Well, its almost bed time on Sunday after another jam packed weekend.... Spent 80% of the weekend making major coding enhancements/upgrades to the OktaGone website. Mostly backend stuff that most of you probably will never see, but alot of it is to automate/allow for an automated payment system, for our upcoming new server platform, plus to finish off the site which i started working on in February 2005.

The site backend, codenamed "Dronesystem" is a heavily optimised (in terms of, built specifically for Webhosts/Internet sales. It currently contains the following items

• Full scale Member/Client system, such as 5 step signup, login/auth system, lost password, reset email/pass systems
• Invoicing, Subscription and Payment system. I just completed this today. It allows for Invoices to be generated (single, and recurring bills), and also for fully automated payments via PayPal, and also semi-automated payments via manual entry of Cheque, Credit Card and Direct Deposit Payments
• News System
• Network Status / Shoutout box
• Admin section that allows for creation and deletion of invoices and payments, suspension of subscriptions, viewing of site logs, modifying client visible news, approving/banning/editing client details.
• RSS Feed for news (automated via cron)
• Daily invoice generation via Subscription system (automated via cron)
  

Still to be worked on

• Product/Category Management system for "Products/Sales"
• Database Backup
• Admin Guide/Documentation
• Log Prune
• Manual Credit Card Payment (for linking in to 3rd party Merchant system).
• Newsletter Management
• Unclaimed PayPal payment management
• Financial System (Stats, profit/loss etc)
• and others!

There's alot of work to be done, but for the most part, the "essentials" are done. The reason this is being worked on, is to enable the seamless and non problematic billing integration between Gateworld, and other clients for reliability of service.

At last count in Dreamweaver, there were approximatelly 10,000 lines of code in Dronesystem.

Onto Gateworld's Major server upgrades - These have been coming for a while, however we are finally beginning progress on the rollout of new hardware. Two brand new Dual Xeon systems are being ordered from ThePlanet in early April to begin the setup of our cluster project. This will enable us to scale Gateworld's database systems, and web-serving capabilities from one to potentially tens of servers or more in the future as they are needed. With the new server system, the GW Forums should be easily able to cope with around 2000 - 3000 users online (including Guests.), and an increased in performance for the main site also, with an improved web system. The new system should be live mid April.

As for the rest of the weekend? Well i completed another stage of "House Cleanup", probably another 2-3 weekends of work left, before its all perfect...

Also setup another Windows 2003 fileserver, utilising DFS for my network to save time browsing about 10 RAID arrays, all the files are now in the one spot, plus a bit of replication. I also burnt about 20 DVD's to free up about 100 gigs of space on my PC - yay!

Well, starting my new shifts based job tomorrow so i need to hit the sack...

Well i havent really updated my blog with any "bloggish" stuff recently, so i thought i'd go al out and update you on everything thats going on at the moment.

I now am the owner of a 32" Philips HD LCD Television, complete with HDMI! Its an awesome TV, and combined with my Altec Lansing 500W RMS speaker system, it makes for a totally awesome home theatre experience, not to mention, its fun to play World of Warcraft on!

Have spent the last few weekends on house duties, as our place seriously needed some (spring?) cleaning - looks great now, with the exception of some dead lawn patches. Saw SG1 on Saturday around lunchtime - wow. I think that rates as possibly my favourite SG1 episode right there (for now!), with the Ori ships kicking absolute ass... I cant wait till July! I still havent caught up with BSG ep's yet, let alone abou 6 weeks of CSI, CSI NY, CSI Miami and Lost episodes.

Ahhh the working life. I'm currently working as a Technical Consultant for ASG in Perth, providing technical support for (mostly) Iluka, a minerals company based here in WA, but i'll be shifting accross to Alinta/Iluka combination in a higher technical position later this week, which brings added goodness.

Gateworld - way to go! We managed to break the 876 user voodoo limit on the forums, and we smashed that record to over 1300 users, and we are now averaging around 1000 users at peak periods. Guest access is currently disabled on the forums, while we roll out a new server platform, due to go live mid-April 2006.

More updates soon!

Blogs are the author's personal space and represent solely the views of the author, and not necessary those of GateWorld.net and its owner. Entries are not edited or reviewed by GateWorld before publication.