSQL databases are optimised and they're virtually instant. So I'm going to migrate the forum posts from MySQL to the MSSQL this month.
Having members posting live is great. I have created a page where I can preview and amend the last 20 posts so I can keep an eye on what has been posted. I would like to thank those members who are posting live as they are obviously making an effort to ensure that their posts are formatted correctly. Some members do not bother to check their posts though, and if I want to let these members post live, it means that I will have to spend time adding more validations to the preview page and perhaps make the validations compulsory.
I am much more in favour now of having the majority of members posting live so I will revert back to the idea that I had last year and allow trusted members to temporarily remove a live post and suspend the go-live status of that account until it has been moderated. So I need to redesign the forum slightly.
I also need to switch all the rich text editors over to the new one and update the Gallery upload form.
23rd September 09 - I've allowed some members to post live. I will continue to review this process as I get to know the members.
13th September 09 - I purchased a new rich text editor; which is the one that I was going to buy before opting to buy the Cute Editor because it had a spell checker. In practice though the spell checker is clunky and, what I didn't realise at the time, any new words that you add to the spell checker are stored within the Urmston.net cookie. But if you log out as a member the cookie is destroyed and so are the new words that you added.
This new rich text editor (RTE) is a Dreamweaver extension so it's easier to use for starters. I was a bit unsure about how responsive it would be but it loads almost instantly so I'm really happy with that. There's no spell checker but there's no need for a spell checker as both Internet Explorer and Firefox have spell check abilities. I'll continue testing this RTE for a few weeks on the forum before installing it site wide.
9th September 09 - The personal encrypted passwords feature is now live. I've used the same RC4 encryption as the pin number but your personal password will have to be at least six characters. This pretty much concludes the changes required to make life easier for all members. So now a member can select their own password, they can have a pin too, and If they do not wish to login they can post to the forum using their pin number.
I will now concentrate on allowing some members to post live. This functionality is already available but at the moment I am the only person who can post live. However, I want to give "post live" members the option not to post live should they wish to post comments which may be controversial. That's easy enough. I am also aware that some "post live" members will be using shared computers so I want to give them the option of being able to enter their pin number before posting. This feature will be enabled from the member homepage. It's just an added bit of security to prevent someone else from posting dodgy comments on behalf of a member.
I'll make these changes over the weekend and some members should be able to post live at some point next week. I may buy an alternative rich text editor this weekend as the one I have is licensed for use on Urmston.net only and I have a few other projects on the go. The trouble with rich text editors is that they can be really clunky in operation and I'm not overly impressed with the CuteEditor considering it's supposed to be a market leader.
Once members can post live, my next project is to create the database-driven contact form so that I don't have to store member's e-mail addresses on my PC. I'm in the mood for creating new features at the moment though so I may build the property section and an online dating feature this month too! I am aware that I have some older features that need to be brought up to date but I've spent many hours modifying the site recently and I think I'm due a bit of fun.
8th September 09 - I didn't get much done this weekend as my dad's hard drive packed in so we had to reinstall everything. It makes you realise the importance of keeping backups. I've been working on the encrypted passwords tonight and it's almost done. I just need to do a bit of testing and then I can put it live.
23rd August 09 - I finished off the Classified Ads section this morning and put it live. I also started work on an alternative means for members to post to the forum without being logged in. It'll be handy for those who cannot accept cookies, who are on a shared computer, or who can't be bothered logging in. I've created a pin number column on the members database and each member will be able to choose their own pin number as it will be encrypted. I'll then create a redirect on the forum Reply button and if you have an active Urmston.net cookie it will continue as normal, if you don't, it will take you to a verification page where you can post to the forum by entering just your username and your pin number. It's going to almost the same as posting to the old site except you'll have to be a member. All posts submitted this way will be moderated.
22nd August 09 - I was in the mood to do something different today so I decided to build the Classified Ads section, which wasn't really a priority but I decided to do it anyway for a bit of fun. I think it works quite well and I have to admit, it's so much better when you're building for members. Each advert will expire after seven days unless it is updated but updating it easily done. Seven days may be a bit low, let's see how it goes. I want to avoid the situation where items are still being advertise a week after they were sold because the advert wasn't removed.
16th August 09 - I eventually got the Smart Image Processor 2 to work so I will be implementing it over the weekend. This will make it easier to upload images to the gallery and it also means that I will be ready to build the new Classified Ads next month.
Since going live I have received a number of enquiries about posting to the forum. Some people cannot use cookies, some people are on shared PC's and are concerned that if they are able to post live that someone else could make a post in their name. I've taken these issues into consideration and I have a relatively simple solution. I will introduce a four digit pin number for all members and that number will serve two purposes:
1. When posting live it will be a final check to validate that it is definitely the member who is submitting the post. If the pin number is entered incorrectly or if it is missing, then the post will still be submitted but it will be a moderated post and will need to be authorised by me. This is also handy for a member who can post live if they want to post something which might be controversial. By omitting the pin number the post will be moderated instead of going live immediately. Which also means that I can allow more members to post live.
