Site Update

Hey all

As some of you may have noticed we had some down time in the last few days, the jist of this is some script kiddies got fed up trying to hack into site and kept bombarding the site with requests, which our spam prevention stopped. This in turn looked light we were running a permanent server process to the host and they disabled all scripting without prior warning.

Basically we believe the host should have got in contact with us and it would have been a simple matter of blocking requests from the offending user agents, but alias they didnt!

The issues have now been resolved. One other aspect the host objected to was us hosting a chatroom, I will look into a remotely hosted one later, but I'm reluctnat to go with ad based ones.

I have been busy updated various elements on the site this morning.

Media Gallery

New Flash based mini-slideshow auto tag.  You can now insert this cool mini-slideshow into any story using the fslideshow: auto tag.

Embedded Video Support - You can now include remote videos from YouTube, Google Video or any online video source that supports embedding their content into your web site.   You tell Media Gallery the embed tag from these sites and the video, while still hosted on the video service, will be integrated into your albums just like any other local content.  This means the video: auto tag can be used to include these videos into your stories, you can rate the items, search them, etc.

Streaming Flash Video Server Support - If you happen to have a Streaming Flash Video Server at your disposal, you can now include these remotely streamed videos directly into Media Gallery.

Major Overhaul to Media Gallery's Templates - In a effort to make Media Gallery a little easier to skin, all  the template files have been reworked so they are now 100% styled by the mediagallery.css style sheet.

New JUPLOAD Applet - Previous versions of Media Gallery used a Java Upload Applet from www.jupload.biz.  This applet did not work with FireFox 2.0 and the applet project has since gone closed-source.  I have replaced this applet with one available from jupload.sourceforge.net and it seems to work very well with Media Gallery.

Lightbox Slideshow - Media Gallery now has the option to present your image media using a Lightbox slideshow.

I have also updated the CAPTCHA routines they now support OpenID, which is something which may be useful in the future.

I also plan on adding an additional level of security in the next few days!

Regards

Dazzy