Today I unveil the new WebCards Website design. I hope you like it.

The site should be easier to navigate and the HTML is much more lightweight. The XHTML validates (mostly) to the XHTML Strict specification. Please let me know if you have any problems with the new design or experience any errors. Leave your ffedback over at the forums.

I have added a new example WebCards installation to the WebCards Gallery.

It is an excellent example so please check it out.

I have also added a new forum to the WebCards Forum for you to post your own example of WebCards. I will add all the good ones to the WebCards Gallery.

I thought I would share a few of the new features that I have added to WebCards over the last few weeks. I haven’t posted a development update in a while and I am keen to let people know how development is progressing.

1. New mail sending class

I have implemented PHP Mailer into WebCards. This replaces the old SMTP class that was used. I don’t believe in re-inventing the wheel and so decided to include an excellent, well-maintained mail class for sending mail. Sending email is very much the heart of WebCards, it is important that it works. Using PHP Mailer expands the sending methods to include mail(), SMTP, sendmail, Qmail and potentially even Gmail if you wish.

2. Admin profiles

Each administrator has their own profile which includes standard information such as name and email address and the ability to change their email address. This opens up the possibility for user permissions and also enables the implementation of a password recovery feature.

3. Administrator logs

In addition to the email logs, WebCards now features administrator logs. This tracks all activity such as editing images and templates, logging in, deleting cards and also tracks the cron logs when delayed cards are sent.

Please post on the forums if you have any comments or feature requests. Some requests that have been posted on the forums are already being implemented in the next WebCards release.

We are now offering paid-for installations of WebCards for US$20.

This is a solution for people who are either not confident with installaing WebCards on their own server or who are having trouble.

We are able to modify the WebCards codebase to accommodate just about any server. We can do this because we are the authors of the project. If we cannot sucessfully install WebCards on your server you will, of course, not be charged. We may also offer free installation in the future in return for allowing us to debug the program on your server.

Please see the listing on the SourceForge.net service listing page for complete information.

If you have any questions please feel free to post them on the forums.

Has WebCards been particularly useful to you? Have you seen an increase in visitors since you installed WebCards? Why not give something back to WebCards?

Why not make a donation to help support the website running costs? I have recently revamped the donation page to make it easier to show your support for WebCards. Every penny you can donate counts.

Do you have a WebCards installation you are particularly proud of? Send the link and I will add it to the WebCards Gallery

Just to let everybody know that the site has been moved to a new webhost. I apologise for any database errors you have been receiving over the last couple of days. These were related to moving over the data.

I was getting tired of the constant downtime and the final straw came when I received this email from the old webhost:

Monitored by two third party companies, ChargerTek’s Uptime has hit it’s 200th Day at 100%

Here’s to going the whole nine yards!

Stats can be seen on the ChargerTek Homepage.

An advantage of the new host is the availability of PHP5. I will be posting details of how PHP5 fits into the WebCards plan in the next week or so.

I have installed a version of phpBB for users to post on. The forums hosted on sourceforge were getting spammed like crazy so I decided to move to a more useful forum that is easier to manage.

It is designed for bug reports, feature requests, language support and general help and support.
Users should register to post topics. Guests can post, but their posts must be approved before they become visible.

Please feel free to visit the forums and let me know what you think.

Since the explosion in the world of blogging over the last few years one of the biggest problems has become comment spam. This is when somebody automatically (or perhaps even by hand) adds some lame comment to your blog which is actually promoting their website. A good proportion (at least in my experience) is promoting online prescription drugs. The kind that we all used to get emails about before the days of Gmail.

Many things have been tried such as Google’s support of the <a rel=”nofollow”> tag and the use of a CAPTCHA to prove you are human.

A few months back I installed Akismet. It is a product from WordPress themselves and you require an API key from them to enable it on your blog but it is such an amazing tool. Because it interfaces with the Akismet website it is constantly updated and you don’t need to update spam “definitions” like you would do with a virus checker or other such application.
Any spam it blocks is sent back to the Aksimet database to enable it to learn and update itself to help others. You don’t need to maintain your own “blacklist” of spammers and in my experience it is very, very effective. You can pick out false positives or any missed spam and this gets reported back to Akismet so it can be updated and improved. According to the website “Akismet becomes more effective the more you use it.”

According to Akismet 4,853 comments have been detected as spam on this blog alone. You can also see how Akismet is performing world wide. From their website:

• 1,781,113,909 spams caught so far
• 2,964,756 so far today
• 95% of all comments are spam

So if you are suffering from the problem of blog spam and you use WordPress then give it a try.