HISTORY OF THE SITE 22/01/2000 Made NATW Y2K compliant :-). Also leaned up bad links, removed banners and Amiga RC5 Team Project links. 20/09/1997 In my humble opinion, the development of the NATW website has achieved a completion point. This does not mean that I think it is finished or that it has all the possible features, but it means that I can call the current NATW website "version 1.0". I will take a rest for a while and think about the next direction the development of NATW will take. I need to do some research about several features that are already planned to be implemented. I ordered the book "TCP/IP Illustrated Part 1" to be able to code a standalone NATW client that will remove the need of a browser. It will speedup consultation of NATW and offline usage will be possible too. I don't know when this will be finished or when a beta version will be available. So for a while, there won't be many visible NATW changes. Thanks for your support and patience. 17/09/1997 Added several links to the Amiga RC5 Team Project. 13/09/1997 Added a search parameters for the 'Proposed name' field. 10/09/1997 Finished a first version of the search script. Some planned features have been removed and will be implemented shortly. 08/09/1997 Made a very rough version of a search script without any layout or form interface. This should be the base for the main search script. Configured GlimseIndex and wrote the wrapper scripts to launch GlimpseIndex everytime new idea have been added. Recompiled and adapted Glimpse to be able to install it without a shell account. 05/09/1997 Been looking all day and night for a searchengine that I could compile and use offline on Amiga. The only ones I could use were not powerfull enough, so I decided to work on the search engine at work on the Linux PC. Decided to use Glimpse after all. 03/09/1997 Changed the 400x40 banner to a small gifanim in the hope that the clickthrough rate in the AWN Banner Exchange program will get better. 02/09/1997 Added a feature to WWWStat v2.0 that allows filtering of the output without intervening into the statistics results. Added a specific check in the maintainer script to see if a radiobutton has been pressed. When it's not, the script now returns a sensible warning instead of the standard error message. 01/09/1997 Added several new features to WWWStat v2.0. The new features provide lots of options about the final HTLM output and make it almost completely configurable. Created the statistics page and put a link to it on the other pages of the 'What's this' section. 31/08/1997 Changed the developer overview. It nows displays page tabs for each category. I did this 'cause when all the categories are on one page, the page gets too long. Drawed the images for the developer overview page tabs. Updated to 'how to use' page to reflect the changes that have been made in the last weeks. Configured, adapted and customised WWWStat for the site statistics. 30/08/1997 Created the pages and the scripts to edit the development history of a reserved idea. Adapted the script for reading ideas. It now displays the development history of a reserved idea. 28/08/1997 Made some changes to the Reserved Ideas Maintainer. Added an 'Are you sure' page when a developer wants to drop an idea. 27/08/1997 Created a script that parses all the HTML files that include banners of the AWN Banner Exchange Program. The URL to the banner image gets a unique extension on every page. This should ensure that each page will load a different banner which will result into more NATW credits. Wrote and layouted the text about the lack of support that NATW gets from newsorganisations. Put a banner of the AWD on each and every page since they demand this before they want to provide any links to NATW on their site. Read more here 26/08/1997 Changed the dropping of reserved ideas. It now removes the entry for the reserved idea from the recent list and adds a new entry that shows on which date the development was dropped. Corrected a bug in the script that shows the recent reserved ideas. The list was sorted by the posting date of the idea, not by the reservation date. 25/08/1997 Made the ideatree 'remember' on which line in the tree you pressed. The display automatically jumps to this line. On some Amiga browsers, this doesn't work. Hopefully they'll catch up to the features of IBrowse 1.12. Designed a new format for storing recent comments. The old way of storing them could provoke problems in very rare cases. Created a script to convert the recent comments file to the new format. Adapted the scripts that work with the recent files to the new format. 24/08/1997 Added a link to "AmigaDOS Online Reference Manual". 22/08/1997 Wrote a second press-release to promote some new features of NATW. Collected emails for a PR-database. Sent them the new press-release. 21/08/1997 I haven't done much on NATW lately, but you all know this period of the year. Holidays, sun, having drinks on terrasses, etc etc .... With that I also got my first 'real' webdesigning job which took up quite some time. However, as of now I'll starting working regularly on NATW again. Thanks for the patience. Designed a new format for storing recent ideas and reservations. The old way of storing them could provoke problems in very rare cases. Created a script to convert the recent files to the new format. Adapted the scripts that work with the recent files to the new format. 05/08/1997 Corrected the bugs in the ideasmailing script. This should work now. Hopefully. 25/07/1997 Created a page that lets you vote for No Amiga To Waste. Submitted No Amiga To Waste to a whole bunch of search engines. 15/07/1997 Finished the pages and the scripts that allow developers to drop the reservation of ideas. 14/07/1997 Designed the pages and the scripts that allow developers to drop the reservation of ideas. Cleaned up some more scripts and made some more function libraries. 11/07/1997 Cleaned up even more scripts and made some new common function libraries. The blue background header of the ideas reading script didn't display on Netscape as I planned it. Adapted the concerning pages and scripts to display the header correctly. 