2. Those members who are on shared PCs or who cannot accept cookies will be able to post to a topic without being logged in by entering their registered e-mail address and pin number. All these posts will be moderated and you will have to be a member.
For the majority of members, posting to the live site will still be a pretty painless procedure. Your cookie will keep you logged in for twelve months so you don't need to remember your password, and all you need to do is enter your pin number when you submit the post. If you forget it then your post will be moderated instead of going live immediately. And if you are a member and you cannot be bothered logging in then you will still be able to post to the forum. I might start working on this next week.
12th August 09 - I finally received confirmation today that my data protection registration has completed. So I need to get cracking on an online contact form so that I don't have to store Member's e-mails on my PC. This was identified as part of the data protection audit that I performed.
I'm struggling to get Smart Image Processor 2 to work on Urmston.net. It works well on my local server and on my other Fasthosts account but it just won't activate on the Urmston.net server. The images upload but the thumbnail creator doesn't work. It's nice when it works though and uploads images a lot faster than the current system. I'll get it sorted out.
Last night I had a play and adapted an RC4 encryption script to work with registration/login test pages. So what you have is a text box containing the phrase to be encrypted and a text box for the encryption key as per this example. The idea is that the first party encrypts the phrase using a key word then gives that key to the second party who can then decrypt the phrase. The point being, that you need the key to be able to decrypt the phrase. What I did was combine the phrase box and the key box into just one "Password" box. This means that your password is the phrase that is encrypted using an encryption key consisting of... your password. In other words, the only way to decrypt the password is to know the password.
I adapted the script and applied it to a test registration form. The Username: Dave and encrypted password %0D%BCcO%C6%A9%25 were added to the database when I registered and I then adapted the script to work with a test login form. I used to test login form to log in by entering the normal credentials, it encrypted the password and then queried the database to compare the username input with the username field on the database, and the encrypted password input with the encrypted password field. If successful I logged in, if not I was refused. So basically I can now create encrypted passwords but it means that I will have to create a password reset system rather than the existing password recovery system because if you forget your password there's nothing I can do because it's encrypted. You will have to do a password reset instead as many of the big companies do these days.
RC4 encryption is pretty old compared to today's encryption standards and apparently some people have managed to crack it. But as every single password will have its own unique key, every single password would have to be cracked separately and I can't realistically see anyone bothering to do that for Urmston.net. The main benefit for me is that I will not be able to see your passwords on the database as I can at the moment, which is why everyone is using system generated passwords.
08th August 09 - I've had a busy week. Lot's of enquiries to deal with and at the moment we're nearly at 200 members. During the week I made changes to the login procedure so that now, once a member successfully logs in and a cookie is created, the session is terminated. All member only activities are now authenticated by cookie rather than an active session. This should drastically reduce the number of sessions active on the server and speed things up a bit.
Other things that I did during the week was to add a Member log-out option, simplify the registration process, and add the Captcha to the Business Contact form - as I received notice that it was being spammed. Last night I purchased Pure ASP upload 3 and Smart Image Processor 2. I've had my eye on these two commercial ASP products for a while; they will improve the gallery upload application and will also be used for the new Classified Ads section and the Property section - when I build them later this year.
Today I converted the Local Events database from Access to MS SQL. As local events appear on almost every page, I'm pretty sure that using Access was slowing down the system.
31st July 09 - The new site goes live.
5th July 09 - I've not done much on the site this weekend, it was too nice to be sat on the PC. I'll try and catch up by working in the evenings this week.
28th June 09 - I purchased a new hosting package yesterday which I will eventually use to host the data protection website that I intend to build later in the year. For the time being though, I've used it to upload the new version of Urmston.net for testing purposes. It takes a while for a newly registered domain name to activate but it was working this morning and I got my first look of the full site on a live server. I wasn't impressed. It never looks right at first but it'll be okay after a few tweaks. One thing that I have noticed though is that the coloured background loads a split second before the white page style loads - which is something that I don't notice on my personal web server. I'm going to have to do something with that as it doesn't look good.
It has been a bit laborious migrating the old pages into the new template and cleaning up the code. The reason why I started Urmston.net was purely as a means for me to learn how to code using Active Server Pages (ASP). As such, I knew much more about ASP than I did about HTML and the HTML code used in some of the first applications that I built was terrible. I've definitely come a long way since; I've used div tags and CSS as much as possible on the new site.
Everything has been converted to the new template apart from the Classified Ads section and the Yearbook - both require a complete rebuild. I've rebuilt the picture upload using a different application and it now works with the latest versions of IE and Firefox too! I've redesigned the Events page slightly and I can't decide whether to make this a member's only feature. For the time being though it will remain public. You will need to have cookies enabled to become a member and you will have to be a member to post to the forum. I had found a workaround for those who don't like cookies but the user login cannot be completed without activating a session and the session requires cookies to be enabled so there's no way around it.
At the moment I do not have a homepage, and the Member's homepage doesn't contain much either. What the members do have though is an application that allows members to contact each other without revealing their e-mail addresses. This will be optional and it will be disabled by default for data protection purposes. A member will be able to activate this feature from their homepage.
