The Blogs are under new administration! This sounds as if a big leadership change has occurred, or a new President of the Blogs was voted into office. Yet the administration has changed (if there was such thing). Just not in the way some may think. I am still the programmer / developer, the Master Administrator, the President, or Lord of the Blogs (if I can use such terms...). So nothing has changed there. But the change is to the Administration area of the ANR Blogs. Hopefully this change should have you Blog Owners and Moderators jumping up and down for joy! Or maybe not if Blog Administration doesn't excite you...
So what is this change your asking me? In the Administration section, the Users section has a big change to it. Now it is very easy to see who may post stories to your blog, who are the moderators, adding and removing moderators has been greatly simplified, and links to e-mail all the moderators and users who may post have been added.
I know you're wondering, "How do I find this!!!" and "I want to see this new fan dangled wonder today!" It's quite simple... First you must be a Blog Owner or a Moderator of a Blog to access the Administration area. So if you are simply go to your Blog click on "Administration". From the Administration main menu click "User Administration" and vvvwalla! Just like magic you can see all and do all! And do take special note of your Blog Post settings at the top of the page. As they play an important role as to who can post and who cannot post!
Well that is all for today folks! May your Blogging be frequent, your content full, and your readers many!
Debugging a website can be a difficult thing, especially if it is complicated in layout and function. Fortunately, there are tools that help greatly with this. Firefox is an excellent web browser, included in it are the options for "Add-ons". These add-ons are written by other users to be able to do things that the web browser does not do by itself. Today I will show off a web development Add-on called "Firebug".
Firebug is designed to help web developers and designers debug their sites. As a tool Firebug is very powerful and I will only brush the surface of this Add-on.
To download the Firebug add-on click the link or follow the directions. From the firefox menu you may also select "Tools" -> "Add-ons" -> "Get Extensions" then search for "Firebug".
What makes Firebug so nice is it lets you view all the source for the web page, view the CSS, view all Javascript, watch Javascript variables, view AJAX calls, and edit the CSS or HTML. What sets this add-on above others that do the same things is the powerful "inspect" button. Once clicked "inspect" turns on a mode where simply moving the mouse over parts of the website lets you see where in the coding each piece is referenced and also the styles used for that section.
It shows the coding in a nicely formatted view showing what you need and the surrounding context. There are many options for what information to display and how to display it.
For serious web developers this is one of the best add-ons available. For viewing and debugging web pages.
I would like to announce a New Feature! Not a new feature some of us grew used to going to the drive-in or movie theater to see the latest and greatest horror or sci-fi movie. No this new feature (we hope) will blow your socks off and is what everyone has been waiting for. At least all those with Sitebuilder sites! Oooh, the first clue! Now that your fingers are all tingling with the excitement of anticipation. I would like to take a moment to say this would not be possible without Dave and Karl who also work on Sitebulder to make it happen. So what is this new fandangled feature? It's a mix of two flavors. In one hand take the blog you are reading right now, in the other hand take Sitebuilder (some of you may have guessed that already). Mash the two together and you get something like this:
Web Action Team Site
WAT Home Page
I agree with you, very cool indeed!!! Now you may be asking how do I do this with my blog and my Sitebuilder site? But wait it get's better because some of you are thinking... I have 5 blogs that I want in my Sitebuilder site. Can I do that? Yes you can! Here's how!!!
1) Log into your Sitebuilder site
2) Go to "Edit Home Page"
3) On the right hand menu you will see the "Blog Options" section from there select "manage" and you should see something like this:
Example screen from Sitebuilder admin page.
From the sample you can see the "Web Action Team" blog is active on the site. To select more simply click on "Add Blog to my Site" to remove the Blog from your site click "remove blog". Add all the Blogs your heart desires, remove all the Blogs your heart desires. It's that simple!
There are a few other options that are available but that can be left until next time. Until then I hope this "New Feature" is better then the old!
Well, yesterday we ran some security scans...with varied results. One result was that we found some more vulnerabilities- the new scanner is thorough! But unfortunately, we also sent out some email from the Portal, due to the scanner being pretty darn aggressive.
My goal for next week is to run the scan against a few 'private' sites: http://nursing-home.info and http://simplestuff.info/mpg . The goal is to run stress tests, and try to crash the sites. I would like to compare the ANR servers/connection against what is commercially available. I think we will be in pretty good shape.
Well folks it's 4:00pm on a Friday afternoon and the office is eerily silent. Come to find out there is only three of us left from Communications Services in the Office. Dave is at some trainings, Karl is out on vacation, Alex is being artistic somewhere, and the 3 of us from the IT group are slaving away at our jobs. Or are we??? We could be playing games or goofing around. But why would we stay here and do that? This is ludicrous to think about. As for me I've been working away at a new grant system for the Center for Produce Safety who cant wait to give away millions of dollars to willing researchers (don't quote me on the millions of dollars... I'm just a programmer, and don't know all the gory details). Anyways Blaine and I simply noticed is was quiet here... A little too quiet... And I thought all the world should know that the Web Action Team is always on the job to solve your programming needs!
