6/8/10

The website was down for a few days while Nikki and I were off getting married. It turns out the primary hard drive in our web server died. Thankfully I was able to recover the virtual drives containing the actual web server OS and data. I installed Ubuntu 10.04 on a spare drive, moved the virtual drives over, and am back up and running with no data loss. I should fire my IT guy due to 3 days of down time, then again that guy is me and I had a good excuse for not getting it fixed right away :)

1/10/10

Fixed a bug on the Feedback page and the Wedding Website guestbook page that prevent entries from being submitted that contained special characters, such as " or '. If you previously tried to submit a comment and it didn't work, sorry. Please try again.

12/6/09

The Knez / Sweeney wedding website has officially launched. Check it out here

8/12/09

Verizon has inexplicably starting allowing me server pages on port 80. Ever since we got FIOS port 80, commonly used for servering up websites, has been blocked. This meant that in order to keep knez.org running I had to buy a second domain name, kneznet.org, and get into some trickery relaying knez.org requests to kneznet.com:8080 to get around the port 80 restriction. Now that port 80 is open there is no need for me to mess with kneznet.com any longer, which makes me very happy. I dont know if port 80 will stay open, but a quick internet search indicates that it has been open in the northeastern US for about 4 months now. I am going to ditch kneznet.com in hopes that port 80 stays open permanantly. Wish me luck.

8/11/09

This has been an exciting couple weeks for the website, and not in a good way. The web servers hard drive failed. Bummer. The site is back up and running, although now its running in a virtual linux machine under Apache rather than IIS. Thats a pretty drastic change so I just had to write a blog about it. Read more here.

6/13/09

I guess its been a while since the last website update. For starters, I reorganized the code for the photos pages so that it is more maintainable. I then updated the code so that I can put album descriptions in that have line breaks. I also changed the album description entry so that it uses a WYSIWYG editor rather than just plain text. So far the only page to use all this functionality is photo page for my xs1100 (link).

I also completely changed the theme of the website. The old one was sooo 2004.

Lastly I removed the Rockford Friends section since it was no longer used... I blame facebook. Don't worry, I didn't delete all the photos in there. You just have to be more motivated to find them :)

10/22/08

The website was down for about 12 hours yesterday but it was for a purpose. We upgraded our bandwidth from 8 mb (mega bits) down / ~1 mb up to 20 mb down / 20 mb up. This should give all knez.org services a substantial boost in speed with a 20 times increaes in bandwith for servering pages to you.

10/17/08

Added a birthday reminder system for registered users of knez.org. Users are able to sign up for email reminders for birthdays of contacts in the address book. The reminders are sent out a configurable number of days before the birthday. The reminder email contains lots of stats about the persons age. I also added the ability for registered users to change their contact information and password. Also added a birthday field to the address book. Head over to the Personal section to see everything in action.

9/28/08

Since the begining of the website I have provided a contact page where users can porvide feedback on the website. You dont need an account or password to post.... you dont even need a name, anonymous posts are fine with me. This worked just fine except every now and then some bot comes along and posts 1000's of comments to my form. This is highly annoying because I then have to go back in and delete them all hoping there are not any legitimate comments amoungst the batch being deleted. I had ignored this problem for years until recently some bot was hitting the page so hard it was causing the entire webserver to slow down. I finally got off my butt and put in an image verification step prior to accepting any feedback. Personally I hate that I have to do this, but the bots traffic should be eliminated. At least you can still post feedback anonymously. Head over to the feedback page to see it in action.

8/31/08

Fixed various bugs I introduced to the photos page when I made the mobile version. Selecting a default image size should work again.

8/10/08

I finally finished the lockable package drop box. Read more about it here.

I also added new content to the projects page, specifically a temperature sensitive cooling fan for the home theater and alternative power supply for my motorcycle Collet Communicator.

Lastly I made a mobile version of the website. If you are visiting this site from a mobile phone the backend scripts will automatically redirect you do the mobile version. It is still the full website with all the content, its just presented in a way that is easier to display in a single column on a mobile phone.

