Mattfast1 - the fast one

Welcome to the fast one

What is this? This site is the home of mattfast1 - the fast one. If you know me, you'll understand. Or maybe you won't. And if you don't know me? Then you will be confused and irritated. Heck, you may even become confused and irritated if you know me. So you should just stop trying to understand. It won't get any easier.

Double. You. Tee. Eff. srsly? [ 11 September 2009 ]

Oh yeah, it's true.

Version 1.0.0 is finally coming to a screen near you. This revision, quite a long time in the making (4 years, by the way!) features PHP coding on the backend, making things a little less failtastic when I need to change one little thing on a sidebar or header or some other tiny thing. We are approaching the 350th revision as well with this update, so I suppose this probably should have been done a while ago...

This version will probably be the last one in which content changes create a revision change. Let's face it, many things have passed since the time I started updating. Back in the day (4-6 years ago), the only way for me to update was by exporting the site to a flash drive at night and publish it via FTP at school. Now that the repository is on teh tubez, and I have a broadband connection at home, I can push changes very easily, making revision number changes pointless for content pushes. Therefore, the only time revision numbers will change will be when I make a layout or other presentational change.

What's next? A review of all content, cutting where it needs to be cut, modifying where needed, and adding more detail as needed. After that I'll probably work on expanding the selection of themes, as well as creating new and frankly more interesting effects. However, most of the work for now will probably center on the family website, since that code hasn't been changed over to PHP.

What's all this crap? [ 3 November 2008 ]

And you thought this website was actually validated code.

That may have been true at one point. However, since that time the underlying HTML, CSS, JS, and all the other random web technologies I'll played with have left their mark in the code. Some of it is nothing the browser could ever see again; it's published in the SVN archive, hopefully never to be looked upon again. However, that doesn't change the fact that I rebuilt this site from the ground up. Its original version barely passed HTML 4.0 specs and it had a ton of proprietary tags.

All of that has now changed. Pages that have been verified have both of the W3C's badges displayed at the bottom of them, next to the Trillian status indicator. So far, the only page to actually sport this change is this index.php. Yes, it took a fair amount of work. Was it worth it? I think good, clean code is always worth it. Expect to see more of these badges floating around here soon.

In addition to validation of the entire site, I am still working on converting absolutely every page to PHP rather than straight HTML. Also I noticed, most of the additional skins don't have the proper classes for the random quote in the header. Hopefully I'll have that fixed soon here. I still haven't moved anything over to mattvandusen.com - I do still plan to do that. Of course, we are entering the busy holiday season in the retail world, meaning more and more of my time will be eaten by work - which is a good thing, since then I'll have money to pay bills and such.

Hopefully I don't wait another half year to update this again. I hope I'll be able to post on the 3rd year anniversary since this site got imported to SVN, which is on Jan. 16. I also plan on putting something up about the election, today or tomorrow.

250th Commit [ 2 May 2008 ]

Well, just a day after I have implemented my newest security measures, this website is celebrating the 250th commit to the SVN repository since the site was imported (which occured 2006-01-16 17:43:03 -0700 (Mon, 16 Jan 2006) according to the SVN log). Now, I know that seems like quite some time just to hit 250 commits, especially considering some projects using SVN have tens of thousands of commits. However, please keep in mind that I'm only one man, and I do have a life, so it does take time.

Those who are paying attention might remember that I made the 200th revision on 2007-05-11 11:46:15 -0600 (Fri, 11 May 2007), almost a year ago. Again, PLEASE remember I'm the only developer. It takes time. That also means occasionally I leave it alone for a while, then pick it up later.

New Security Measures [ 1 May 2008 ]

I have implemented some new security measures on my group of websites, especially the portions that someone may be able to break (in other words, run something other than straight HTML). These new security measures are designed to keep out troublemaking countries that have recently been sending hundreds upon hundreds of bad requests to my websites. Of course these efforts have been thwarted thus far by Apache and PHP, but just to be safe, computers in the following countries will be disallowed from accessing anything on mattfast1.com or mattvandusen.com, and are also blocked from several sections of vandusens.us.

• China
• Korea
• Vietnam

Of course, I will be monitoring the logs. If need be, I can ban other clients based on a variety of factors, such as country, IP block, individual IP address, and user-agent. So far this is all I'm blocking, with exceptions of some text-based entries for domains that have been blocked for ages, and hopefully have given up. Doesn't mean their entries will be removed from the filter, either.

On a side note, it's been brought to my attention that all *.co.kr domains have been blocked for some time. Of course now the ban of the Koreans is complete, since they are now blocked by alternate methods. You can see my blog entry for more details.

New Project [ 20 April 2008 ]

My new project for this site is a little reorganization. I'm going to separate some things a bit. The bulk of what's hosted at mattfast1.com, including the blog and this particular site, will be moving to the mattvandusen.com domain.

What does that mean for you? Probably not much, since I will be creating redirects and so forth so everything can be found. However, if you have any links or bookmarks to this website, please be prepared to change them. I will try to post here when I have a timeframe for moving everything. It'll take a while before I'm ready, since I have to ensure all the links won't break.

The blog should be easy to move, I may even do that today. All I need to do is configure Wordpress to the new domain, move the files, change my automatic updates to Wordpress, setup the new domain, and turn the old one into a redirect domain. This site may be a little more difficult, since it's been hard-coded to the mattfast1.com domain for YEARS. I've been trying to fix that for some time (that's part of the reason I changed the site to PHP), but it's still daunting - I have some pages I haven't even LOOKED at in 2 years, let alone converted to PHP.

DOFUS Patch Archive [ 29 June 2007 ]

I am putting together an archive of the past DOFUS patches, so that hopefully some poor soul doesn't have to re-download the entire full version just because they're missing one patch in the series. Like I am right now.

If you have patches to contribute, let me know. I have all the patches back to 1.17.0 to 1.17.1. I am missing 1.16.X to 1.17.0, but I have 1.16.X to 1.16.4. If you have any others, please let me know. I cannot receive them via email, but I could possibly provide you with an FTP dump.

200th Revision [11 May 2007 ]

That's right, we have finally commited our 200th revision since we started using the Subversion revision control system.

See you in another 200 revisions.

We're Green! [ 26 Apr 2007 ]

DreamHost, the company I have been hosting this site with since June 10, 2005, announced recently that they have taken steps to become a carbon-neutral company. What does that mean? Well, if you read their pages on the subject, it explains quite a bit about what that ACTUALLY means. If you're too lazy to read those pages, you can just be content that our hosting is taking steps to reduce their footprint on this planet.

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