SharperIron is Back Online

As you can see, we’re back!

Our regular content schedule will resume shortly.

Some things to be aware of

• If you have registered at SI, your old password will no longer work. If we had a valid email address for you, you have probably already received notification of this, but in my tests, the automatic email link won’t work. Regardless, you can launch the reset process here.
• For any problems logging in, please send a message using the site contact form (category: technical problems or account/password)
• A few parts of the site haven’t been completely restyled yet. So we’ll be under construction for another week or two.
• Feel free to post question, missing features, error messages, etc. in this thread.

A word or three about the restyling

Part of the goal this time around was to make the site a bit more phone and pad friendly. On very, very small screens, the menus were hard to use and the side-positioned author panel on articles and comments tended to create the need for lots and lots of scrolling. The new design should be a bit better for little screens.

Generally larger fonts sizes were chosen. Rather than follow the current design trend of using ridiculously giant font sizes (a soon-passing fad, I hope), we’ve gone a notch or two larger. The main appeal of that design choice is mostly selfish: my eyes are just older (and certainly tireder) than they used to be. Maybe larger text also works better on small devices?

Since I don’t own a single smart phone or pad of any sort whatsoever, I rely on you all for feedback (along with using some screen-emulator tools). Feel free to post problems and suggestions for the improving the site functionality and look for the itty bitty-expensive-screen world.

A word of warning: web site visual design has moved very quickly (from my POV) to HTML5 and CSS3. If you’re using an antique web browser, things are probably not going to work right.

Finally, on the styling topic: it more fun than usual this time around!

What about “Drupalgeddon,” being hacked, and all that?

After setting up a new webserver, installing fresh versions of everything, restoring an old backup, and carefully adding the newer content back in, I’m reasonably confident that we’re free of “back doors” and other sorts of hacker evil. There’s no way to be 100% sure, but it looks like nothing happened to our stuff beyond the initial automated attack that created a bogus user role on the site and a single bogus user account in that role. Time will tell. I’m not losing any sleep over it.

The whole process has been really educational. Lots of up-to-elbows in linux, mysql, nginx, and other technical guts. A few more rounds of this and I’ll have about 1/6 of a proper education for somebody doing this sort of thing!

That said, with all the manual database tampering, a few things are likely to be not quite right here and there. There might be a post or two with the wrong user name on it, the wrong date, missing tags, and miscellaneous similar messiness. Again, feel free to post whatever seems amiss here in the thread.

Thanks for your patience during the downtime.