An Array Of Nifty Quickees

Hey it's friday guys! And that means I'm scouring clean the submissions box off a bunch of stuff thats cool enough to share, but for one reason or another (Enough articles posted, or maybe I'm just lazy :) haven't gone up quite yet. Hit the link below to share the fun.

I've also got assorted Slashdot Source details for anyone who is interested in that sorta stuff.

First off, Moses Moore sent us the Meta perl generator. You can check it out here if you're curious. Basically with this code, you can hack together your own generator script (Like my movie generator, or the recently posted Slashdot news article generator). It's spiffy.

Next Mark Spencer sent us a link to hisLinux support site . It's extremely under construction, but he's looking for help to make it way cool.

Allright Slashdot stuff. It's been a busy day. We were getting way more hits than usual this morning. The cron job that handles the site updates used to run every 60 seconds, but with the increased load, it needs to do more, and on a busier system. So I moved it to 2 minutes. Today we just moved it to 5 to make sure- when 2 of those things run at once, I've got big problems :)

So now its a daemon. It runs in the background, idling until called into action to update the homepage and articles. Yippee!

The Q&A section is Under Construction. I'm really looking for a Sharp person to spear head it. It's going to basically be a subsection of Slashdot (like the book reviews and the features sections) that's going to concentrate on asking a couple of questions (probably mostly on Linux, but certainly other topics are valid). The idea is that with the huge number of experienced computerphiles in the audience, we can help the huge number of newbies *grin*. So if you have questions (no questions are Stupid!) send 'em in. I really think this could be fun, as well as allowing us to help people get up to speed. I hope to have varying levels of difficulty to keep the gurus out there on their toes too.

And now the Slashdot Source Code stuff. As you hardcore readers already know, you can finger or Dave to figure out the TODO list on Slashdots code. And both of those lists are getting shorter. We're very close to being ready to try a first test site. If you're interested in being the first, drop us a note. (You better either have a really cool idea for a site, or be willing to pay us because we've had a lot of inquiries and can only pick a couple- don't worry, when the code comes out, everyone will have free reign to do what they desire).

Anyway, here is a list of the major stuff left to cover before the source release:

Topic Editor

Cleaning up Cookie stuff

Standard Functions for various display thingees (Stories, Comments Etc. Those will be the only functions that source code users will really need to modify

Make sure it'll work without mod_perl for those who don't wanna screw with it, and aren't going to be getting 100,000 hits a day on a P133.

So anyway, we're gonna work real hard on those things tonight and tomorrow, so don't be to surprised if you see some scary error messages. Perhaps another week of misc. coding- then we need a test site. And it should be ready a week later. Dave and I both have a major project going on at the office these days though, so our time is a little short, but hopefully things will get done quick enough anyway.