Subspace620 News & Events

Celebrating 1 full day of a working news page.

Here is hoping for many more!

Woot!

Reading Week Star Wars Marathon!

Hey guys,

On Tuesday, February 22nd, we're going to be having a Star Wars marathon. Starting at 12:30PM we'll be watching all six movies back to back which will take until about 1AM. We'll also be playing Risk/Munchkins/Whatever and ordering food at some point. We'll be in the Computing Science Center main area where the movie nights normally are. No worries if you can't stay for the whole thing, feel free to come and go as you please.

Thanks for reading,

James McNeice

Why Thingamablog and not x?

Now some people out there may be wondering why Thingamablog was selected to be the engine behind the subspace 620 news page. The reason for that is very simple. The University of Alberta's server, upon which subspace 620's website is hosted, does not allow any cgi scripting (PHP or otherwise).

There you go. That was easy, wasn't it?

Now some of you may be wondering what the full story is behind Thingamablog's eventual addition to this website. That story starts well over a year and a half ago when I first started to work on updating subspace 620's website...

As part of my election promises as well as part of some general discussions just before being elected president I decided that updating the subspace 620's website was long overdue (Considering that the crew manifest page was 2-3 years out of date at the time). So i started with a first draft update of the site: updating some basic facts, fixing old and out of date links, etc. all in PHP & HTML. I was planning on using some sort of PHP based blogging engine, or maybe even a forum engine, for the news portion of the site along with a few other updates that would have made the site feel a fair bit less like the club was still living it up in the year 1999 (not that there is anything particularily wrong with the style of the website but you know how it is...).

It wasn't until I decided to give my update a test run that i discovered that PHP was not supported on the University's servers. Since this problem meant redoing all the work i'd already done I put off the update for a while so i could get back on track with homework as well as figure out a new plan for the site update itself.

The next attempt of updating the site came about a year and a quarter ago. I'd written some perl scripts to automate some of my work for me and stuck to mostly just fixing informational problems with the site. Finally I was ready to hit the news page problem again. This time the plan was to use a perl cgi blogging engine named blosxom since it looked easy to use (had a test one already running on my laptop) and since the server had perl installed I figured it would work for what I needed. It wasn't until I uploaded the new version of the website that I realized that not even perl cgi pages were allowed.

Now this was a problem but I had to get back to work on homework so I left things sit, with the site mostly updated and a news page that threw an error at you since its cgi scripts couldn't work.

Time passed again and my term as president was up with me heading off to Toronto for a 16 month intership. After getting settled in I finally gave it another go, building an updated version of the site and finally coming across Thingamablog for the first time. With a few quick tests I figured it would work so I set the site aside while I worked on some other stuff. Six months later, here we are and I finally have returned to update the website again, with new information on the executive members and for the first time in 3-4 years, an up to date news feed (a working one too!).

Now for those of you wondering, Thingamablog is a blog updating engine that runs on my laptop that allows me to build a blog and entries. When i'm done with an entry, I just save it and hit the upload button at which point it drops the blog onto the university's server as flat and reliable old HTML. If you are interested in learning more about Thingamablog, do visit their website.

Thanks for listening and talk to you soon.

Hello one and all and welcome to subspace 620's brand new news feed.

Hello everyone,

If you are reading this then that means that subspace 620 once again has a news feed. Thanks to no php or other cgi scripting allowed on the campus servers I am Thingamablob to make this newsfeed. Here is hoping it provides an easy enough interface for future execs to be able to continue to update.

Anyways, glad to have finally gotten something that works and i hope you'll come back here to check up on the goings on of the club or feel free to visit our google groups page at:http://groups.google.com/group/subspace620 .

If you have any other questions, drop me a line at subspace@ualberta.ca or continue to peruse our website.

Thanks for listening.