YaBB, an extremely popular and secure forum software, written entirely in Perl, released a new version on Thursday, Nov. 8, 2007. Exactly two years after YaBB 2.1 was released, YaBB 2.2 has come on full-force.

From the official announcement on the YaBB Support Forums:

YaBB 2.2 – small numbers don’t mean small changes

Below is a list of just some of the things changed for this release. The list will be updated over the next few days. There are so many improvements, it’s a project just to list them all!

Feature Additions:
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Allow members to choose non-administration membergroups in their profile
Private Messages Buddy List
Buddy list integration in view profile and topic displays
Added a:visited CSS style and various other missing or previously hardcoded styles
Carbon and Blind-Carbon Copy address boxes in Private Messages
User Panel – buddy list, private messaging center, profile, etc.
Admin option for who can see the members list
Private Message ignore list
Forward Private Messages

The full list of feature additions, security fixes, bug fixes, etc. is available in the official announcement.

My supervisor at work sent me a link to the following video the other day. It starts off kind of boring, and it’s a bit long, but it does get much better as the video goes on. It’s a great video for graphic designers. Enjoy!

http://www.makemylogobiggercream.com/

Well, it’s halftime of the “biggest regular season game in history”. Unless the Patriots come out of the locker room in the second half as a completely different team, I don’t see things going their way tonight. They have been playing poorly, given up a huge interception and been penalized for over 100 yards in the first half. In the last 30 seconds of the first half, they gave up a huge play, allowing the Colts to score a touchdown and take the lead.

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This is just a quick post to say that I went to a pretty good conference today. I am rarely able to find conferences that are worthwhile for me, but today I happened upon one.

Generally, being that I am a Web developer, I find that conferences are skewed away from my particular interests. For example, I was looking at a conference that is supposed to occur this month. The conference itself is a 5-day event in Nashville with over 100 different sessions.

Unfortunately, however, all but one session is skewed toward either IT professionals or faculty. Only one single session is geared toward Web developers. It’s hardly worth the extravagant cost of admission to go to a conference like that.

As I said, I am a Web developer. I am not an IT professional, nor am I really a marketing professional. Unfortunately, though, 99% of the “Web conferences” I have looked at are geared toward one of those types of people. Very few are geared towards those of us working on developing the Web sites.

Today, though, I was able to network with some good individuals and was able to participate in a roundtable discussion about dealing with Web 2.0 interfaces like MySpace, Facebook and SecondLife.

Happy Halloween everybody!

This is just a really quick post to wish everybody that celebrates this holiday a happy one. I hope you all got lots of candy and carved some great pumpkins.

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Did you miss me? Sorry I didn’t get a blog post put out last night. I was without my computer for the whole day, due to the fact that I am working on fixing my mother-in-law’s computer. She basically inherited her son’s old Pavilion desktop, and it is chock full of all sorts of performance-degrading software.

Of course, before I wipe the whole thing, she wanted me to back up all of his old stuff, in case he ever needs it. I had no idea what I was getting into when I agreed to work on it.

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Yesterday I had the pleasure of trying to figure out how to rip the audio soundtrack off of a DVD. To say the least, it was an extremely painful process. The end lesson for me was that there is no easy way to rip the soundtrack from a DVD.

I’m certain that there are tools out there to make this easier, but with the short amount of time I had to complete the project, I wasn’t able to find one.

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In my previous entry, I tried to introduce you to binary numbers and all of their uses. Obviously a single blog entry is not nearly enough to fully explain binary, but I at least tried to summarize the information to the best of my ability.

In this entry, I plan to do the same for bitwise operators. I want to explain briefly what they are, what they do, and why they might be useful to Web developers.

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I am currently working on taking a few courses to get certified in various programming languages. At the moment, I am enrolled in a Zend PHP certification course, and have learned quite a bit even though I’m only halfway through the course.

The main concept I’ve learned is that, although I knew quite a bit about the standard PHP functions, and although I know a good bit about programming specifically for the Web, I know very little about traditional programming. Having never learned C, BASIC, etc., I have no base of information that a lot of other, more experienced programmers have.

I plan to explain how useful binary numbers can be in programming, and how often they are overlooked by people programming for the Web. To put it simply, most of us Web programmers (and I am basing this off of both opinion, and a very small sample of the programming population—the rest of the people in my class), simply have never needed to use binary numbers because we’ve never programmed in assembly languages. They can be extremely helpful, though, and incredibly efficient.

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Okay, so Marble Madness was a really cool game back in the day. I am willing to admit that. However, using that same concept as the navigation for your Web site is a really poor choice.

Janet Jackson’s Web development team obviously disagrees, however, as that’s exactly what they’ve done with her site. I happened upon her official Web site a few weeks ago (please don’t ask me to explain why I was there, I’m really not certain) and found it to be the most horrendous site I have ever encountered.

Navigating Janet’s Web site is similar to playing a puzzle game like Marble Madness. You apparently have to move your mouse at just the right speed and place the pointer in just the right place in order to get anywhere on the site. It’s a skill I have not mastered, although I did take the time to try simply to see if I could figure it out. I didn’t.

If you visit the site and click on one of the initial links, good luck getting back to the main navigation.

I submitted the site to WebPagesThatSuck.com a few weeks ago, but I don’t know if it was ever published there or not. Regardless, I just had to share my experience with the public. Enjoy!