Motorcycles International is back on track. The original design team was made up of some talented individuals, but one “bad apple” ended the relationship. Some would say that I should be accustomed to such individuals. Regardless, the new design team is doing extremely well.
The R3Owners.Net site is still the top in it’s class, but nonetheless it did move up in it’s rankings a bit. The tests helped!
The Motorcycles International Portal is starting the visual/theme development phase. It’s difficult to say how long this will take, but structural forum development will continue. I’ll likely add the Photo Album and Classified Features this weekend, but it will take a bit of time to integrate them properly.
After some challenges, the new company has been started. Finally can focus back on the new portal.
The new logo has been done for a while, updated the placeholder site.
What was initially a small project turned into an exercise in managing many aspects of RSS feeds, caching, CSS development, and sitemap issues.
Regardless, I’m proud of the outcome and look forward to making it a part of my routine.
Even if no one else chooses to visit.
I don’t know what caused the issue, but for some reason WinXP was moving to a slow crawl. Initially I thought it was related to it’s slow hardrive, but after a while it was apparent that something was slowing it down bad.
So I pulled out the Vista CD that Gateway sent me earlier this year, along with an associated driver CD and wiped the hardrive clean of all partitions so that the install could do it’s magic.
I know Vista is receiving a lot of bad press, and it’s big-news SP1 update is coming soon, but I’ve got to say that running it with the current updates and AGV isn’t that bad. Previous issues like my PC-Card software have been resolved, as just about everything has a version for Vista now.
Ok, I’m going to say it out loud:
MotorcyclesInternational.Net !
The domain, and all of it’s common variations, have been owned by me for years. It has served as a infrastructure domain for too long, the time has come to bring it back.
During the 90′s it was a side project, representing the forward-thinking approach that many sites had during the Dot-Com era. It’s .Com variant (which I obtained from the former dealer) was one of the world’s best known online stores, and had been written up in several motorcycle magazines.
The platform will be similar to some of my other projects, such as TriumphRat.Net, but it will start off on the new target architecture after the current riding season.
Time will tell if the portal will be as I hope, but if you would like to join in the fun and help out let me know!
First time in a while, but I actually slept during the middle of the day. No bike riding or work, just relaxing at the house. One of the moderators that helps out on TriumphRat.Net appeared after a long hiatus and ShawnReed.Com was upgraded.
Also, a new website was started today. It’s just a single-page of white space but was a large beast in the late 90′s; magazines included it in a couple articles.
It’s not as cool as writing about what would have been a great ride, but sometimes that’s the way it goes …
Earlier in the day, one of my sites was attacked by Turkish Muslims using a little-known exploit that I wasn’t aware of. Their edits were simple, but took some time to find.
Until now, most attacks were limited to script kiddies or compromised networks executing commonly-known attacks. It never crossed my mind that one of my sites would be taken advantage of by a Muslim interest group. The site that my users were forwarded to had an obvious theme toward making their beliefs known.
The experience reminded me of several events, and brought a sense of pride for those who are working to defeat oppression in the world. What I did today doesn’t compare to the sacrifices they are making for us, but there are other ways I can be useful.
Not a bad deal:
There were other niceties, like a competitive 2-year parts replacement option and a 50% discount on a Microsoft Laser Mouse (for laptops). MS-Office is fully functional for 90 days, but to be honest I’m not thrilled about the idea of paying for it. I went ahead and activated it, but downloaded:
Time will tell if I fall victim to the Microsoft desktop domination, which is already happening with a requirement to use IE over Firefox (for a proprietary app I use). Thunderbird is a nice program, but it also may not be able to overcome my familiarity with Outlook.
In a few days, the next investment will be on one of the Sierra Mobile 3G Wireless Cards. One of my reasons for the Gateway purchase is that it supported the card that the three major mobile providers still use in my area. Other laptop manufacturers, like Sony and HP, have already switched over to the smaller card format.
This laptop wasn’t a significant investment, and it will likely get handed off to my family in a year or so. By then, the business-grade laptop choices won’t be so difficult.
This morning, the familiar yellow security icon appeared in my desktop tray. I knew what was going to happen next, Internet Explorer was going to get updated.
I was right, it was the only issue that needed to be updated.
Downloading wasn’t much of a challenge. Roughly 16mb at first, and I ran an errand while the subsequent download/install phase took place. When I got back from the grocery store, my computer was ready to reboot.
Changing the default text-bolding mechanism was the first step, and fixing some of the toolbars around so that I could get a grasp on what was going on with the menus. Chose to stick with default tools only for now.
The true scare came when I saw how a couple of my sites looked under IE7. I did a similar test recently after upgrading to Firefox 2 with no issues; but IE7 was trashing primarily DHTML and CCS menus that were being used on some sites. Even though these sites validated 100% at the W3CÂ Validator, as some of you already know it doesn’t matter much when you’re dealing with buggy browsers.
My sites that relied on primarily HTML 4.0 code, with more tables than css, weren’t harmed by IE7 bugs.
IE7 was basically a solid install without any issues. It isn’t crashing or behaving erractically. So in that respect, we can say Microsoft did well. However, Microsoft has some work to do before IE7 will be accepted within the enterprise market.
For me, I’m going to use Firefox a bit more.