I’ve created a phpBB site for ex-Landmark employees to keep in touch with each other and general chatting. I had been thinking of doing this for several months and then I was included on a email thread about a unoffical reunion and it perked my interest. I chatted it over with the folks in the thread and then went a grabbed the xmark.org domain and threw up phpBB, did a quick logo/favicon and we were off and running. We’ve brought in 150 users since we went live 1 week ago, that’s pretty cool!

Here is the site

MediaWiki is the Wiki that runs wikipedia. I’ve just downloaded it and started looking around as I would like to setup a personal Wiki and possibly a business one. MediaWiki looks like Plone, but it isn’t. It’s PHP based and they probably just borrowed the icons and the like. I’ve also grabbed ZWiki, which integrates with Plone and could be a better choice for GCG as we are already Plone based for out CMS.

I’ve integrated WeatherReport into the site. I had to do a fair amount of hacking around a couple of issues:

• First, I had issues with the DB access. I keep fairly restrictive access to my backend DB and I had add a specific premission for weather report. I’m not sure why this was needed, but it resolved the issue.
• Second, I had much pain and suffering around the CSS needed to make it appear to ‘belong’ in the ‘Silver is the new Black’ style I use. I ended up with a set of #weather CSS tags that seem to get the job done, but not exactly how I wanted. My neophyte status with CSS is showing though, but it was a good learning experience. I assumed that I could sub a #id with new properties and they would override the stuff above it, that doesn’t seem to always be the case.

Go get Adblock! it is an excellent Adblocker. I’ve installed it and it’s been wonderful. Here is the Link to the install page and HERE is the latest rules you can download. Grab the latest .txt file and save it, then import into adblock.