The site is going live at some point in July so I'll more than likely put the registration live within the next week for advance registrations, and then put the site live at some point towards the end of the month. It depends how many problems I encounter. The main thing is to check that the cookies work correctly and what I might do is ask some of the registered users to start using the test site the week after next.
Once the site is live I'll spend a few weeks adding extra images and tweaking some of the design elements but it will be an ongoing thing. I will also attempt to find owners for the existing forum posts but that will definitely be an ongoing thing.
The new classified Ads application will be live shortly after launch. It will be much more like eBay - you'll be able to upload a photo, select a category and you will control your ad/ads from your homepage. The ads will expire after seven days but clicking on the ad on your homepage will extend it for a further 7 days.
I'll be building a Special Offers section so that members can add special offers - Walls Cornetto: two for the price of one at Sainsbury's for example. The way it will work is, if you don't know the expiry date of the offer then if you leave the 'To' date field blank, the offer will expire after three days. The offers will appear as a list on other members pages.
At some point in the summer I intend to take hundreds of photos because I want to create an information page for every feature of interest in the area. It will basically be a page with a picture and a little bit of information. It's something that I never completed on the current site. Many of the pages will reference David Smith's excellent Glancing back A-Z directory.
I will be building a property section at some point this year. It'll be pretty much like any other property site except it will be free to advertise your property. I'll include For Sale, For Rent and Looking to Rent options and will be controlled from the members homepage.
The Times gone by section - where we select a building and list the businesses that have operated there, will be up and running again at some point this year. All the information that we had is still stored on a database so it's just a matter of rebuilding the application.
I would like to add a film review section because I think, with it being a local audience, it will be better than a national one - like the IMDB for example. But it's not a priority at the moment.
I will be registering for the Data Protection Act today.
June 09 - I was on target for a launch this month but I lost a couple of weeks in May due to the failure of my motherboard so it's going to be July now. IE8 has also caused a few issues too as my rich text editor - which I have added to the forms, doesn't work with IE8 and my image upload no longer works with IE8. So I've purchased a new rich text editor and I will be purchasing new upload software in June.
At the moment then I expect to put the registration pages live at the start of July and launch the site towards the end of July. Oh, I am also registering as a Data Controller - as advised by the Information Commissioner's Office. Today 30/05/09, I've fixed a CSS issue with IE8 this morning and this afternoon I will be having a play with the rich text editor (RTE) and getting it configured to work the way I want it to. And then I will have to replace all occurrences of the old RTE with the new one.
May 09 - I had a really productive Easter weekend and I've been working on the site in the evenings as well as at the weekend. The members application seems to be working okay so it's just a matter of converting the existing content to the new format. Well it's not as easy as that as it's the behind the scenes pages that require most of the work.
April 09 - Oops, I changed my mind again and opted to stay with ASP. The main reason being that I already have a pretty good level of skill with ASP which means I can customise the site the way I want it. I can't do this with ASP.net and it would take me a while to learn. The other thing is that ASP is still an acceptable means of building database-driven websites, particularly with the enhancement made to Dreamweaver - which is the software that I'm using to create my pages. Dreamweaver now has support for Ajax which opens up a whole new area of web technology.
March 09 - I'm determined now to get the new site built. I've got more time to spend working on the site and since the start of the year my job has become permanent, after contracting for a few years. The main advantage being that I get a lot more holidays each year. I've redesigned the site again and I'm currently building the master pages using Microsoft Expression Web. My hosting company have updated to ASP.net 2.0 too so that makes things a bit easier.
ASP.net is the best technology for the web at the moment as far as I am concerned and is a totally different beast from the Classic ASP that I am used to. My job is to support Microsoft SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) globally so I use ASP.net technology all the time at work. I am also using CSS to ensure that certain accessibility standards are met and I will be testing each page with both IE and Firefox to ensure compatibility.
By using ASP.net I am able to take advantage of its built in features which makes my life a lot easier. For example, it comes complete with a members’ administration application so making a website members only is a lot easier. Cookies for example are encrypted automatically, which is not that easy with classic ASP. And then there are the validations which are server-side validation so unlike javascript, they are not browser dependant and they can't be switched off.
Besides using a MSSQL database for the members’ application, I have also been able to connect a mySQL database which I will use of the majority of the applications such as the forum; mySQL is a lot cheaper than MSSQL. I'm still using Fasthosts to host the site.
May 08 - In recent years I have struggled to spend as much time as I would have liked working on the site due to other commitments - and World of Warcraft. The site was becoming outdated, the HTML code was old, there was no support for Firefox, the validations used Javascript etc, and basically the site was in serious need of a new design. I believed that ASP had had its day and started working on a completely new build for urmston.net using Microsoft Expression Web and Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express to build the site using ASP.net technology.
However, shortly after starting on the new site I realised that it would be a huge project - because I had to redesign the site, create the pages, re-create the applications and learn to program ASP.net. The other issue at the time was the fact that my hosting company hadn't updated to the .Net 2.0 platform so some of the pages that I was creating in ASP.net 2.0 were not working on the live server when tested. At this point I was undecided which way to go. In the end, other commitments took priority and the project stalled yet again.
