First of all, I wish to offer the TinyMe community an apology for my failure to be in communication these past couple of months. I have been remiss in my duties, and I sorely regret that. I do hope you'll continue again with me. I hope to be updating this blog once again much more often.

The breakup with PCLinuxOS and the ensuing events were very disheartening and discouraging to me. I never saw myself moving away from PCLinuxOS at any time. Even once the Unity releases reached the point at which I could begin work again, I felt too discouraged to do so. However, I think I'm getting past that, and I'm ready to begin work on TinyMe again.

Also, as of recent I've been playing around with coding in PHP. At the end of last semester, I created a computer museum website for my school's computer services department. Then, while joking around with a friend over the summer, I became inspired to create a website for my friends to allow them to share jokes. That website is now 600+ lines of code and growing. I have yet to finish the logging in function!

I did start some work on a TinyMe Acorn 2009 alpha release based on Unity earlier this week, but immediately ran into a roadblock in that Python wouldn't come out without dragging many essential system elements along with it. Fortunately, Gianvacca tracked down the culprits. Hopefully we'll be able to get things sorted out very quickly.

I've posted little snippets of news as to what's going on with the website, but I'll explain here with more depth as to what I'm thinking.

A few months ago, the website was the wiki, the forum, and a gallery within the forum. The wiki served as the heart of the site. However, I never liked how there wasn't seamless navigation between the wiki and forum, nor how you had to register for one account on the forum and one account on the wiki.

So now the core of the site is no longer the wiki but Joomla. As much as I like using the wiki for the main core of the site (it's very easy to use), Joomla offers the power we really need. And much of this power is provided in JFusion.

JFusion is a web software integration tool which makes it very easy to integrate logins across systems. Here on the TinyMe site, we're using JFusion to integrate the login information between the forum, our new gallery, and the wiki. Hopefully in the future we may be able to unify the login information between TinyMe and the Unity Linux website, and possibly even other Unity Linux-related websites which are running Joomla.

Getting back to Joomla, I've recently found out that its registering system is far too spambot friendly, and I was forced to lock down registration. It's now possible to register via the forum. However, I haven't found a way yet to make the “Create a new account” link on the front page point to the forum registration system.

The forum has retained the same software, but it is now wrapped inside Joomla. I'm seeing a few visual issues with conflicts between the forum and Joomla, none of which are a show-stopper. I hope I can get those ironed out in the next few weeks, as well as getting Google Ads reinstated. I paid for the first 3 years out of my own pocket and so far that money has been 65% paid back.

The wiki… sigh. Honestly, I'm not quite sure what to do with the wiki. I loved the download page I had. It was very easy to maintain. However, I love IonFiles' ability to count the number of times a file has been downloaded. I tried to hack that functionality in DokuWiki but couldn't.

What I'm thinking is that I'll lock down a few areas, like this blog, then let the community have at it.

I'm very happy to have some proper gallery software in place now. Hopefully we'll have many TinyMe 2009 Alpha screenshots to fill it soon. In the meantime, find your best wallpapers and upload them!

It's very late here now and I need to head off to bed. Good night.