10/07/1997 Cleaned up lots of scripts and made some common function libraries. 09/07/1997 Create the scripts and pages that handle the cancelling of reservations in the wanted section . Designed the ideas maintainer in the people section. 08/07/1997 Changed every developer login form to a new layout. 07/07/1997 Created the scripts and pages that handle the deletion of requests in the 'developers wanted' section. Updated to 'how to use' page to reflect the changes that have been made in the last weeks. Finished installing Linux/XFree/Apache/Netscape/Scriptum/Afterstep, so I'll soon be able to correct the bugs in the mailing script. 05/07/1997 Created the scripts and pages that handle the posting of requests in the 'developers wanted' section. Designed the 'developers wanted section". 04/07/1997 Corrected some minor bugs in the idea reading script and the date parsing subroutines. Adapted some leftovers of several databaserestructurings in the developerfiles. They didn't cause any trouble, but might do so in the future. 01/07/1997 Designed and made the first html pages of the 'developers wanted' section. Wrote a script that automatically archives, compresses and emails backups of the data to me. Should provide 100% recoverability when bugged scripts corrupt data. 30/06/1997 Found some more oddities in the script that should automatically mail new idea to developers. Since I have to use a Unix machine to track down the bugs in this script, I disabled the script for the time being. Once I will have finished installed and configuring Linux/XFree on the PC at work and found some time in between the hours to debug the script, I will reupload the fixed version. 27/06/1997 Adapted all forms to make all textfields and text areas use a small font. Using bigger fonts with Netscape caused the table formatting of the forms to become heavily corrupted. 25/06/1997 Quickly ported HTP (html preprocessor) to use it for template creation of the pages. 23/06/1997 Decided to use the second HD of the PC at work to install Linux/X. Once everything will be configured, this will allow me to test and develop the site in a 100% similar environment as the webserver that hosts NATW. 22/06/1997 Designed a new backup format and adapted all scripts to use it. 19/06/1997 Corrected a bug in the new ideas mailing script that corrupted the developerdata. 17/06/1997 Wrote a press release and sent it to every Amiga magazine and newssite. 15/06/1997 Added an option to the developers registration/modification settings which allows developers to select if they want to have new ideas mailed to them. Wrote the script that automatically mails new ideas to the developers who set this option. Added the 'Link to here' page. 13/06/1997 Created the two 'No Amiga To Waste' gifanims. 10/06/1997 Created the 'No Amiga To Waste' 400x40 banner. 08/06/1997 Fixed a bug in the idea reading script, it didn't work correctly when no comments were added. 07/06/1997 Redesigned the vertical navigation on the 'people' pages by making subdivisions. Made some small 2D graphics for the new navigation bar. Added a 'history' and a 'links' page. Created small 2D and 3D graphics for the 'links' page. 05/06/1997 Adapted the HTML code to display correctly on Netscape. Redesigned the vertical navigation bar on the 'ideas' pages by making subdivisions. Made some small 2D graphics for the new navigation bar. Restructured the format of the ideas database. Wrote some scripts to convert the old to the new format and adapted the scripts that create new ideas and comments to support the new format. Added 'posted on' and 'under development since' when reading ideas. Reversed the order of displayed comments when reading ideas (now it's from recent to old). Created logging of new comments, reserved ideas and categorisation groups in recent files. Added links to view the most recent comments, the most recent reserved ideas and the most recently added categorisation groups. Added a link to search for specific ideas, only the HTML page exists for the moment. Soon the searching script will be finished also. 04/06/1997 Decided with Matt Sottile of 'The Amiga Community Wish List' to join forces and to work together on 'No Amiga To Waste'. Wrote a script to enable him to transfer the ideas in his database more easily. Matt Sottile is going to develop new developer specific parts of the site. Corrected a small bug in the tree browsing script that used the '>' character in the HTML code instead of '>'. 02/06/1997 Reprogrammed the ideas tree browsing script so that it would be as fast as possible and I optimised the generated HTLM source so that it would be as small as possible. This was necessary 'cause I noticed that a completely unfolded tree took about 340Kb now it's *only* about 60Kb. Added 'unfold all' and 'fold all' as tree browsing functions. 31/05/1997 Realised I wasn't doing any backups of the data on the server. Created a backup database format. Added automatic backup in every script that changes data in the ideas database. 29/05/1997 Corrected a bug in the tree browsing script that didn't display the last modification date of the categories correctly. Adapted every script that changes data to the new way of getting last modification dates. 27/05/1997 Corrected a bug in the script that adds new comments. The name/email attached to them was the same as the name/email of the person who originally posted the idea. Installed Apache and AmiTCP to be able to test the cgi scripts offline in localhost mode. 25/05/1997 Uploaded the site and activated it. First testing on it was done by several people on #Amiga and a number of small bugs were corrected. Previous months Created the first public version of the site. Made two preliminary designs for the site and rejected them. Designed the ideas database and it's basic functions. Learned the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). Rented a virtual server and registered the domain. Created the basic ideas categorisation groups. Learned programming in Perl 5.