SharperIron is Back Online
As you can see, we’re back!
Our regular content schedule will resume shortly.
Some things to be aware of
- If you have registered at SI, your old password will no longer work. If we had a valid email address for you, you have probably already received notification of this, but in my tests, the automatic email link won’t work. Regardless, you can launch the reset process here.
- For any problems logging in, please send a message using the site contact form (category: technical problems or account/password)
- A few parts of the site haven’t been completely restyled yet. So we’ll be under construction for another week or two.
- Feel free to post question, missing features, error messages, etc. in this thread.
A word or three about the restyling
Part of the goal this time around was to make the site a bit more phone and pad friendly. On very, very small screens, the menus were hard to use and the side-positioned author panel on articles and comments tended to create the need for lots and lots of scrolling. The new design should be a bit better for little screens.
Generally larger fonts sizes were chosen. Rather than follow the current design trend of using ridiculously giant font sizes (a soon-passing fad, I hope), we’ve gone a notch or two larger. The main appeal of that design choice is mostly selfish: my eyes are just older (and certainly tireder) than they used to be. Maybe larger text also works better on small devices?
Since I don’t own a single smart phone or pad of any sort whatsoever, I rely on you all for feedback (along with using some screen-emulator tools). Feel free to post problems and suggestions for the improving the site functionality and look for the itty bitty-expensive-screen world.
A word of warning: web site visual design has moved very quickly (from my POV) to HTML5 and CSS3. If you’re using an antique web browser, things are probably not going to work right.
Finally, on the styling topic: it more fun than usual this time around!
What about “Drupalgeddon,” being hacked, and all that?
After setting up a new webserver, installing fresh versions of everything, restoring an old backup, and carefully adding the newer content back in, I’m reasonably confident that we’re free of “back doors” and other sorts of hacker evil. There’s no way to be 100% sure, but it looks like nothing happened to our stuff beyond the initial automated attack that created a bogus user role on the site and a single bogus user account in that role. Time will tell. I’m not losing any sleep over it.
The whole process has been really educational. Lots of up-to-elbows in linux, mysql, nginx, and other technical guts. A few more rounds of this and I’ll have about 1/6 of a proper education for somebody doing this sort of thing!
That said, with all the manual database tampering, a few things are likely to be not quite right here and there. There might be a post or two with the wrong user name on it, the wrong date, missing tags, and miscellaneous similar messiness. Again, feel free to post whatever seems amiss here in the thread.
Thanks for your patience during the downtime.
Aaron Blumer 2014 Bio
Aaron Blumer, is a Michigan native and graduate of Bob Jones University and Central Baptist Theological Seminary (Plymouth, MN). He and his family live in small-town western Wisconsin, not far from where he pastored Grace Baptist Church for thirteen years.
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It doesn’t appear in “new threads” list either. I am running Chrome…but my posts have worked on 2 other threads?
Not sure what, but something was broken on that post. It was in the queue but unpublished during the transition and that seems to have made a difference. Wiped it and reposted and it seems to be handling comments normally now.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
This is something I’ve been wanting to know…how do you embed a picture in a post? Can you upload it and attach it to the comment or does the image have to be online somewhere in order to get it to appear?
"Our task today is to tell people — who no longer know what sin is...no longer see themselves as sinners, and no longer have room for these categories — that Christ died for sins of which they do not think they’re guilty." - David Wells
[Jay]This is something I’ve been wanting to know…how do you embed a picture in a post? Can you upload it and attach it to the comment or does the image have to be online somewhere in order to get it to appear?
Use some offline hosting service like cubeupload . Then embed in the link using the HTML img tag
like this?
"Our task today is to tell people — who no longer know what sin is...no longer see themselves as sinners, and no longer have room for these categories — that Christ died for sins of which they do not think they’re guilty." - David Wells
[Jay]like this?
On images (and I learned this the hard way):
- If you just link to someone else’s image on another site …
- You basically are stealing their bandwidth
- And you risk someone changing the image to something you did not intend to display (the image changes .. but the file name stays the same)
Discussion