7/30/08

The replacement FTP hard drive has arrived. The FTP server will be back up and running in no time with the ability to upload or download files. The entire site will still be empty unfortunatly.

7/13/08

I finally finished moving all my web content from my old webserver to my old game machine. This represents a doubling in processor speed, ram, hard drive space, and gigabit ethernet (not that it matters too much for our website). It should not have taken nearly as long as it did but I ran into numerous driver problems with Windows Server 2003 32 bit. Anyways its done now with one exception; the hard drive responsible for FTP data storage failed. The FTP server is still up and running but there is nothing there. Surpisingly enough the hard drive is still under warranty so hopefully I will have a replacement in a couple weeks.

5/26/08

Added a page for my new computer. Check it out here.

5/25/08

The blog page finally got an update. You can now edit or delete existing posts if you are logged in. I added the ability to filter blog entries based on the category. I also added a search page that allows you to search by blog category and keyword. The keyword search is not very intelligent however I dont have too many blog entries so you should be able to find what you are looking for.

3/24/08

Nikki and I are constantly working on the house. When we first bought the place I thought it would be a good idea to document our work on the house on our webpage. I started creating webpages for each project we worked on. The problem is that we have worked on so many things I cant keep the webpage up to date. I am scrapping the idea of making individual webpages for each thing we do to the house. Instead I have created a house maintenance log, similar to my vehicle maintenance logs. I am very good about keeping these logs up to date because it is so quick... nowadays I dont even have to launch an HTML editor, I just use built in forms I have created to quickly build the page. Check out the begining of the house maintenance log here.

2/28/08

There have been a couple of times now where I have tried to access the website only to get a "Too many users" error message. For the last 4 years the maximum number of simultaneous users for the website has been set to 10. Apparently now the website is big time and 10 just is not cutting it. Today I uppped it to 40 which, given the growth rate, should be good for the next 16 years :)

2/26/08

I have been hard at work upgrading the stereo in the Saab. I finally got around to documenting some of my work on the new Saab car stereo page.

1/6/08

I finally fixed the photo pages after restoring to old copies after the website deletion. Users can now again post photo comments. The photo direcotory page also correctly shows listings of photo directories, such as on the house or vehicles photos pages. I figured out a better way to determine the date a directory was added. Rather than looking at the modified time of the overall directory (which changes anytime someone adds a photo comment) I now look at the modified time of one of the photos in the directory. This gives a better representation of when the photos were actually added. By the way, the create date of the directory is what I really want to know but that information is not available directly from PHP.

12/19/07

I accidently deleted the entire web site today. Of course I deleted it from a remote machine so the recycle bin was no help. As soon as I went to knez.org and got blank page I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. Well between a backup from 6 months ago and some data recovery off my hard drive most of the site is back up and running. Some sections may be outdated or broken and unfortunatly all the photos now look like they were just added to the website today making the date added sorting ability worthless. Oh well, its better than nothing. Be patient as I get all the pages working again.

7/5/07

I made my own blog software for the webpage. It is still pretty limited in what it can do. The 2 most recent blog entries are listed to the right. The rest of the blog entries can be found at the Blog page.

6/26/07

I finally finished some serious maintenance on my motorcycle. Well not that serious but it took me a while. I also finally made a HTML form based way for me to enter comments for photos (much easier than manually editing text files). This means you can expect to see more photos with comments. Just to prove it, I commented all my recent xs1100 maintenance photos

4/18/07

Its been a while since my last update. This is mainly because I have not picked up any new hobbies since my last post, and posting pictures is automated so I don't make note of new photos here. I am making an exception for photos of my previous car, the Contour. After the fire I realized I had no photos of the outside of the car. The only photos I had were of the interior while putting in the car computer. Finally after about a year, I decided to do something about this. I went to ultimate photo source for help, my Mom. She quickly found a few photos of my second and third contours (The first does not count, I only had it for about 1 week before returning it). Check out the photos here.

2/2/07

Added the The Photos page now allows the user to select the size of the preview images shown. It defaults to a thumbnail size but goes all the way up to the full size image. If you have cookies enabled it will even remember your choice the next time you visit the site. Dial up users probably want to stick with the default thumbnail view.

