Today, I finally released the source code for my Userbar Generator. It is written in Visual Basic 2005 and hence requires either Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Basic 2005 Express (the latter being free).

It may be found at http://dev.dansoftaustralia.net/projects/userbargen/. If you make any significant changes, please feel free to contribute. :)

Recently, several users have reported spam messages coming from a dansoftaustralia.net address. Note that I never send any spam messages, and the From address is fake (spammers often use spoofed email addresses in the "From" field). If you are getting spam messages, the best thing to do is to just delete them.

Thanks for understanding!

A beta of SMFBlog is now available! SMFBlog is an extremely simple blog system, based off SMF (it's a mod to SMF). Certain boards can be marked as "Blog Boards", and topics in these boards are considered blog posts. Please try it out (see http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=793) and tell me what you think so far!

Note that this is still in beta, so a few small bugs are expected...

This site now has a new design. The old design was getting rather old, and had really bad coding. This new one is XHTML 1.0 valid, and styled completely via CSS. Eventually, I'll fix up all parts of this site, but for now, most pages have not changed. There may be minor problems around the site... If you find a problem, please email me :)

I'd like to thank StyleShout for the excellent design!

I'm proud to announce that the DanSoft Australia development site is now up (after a small beta period), at http://dev.dansoftaustralia.net/! The site is basically a SourceForge.net-like system, giving each user a powerful yet easy-to-use hosting platform for all their project's data. It is mainly aimed at collaboration between users (a group of users could all work on the one item, for instance), although any developer can benefit from it.

Anyone may sign up, and registering your project gives you access to these main features:

• Subversion (SVN) access
  Easily manage your project's source code
• File Release System
  An easy-to-use system to store all your project's releases. Each project may have more than one "package", and each package may have any number of files.
• News Announcements
  Any news relating to your project may be posted to its homepage. Selected news articles will appear on the dev.dansoftaustralia.net and www.dansoftaustralia.net homepages.
• Website hosting (including PHP)
  Each project gets its own homepage at [project name].dev.dansoftaustralia.net. For security reasons, you'll need to contact me if you want access to the website hosting. The websites are created after you register, but I have to give you the server access details.
• Task management (TODO list)
  Keep track of what you need to do
• Issue/Bug Tracking
  Easily track bugs in your project
• Documentation Management
  A simple documentation management system, to upload any relevant documentation
• Mailing lists (may not be operational at the moment)

Probably the most useful feature is Subversion - It's a very easy-to-use SCM (Source Code Management) system, and allows multiple developers to work on the same code simultaneously (although it's also useful for single developers - I use it for the SMFShop code). Speaking of this, note that for anyone using the SVN version of SMFShop, it has moved to http://dev.dansoftaustralia.net/svn/smfshop/trunk/. Also, the development snapshots and statistics have moved to http://smfshop.dev.dansoftaustralia.net/. I hope you enjoy it!

Hello everyone,

This is a news I'm posting at all my projects just so everyone is up-to-speed on the latest developments.

1. All projects are going to be delayed by 2 months. I can only say that this is because of paying/semi-paying customer needs so all Free stuff has to wait. Sorry

2. To help centralize the bug-tracking and documentation for all of my projects I will be hosting on my personal site a Wiki and a bug tracker. That way I don't have to go to so many different sites to get bug tracking information and you don't have to go to so many different sites for documentation (once it is written and available). You will find these areas on my website from the Main Menu or at these URLs http://jrsofty1.stinkbugonline.com/Wikka and http://jrsofty1.stinkbugonline.com/bugs

This is being broadcast on all project sites.

Sc2 has found a major bug and I've got the fix. I'll be repackaging the PIR Shop Item mod shortly to fix the problem.

Due to the loss of this site for a time I switched the main repository for source code to SourceForge here http://sourceforge.net/projects/smfaibot. I will still continue to use this site as a package deployment platform however, the main site will be located at SourceForge.

At this point 0.1.1-Alpha has been released and there have been a couple of bug reports. These items should be fixed in the 0.1.1-Beta 1 release that is due at the end of August or beginning of September.

Keep your eyes posted for the news release.

I'm also working on a bit of a side project that will help with the development of SMF Packages. The primary thing is that it finds the text variables and lines them up so that you can create your language file much easier than searching through your code for each and everyone (and usually missing one or two). No idea when this will be released. It is also registered at SourceForge but there is nothing to download yet.

Due to a hard drive failure, this site was down for about one week. The site is now back up, and all data has been recovered.

Wow I started getting a lot of bug reports ;) that's alright though. Currently the 0.1 alpha release has a corrupted SMFBot_0_1_0_install.xml file. I will release a 0.1.1 alpha version in the next couple of days. Once these are fixed then I'll focus on the Beta 1 build.

Thanks for you testers to keep me alert to my mistakes ;)

SMF Bot 0.1-Alpha has been released to the testers. This is a preview release and will hopefully generate some interest in the project as well as some ideas on how to make it better.

In the next couple of weeks I'll be working on the first beta that will have a larger release.

I have uploaded a working demo of the SMFBot here:

http://jrsofty.stinkbugonline.com

This is just a test of the actual posting functions. If you are interested to see the back end please drop me a PM at the site.

Have released a new Item
Makes users have to pay money to change their Forum Avatar
More info at
http://www.daniel15.com/forum/index.php/topic,940.msg5329.html#msg5329

Hello everyone,

I'm back from vacation. However, I'm not able to do much work on the project at this time. This is due to some family issues that need to be dealt with first.

Therefore I need to back up the Alpha Test release for at least another month. I'll make a post here once the release is ready.

This of course means more time for people to sign up to become testers.

Jason

On my personal little test bed I've gotten the bot to reply to my posts :yay:

I have one last hurdle to overcome before I can even think of releasing the Alpha Preview.

I'm having some problems that after the bot posts she doesn't return to the last posted message. As a matter of fact she doesn't return to anything. She gives us a white screen of death :yikes:

So now I've got to figure out WHY and fix it. It doesn't seem to be anything in the way I've tapped into the SMF forum. It seems more like some really odd error that will cause me to have multiple headaches here soon.

Any way I've also need to let people know that I'm going on vacation starting on the 30th of April. During that time I will not be coding (my wife would kill me if I brought my laptop with me on the trip). So don't expect much from me until the middle of May. If all goes well after I return and I find and squash this stupid white screen bug then we'll be on date for the Alpha Preview for the first testers.

Still haven't signed up? You need to do so if you want to be one of the first to get the SMF Bot to try out! Sign ups are open until I announce the solid date for the Alpha Preview release.