Okay so anyone who’s tried to talk to me on MSN knows I’ve spent about the last two weeks working like crazy – and I’m pleased to report that I’m finally about caught up! I’ve basically missed the entire Scout Update for Team Fortress 2, but that’s okay because generally speaking the updates introduce a big chunk of crap that pisses me off so I like to leave it until it dies down a bit and Valve makes some changes to balance things out again.
So what all did I get done? Well it started out when we began a complete rebuild of the Sabrienix website. I’m still not 100% happy with it, little things like the icons (which are just stock Photoshop shapes that remotely matched the subjects) and a few of the pages need custom headers. I was pretty happy with how quickly I got back into doing DHTML, something I haven’t done since about 2001. A quick check on Browsershots shows that it renders correctly in most browsers, and I think it’s a lot more attractive than the old version.
Next, we replaced our ticketing-only system which ran on Eventnum to WHMCS which does ticketing, sales, and a bunch of other neat stuff. We don’t run cPanel, so it can’t auto-provision yet (though I am working auto-provision-on-pay for Mumble hosting) but the amount of stuff it does is just great. We now support Paypal and Google Checkout (though GC’s API complains because our certificate sucks, which I really need to get off my butt and do something about) and it keeps track of everything, so we no longer need spend so long worrying about who owes us what. Overall I love WHMCS, it’s definitely worth spending the money on.
After we got done with that, we provisioned two new servers in San Jose, California. One is “Xatu”, an absolute monster of multi-cored goodness running FreeBSD for general web hosting. I moved some of the sites off of Zubat to alleviate some of the load he’s feeling, sites like moodoo.org and my wife’s website now run quite a bit snappier on Xatu.
The other server “Wurmple” isn’t so beefy, but he’s running CentOS and all he has to do is host Mumble servers. Which reminds me, just yesterday I got done with v0.3 of Moomur, our Mumble control panel. It doesn’t do a whole lot of new things from the client perspective, but it runs off Xatu and allows you to administrate any Murmur on our network from the same place. So it doesn’t matter if your Murmur is on our old Dallas server, or the new San Jose one, or in the UK where I’m planning on adding a server next month – the control panel is in one place and looks the same. I’m really excited to get some new features on it and make it look a bit prettier.
I just have a few things to wrap up, like automating MySQL database creation, automating password-protected folders (a feature request from a cPanel convert) and I’d like to get the auto-provision-on-pay for our Mumble services working. I should be able to get that all done by this weekend hopefully.
Tags: sabrienix