A community site for contemporary interior designers and its related sectors

June 22, 2008

The idea of sharing knowledge with a wider community had been with me since a long time. Although sharing knowledge and putting it in a digestible format takes time and energy, the rewards of doing so are well worth the effort. Not only does one receive an immediate peer viewing which in itself is an enriching process, it equally generates a cross fertilization which stimulates new ideas and fosters positive discussions often leading to inspiring collaborations between a diversity of interesting individuals. Although financial compensation is not a core motivation factor in this kind of community sharing, the network, friends and knowledge sources one acquires along the way will in the end pay off far greater than any investment in advertising. And the more one shares and contributes, the profounder and wider that network, those friends and the knowledge base will become.

It wasn’t until recent years though the infrastructure to launch such community sharing became available at a reasonable cost. Having followed with keen interest the development of the open source community in the IT world and having experienced the knowledge-power such community can generate I felt confident a similar philosophy and framework was the right way forward to create a community platform for interior designers and their related sectors.

So in October 2007 the first codes of software for ID-Sphere were loaded onto the server. In order to make this work a stable system with adequate security and filtering capabilities was necessary. Users should be able to contribute, get increased access if they desire so, but at the same time the fundamental framework should be protected of misuse, spamming, email theft, etc, and this and much more should be possible without a small army of programmers to maintain it all. The answers finally came from the open source community: Powerful blogging software, loaded on servers running Apache, MySQL, supporting PHP and Perl. All open source software.

WordPress became the blogging software of choice mainly because of its wide community support, its adaptability and the many plug-ins that have been written for it.

I have been fortunate enough to have followed IT developments since childhood since the late seventies and knew pretty well what was available. Programming ID-Sphere and adapting it to what I thought it needed took me awhile though. Putting in some basic content to set the example of what sharing knowledge means took me even longer.

Now some 9 months on for the first time I am able to look at something of which I think may actually make a stand. My to-do list however is still very long. I decided to keep this thread as my history log and post replies with current developments.

26 August 2008

Took the leap anyway, Wordpress 2.61 it is. Some of the new features were just a must have. The administrative control is much greater. It has a roll back feature which lets you easily reinstate a previous version of a post or page. As ID-Sphere will be open source to the community maybe this is not an overrated luxury. It will make my live easier when someone gets in trouble with a post or page adjustment.

October 9, 2008

Just noticed the form plug-in is incompatible with the forum plug-in and rearranges the forum layout. The header and breadcrumbs are taking too much space. Bit by bit I will be reprogramming the submission forms with another plug-in (I have 5 of those). I’ll tackle one at the time. Hopefully by the end of the month I will be finished and the forum will have an optimum layout.

The article ‘What design program should I use?’ was missing some <p> tags and wasn’t loading properly. This is fixed now.

November 6, 2008

In the forum the images for users without an avatar were displayed as a red X for a failing image upload. This has now been rectified.

Due to users request the policy for separate newsletter subscription was changed. As of November 4th registering to ID-Sphere automatically subscribes the user to the newsletter.

The registration menu has been adapted and includes more fields to fill in. It now gives the possibility to use a short login name as the first and last name are required in separate fields. It has an extra password field so the user can choose a password instead of receiving a random generated password. It also includes a disclaimer one needs to agree to. As discussed above there is also a new field to opt out on the newsletter subscription. The email the newly registrant receives includes an activation link. This avoids bogus registrations, which we received quite often lately.

December 16, 2008

An XML sitemap was added to the ID-Sphere directory. This ensures that the mayor search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask, etc) can find all page and are kept up to date on the changes and new publications that happen on the site. In the mean time ID-Sphere has been registered with many other directories and sites so traffic should start to increase slowly.

I have put an health and safety page online in the useful resources with links to organisations and articles concerning health and safety issues of interest to the interior designer.

I have also published an article on health and safety.

February 4th, 2009,

On the 26th the security of ID-Sphere was breached. A hacker gained control over the cpanel and uploaded some malicious scripts to the server. The id-sphere mailserver was used to send mass-mailings. Luckily the hosting company spotted this with in a couple of minutes and shut the entire site down. Policy in such cases is to re-provision the site, basically delete everything and start anew. It took some time to get a site back up and running, to have it filtered for scripts and viruses and put all the necessary privileges back in place so the wordpress structure would correctly talk again to the ID-Sphere database.

It’s been hard work and very time consuming. The last problem (I hope) was solved only today feb. 4. The forum allowed no new posts and gave an error if you tried to post anything new. It must have been very frustrating for anyone trying to write a post only to find an error and losing whatever was written. Truly sorry about this. All is solved now I think.

So for the last week I have been trying to figure out how the security of ID-Sphere was breached. I reinstalled an earlier clean backup only to find out the security was breached again a couple of days later. I think I finally nailed the source of the breach. Something called Sequel Injection by which a Java Script is fed through by entering it in a text box in a form. This was possible due to a security hole in Wordpress 2.6.2 on which ID-Sphere was running. I spent more than half a day to close the security and also upgraded the software to the latest version. Apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused. I truly hope I have fixed it this time. If you would run into any troubles or find some inappropriate security issues please advise me immediately at info@lizzydesign.com

Many thanks,

Lizzy