I also modified all pages on my site to use the same copy of the photos pages. This means that the entire site now supports user selectable image sizes and image descriptions. This will make it much easier for me roll out future photo page enhancements.

1/25/07

The Photos page now display a description of each photo if one has been provided. Its unlikely we will go back and fill in descriptions for our old photos so look for this new feature on our newest photo galleries, including the Kennedy Krieger Gala photos. I also changed the way the way I display the year those photos were taken.

12/29/06

I am always adding new photos to the site. In the past it has never been clear what photos I added unless there was a note on this page (which was not often). That is why I added a new way to sort photos, by date added.

Check out the Photos section so see the new sorting feature at work. I just added photos from Christmas in Illinois. Hopefully I will be adding this new feature to all the photo pages accross the site in the next couple days.

12/9/06

A while back I changed the way the photos of the house are stored on my server and presented to the user. This caused all my image links to break. I finally got around to fixing all the links to the photos of the house are back on-line. Check them all out in the House section.

10/20/06

It may appear that I have not made any websites updates for while. In truth I only mention the significant updates here. I am always adding photos to the Photos section, the House section, and keeping my vehicle's maintenance logs up to date.

This time around I finally updated the computer page to reflect the current state of affars. Make sure to check out a page on Nikki's new computer.

Nikki and I have been working like crazy on finishing our basement. You can keep up to date by looking at the photos we take but even better than that we took a video to capture the entire state of the basement pre-drywall. Watch the videos.

8/22/06

The webserver now has a fresh OS and all updated versions of the various servers it runs. There is no traces of the virus it was infected with. There are still a few things I need to setup but for the most part all of the services are back up and running.

8/14/06

Normally I do not make an entry in this table every time I upload some photos but this time I am making an exception. To start with we have some photos of Nikki's new computer. I added some updated photos of the basement concrete work. Finally I added some photos of the extreme plumbing work Nikki and I have been doing in our basement. We are not done with the plumbing yet and eventually I hope to add a section to the house page dedicated to this plumbing.

8/11/06

The Webserver has a virus. I got the computer up and running again but I need to do a clean install so the website will be down for a few days. This will probably start on 8/14/06.

7/16/06

Updated the World of Warcraft page including updating the characters, macros, UI mods, and screenshots pages.

7/12/06

Added a component discussion page to the Bronco-pilot page where I discuss why I got the parts that I got.

6/20/06

Added a page dedicated to the next generation of car computers; the BronCo-pilot. Check out my progress on the second car computer.

6/3/06

The server software and hardware maintenance is complete. The server should have significantly better up-time now.

The Personal section now supports user groups. This allows users to access a portion of the functionality, rather than just providing all the functionality. This means the personal section can be opened up to more users beyond myself.

6/1/06

Finally got around to updating the Programs page. I also included a new version of the MP3Cleaner application that fixes several annoying bugs. The MP3Cleaner page now has screenshots and download links for both the executable and the source code

5/25/06

Add a discussion and some photos of our recent project in the basement, the bathroom plumbing. Check out the Basement section of the House page

5/1/06

Finally added some photos of my Yamaha XS1100. Check them out at the XS1100 page

3/29/06

Add a main vehicles page featuring the imfamous picture of Nikki in a cowboy hat. Also updated the maintenance log for the XS1100 and Bronco

3/12/06

Added a maintenance log for the XS1100 and Bronco to keep track of the work I do on them

3/6/06

Updated the video section of the World of Warcraft page again. Check out some of my favorite films here

2/28/06

Updated the video section of the World of Warcraft page. Check out some of my favorite films here

2/24/06

Added a page dedicated to my new (to me) vehicle, a 1996 Ford Bronco. Make sure to check out all the photos here

2/12/06

Its been a while since the last update. The big news is that my car has been totaled. You can read about it and see some photos at the Contour section of the Vehicles page.

Updated the security of the Personal pages so that it is harder for unauthorized users to get access.

12/19/05

Added photos of our new kitten Bailey to the Photos page. Also added photos of Nikki and myself at the Kennedy Krieger Gala to the Photos page.

