ChipCrunch.com

The first post on this site occurred way back when in June of 2007. Ever since then this site has been running on the old but trusty Joomla 1.0 platform. Overall it served us well, but as time moved on we found it ever harder to find module and extensions which were needed to keep the site fresh. Not to mention some of the components we utilized were no longer being supported and in some cases even became security risks. Thus, over the last month the decision was made to move this site to the Joomla 1.5 platform while minimizing any disruption to our readers. Moving all the content while preserving the feel and structure of the original site, including the exact same links structure, took some hard work, but with the help of the Joomla community as well as several excellent extensions things went pretty well - most of the time.

Email spam, comment spam, bot automated user registrations, you name it – are a pest. So far we’ve been pretty lucky with relatively few of these pests taking note of this blog, but as of late there has been a substantial uptick. With ChipCrunch gaining popularity and ever more link-backs from other sites and blogs, this was to be expected. As such we spent this last weekend integrating Captcha protection for new user registration and lost password retrieval. For now we left the contact form unprotected, just in case you need to notify us that there is a problem with the Captcha protection. Big thanks go out to Walter Cederic who wrote the Captcha plugin that we then modified a little to work better with this site.

We also took some time to filter our existing registered user list and remove those that are known to have been created by automated bots. We’re pretty sure we did not remove any real users, but if so please accept our apologies – the process was somewhat manual and most likely not perfect. Since we were already working on the site, we also fixed a couple of small rendering bugs that a few users have reported over time. Hopefully that will lead to a better overall experience for all of you. As always, we are open to any feedback or criticism so please don’t hesitate in contacting us.

There have been relatively few posts to ChipCrunch.com over the last few weeks, but do not worry, a lot of work has been happening on the backend. First, the site was moved to a new server in order to enable php5 support. And while conceptually this ought to be a rather simple process, in reality nothing is every this simple. Several parts of the site experienced minor issues after the move that needed some time to be worked out. While working on them, we also fixed a few bugs related to article commenting, cross-browser image alignment, and the mobile version of this site. We also upgraded most of the third party components that we utilize to their most recent versions, which of course took some work as well. Finally, we added social-bookmarking for each of our posts so that you can easily bookmark and share them utilizing whichever service you prefer. Hopefully, you will find this new functionality useful. Should you encounter any issues with it or with any of the other upgrades, please let us know immediately so that we can address them. Anyhow, once all the backend work was mostly done, it was high time for a vacation. A real vacation is a vacation sans laptop, which explains the lack of updates recently, but now that I’m back updates will start appearing at the regular pace.

Waiting for a plane or train is never fun; as a matter of fact waiting for just about anything is usually not a very enjoyable experience. As such, we’ve been working on a version of this site for mobile devices, which can now be found at mobile.chipcrunch.com. Additionally, it can be accessed through the Mobile link in the main navigation panel at the top of this site. We’ve worked very hard to make the mobile version XHTML Mobile 1.0 compatible just as we spent significant effort in making the main site XHTML 1.0 transitional compliant. We hope that you will enjoy this new service, just in case you are stuck who knows where and don’t have your laptop handy. Most importantly, if you encounter any problems or issues, or if you have any suggestions about how to improve this site to make it more valuable to you, please be sure to let us know. Big thanks go out to Denis Ryabov and his site, which provided the initial code which we modified to enable us to provide the mobile version. Enjoy!