It's that time again, when a certain date rolls by and reminds me that, despite all good intentions (with which, as you know, the road to hell is paved), I've done absolutely bugger all on this site.  I've said it before, and no doubt I'll say it again, but that's set to change.

If you check back regularly (and let's face it, why would you?) you'll have noticed that there's been nothing but nothing here for ages.  The last article submitted was when that kid "hacked" us, and that was too long ago for comfort.  In my defense things have been very busy at work, what with one guy leaving when the team was already a man down, and all sorts of school related things that I don't need to go into here, and no-one else seems to be bothered (yet) with submitting content, and I lost my system drive the other day (I've seen a head crash first hand now), along with all my offline work on the site, but that's not really an excuse.

In short:

• A nice shiny new look (just like the old one)
• An upgrade to the forum system (you'll never tell the difference)
• All those same articles, revised a bit so they're not too out of date
• New articles that you don't know about yet
  
• Categories! (there's cryptic for you)
• More flexibility (leaves the future much more open)

We were "hacked" by some script kiddie recently.  I haven't been paying as much attention to the site as I should have been (I know, I know, but I feel guilty enough already so lay off, okay) but indications are that it was at least a week ago.  Shows how many people look at the site and how often, I suppose - the lesson to learn is: content helps

Anyway, this individual overwrote the configuration.php file (world writable, apparently, though not any more) with a script from 24fun.com that made it snow, but the snow was the words "Hacked by PoWeRFuL".  Very imaginative, very ingenius.  Well done. 

I tell you what, whoever you are - I might stop thinking you're an adolescent moron with all the wit and imagination of a used teabag if you come back and demonstrate your "Hacker" skills (should that be "hax0r skillz"?  no...) by writing an article explaining how you did it.  Of course, you probably don't even know, so do yourself a favour and learn, okay?  There's bigger bucks and shorter jail sentences for white-hats than black-hats, and no-one respects a script kiddie.

A few people now are filling in the poll (to the right, here) on how the template looks, but that doesn't give me any more information than how it's going down.

What's wrong with it, or what's right with it?  Discuss it here...

PC Professional UK

The grand opening! 

It's been a long time coming, but I've finally decided enough's enough and drawn a line under version 1.0 of the template, and I hope you like it.  I kept having new ideas, inspirations, and vague hunches to try, but the point came when I just had to say "That's it, new stuff can come later".  So I did, and now I/we can get on with adding content.

...to call it a day on this version of the template.  I started again and made it tidier, using my growing (but still minimal - so much to do, so little time...) understanding of CSS, and fixed a few bugs in the HTML too.  I've tweaked the Forum template to more closely match this one, and hopefully there won't be much more to change before I say "That's it, it's going live!" and start adding the proper content.

As you see, things are progressing really nicely here.  The template works, and looks the same in IE and Firefox (and I think it's looking good)... There's still a lot of work to do, but I'm getting there.

The logo has been decided upon by democratic vote (you see, it can work - go to this thread to see the breakdown of the results), so what you see here is what we're stuck with.  If you don't like this logo, thought you could have done better, or would've preferred one of the others, then you should've voted - it's your fault!