11/21/05

Added two new pages to the Personal section. If you are one of the two people with access, check it out.

11/13/05

Added a page on moving the Water Heater to the House section

10/18/05

Moved all my personal pages to a new password protected personal section. This includes the address book, calendar, webmail, mp3player, and various server admin programs

10/16/05

Added a discussion on the floors in the House section.

10/13/05

We are back on-line and living in the new house. Sorry knez.org was down for a long time but it took a couple weeks longer then expected to get cable internet here. I took advantage of the down-time and moved the website from the old webserver (650 mhz with an 8 gig hard drive) to the workhorse (1.4 ghz with 140 gig hard drive).

9/8/05

I created a House page to talk about our recent purchase. I will try to post before and after shots as we continue to work on the house.

8/21/05

Updated the World of Warcraft page unter the Projects section. I completly revised the user interface mods section to reflect the mods I currently use.

7/9/05

Updated the World of Warcraft page unter the Projects section. I added more links to new characters. I also posted the code for the macros that I have created to assist in casting the right spell at the right time

7/30/05

Fixed a bug in the way I was using the Stats page. Previously only stats would only be captured on the feedback, index, and update history pages. Now stats will be collected on all page. I also reset all the stats now that they are working properly.

7/28/05

Finished adding all the photos to the Continental Divide section of the Adventure page.

6/16/05

Finally got around to organizing the Continental Divide section of the Adventure page. I even added photos to the first day's log. I will try to add photos to the rest of the days shortly.

6/12/05

I finally filled in the content of the Arcade Machine and LCD Projector sections under the Projects page.

Minor updates to the XS650, XS1100, and Contour sections of the Vehicles page.

Added a quick and dirty Car Stereo section to the Projects page.

6/7/05

I changed the way images will be displayed on the webpage. So far I have only updated the Car Computer section on the Projects page. This will soon apply to pictures on all pages.

5/31/05

Added new sections and updated the content of old sections of the Car Computer page found under the Projects page. This included pictures of a nearly finished car compter.

5/17/05

Added the Webmail page for web access to knez.org email accounts. This web interface is part of the Argosoft mail server I use so it may not look exactly like the rest of the site, but its still handy to have.

5/15/05

Added some friend's characters to the World of Warcraft section under the Projects page

5/13/05

Updated the Photos page so that users can select what size the image will be displayed as. The options are small (width=300), medium (width=600), and large (width = original). Previously all images were displayed in their large size.

5/10/05

Added more pictures to the Photos page. The pictures are from Nikki's graduation from Eastern Illinois University! Congradulations Nikki!

4/28/05

Made the Address Book somwhat public. It can now be accessed by anyone who knows the answer to the password hint listed on the page.

Fixed the mapquest links in the Details window of the Address Book. Also updated the search page to reflect recent changes to the fields stored in the database.

Add a couple of new characters to the World of Warcraft page under the Projects page.

Fixed the layout on the Programs page.

4/17/05

Added the Computers page

4/11/05

Modified the Photos page to so that when thumbnail photos are clicked, only the picture is displayed in the browser. By displaying only the picture, and not displaying any other web content, new browsers will automatically resize the image to fit the window

4/2/05

Modified the Photos page to sort photos by year (finally). This means that the year links on the left hand side of the Photos page finally works. If you really like the old way were photo albums are not year specific, then just use the "All" link from the year links on the left.

3/7/05

Added some photos of Nikki's Tri-Delta formal dance to the photos section

Added a discussion on the fabrication aspect of the car computer in the Project part of the webpage

2/24/05

FTP support has been reenabled (ftp://knez.org). If you want an account let me know

Aded the Update History page.

Added a Feedback page tied so users can share their thoughts about the site.

Added a bare About Us page.

Modified the Address Book interface

Made cosmetic updates to the CarComputer page in the Projects Section

2/6/05

Added a rough calendar of events. Sorry but it will be private when I am done

2/5/05

Added password protection to the Address Book so that I can start using to for real

1/28/05

Added the car computer page and even added some content including pictures

1/23/05

Added the photos section. Completely remade the webpages to use this new fancy webpage layout style.