So we have the new and improved ByteClub online.

I’ve posted bits and pieces of the story in various places, to various people, but for the record:

ByteClub went off-line just after I posted on the 30th of October, 2008. Not sure exactly what happened, but John said he’d been playing around with some settings to disable SSH access from outside Swinburne. I don’t know if that’s what caused the outage, and I guess it doesn’t much matter now anyway, but in retrospect I should have contacted John to see if he knew what was going on. Since he’s inside Swinburne, he had no idea there was a problem. But all connections to the outside world had been lost. I had assumed it was ITSs fault, and went ahead with finding a new host (Dreamhost), and re-delegating the domains (bytelcub.net, byteclub.net.au and byteclub.com.au). Re-delegation caused a bit of a problem for John since he was hosting some other stuff on tyler (the old server) which I hadn’t realised. I broke the Swinburne HTML Validator (used by the Internet Technologies subject). Oops. My bad. Sorry.

John has since restored the old tyler server and it’s once again accessible via the tyler.byteclub.net address, so anyone looking for the old content should still be able to find it there.

We now have the new host, and WordPressMU has been installed, and I’m setting up blogs for people who have requested them.

Next, I should track down all the other blog owners and see if they want an account on the new system.

This still leaves me with the job of exporting all the old blogs. I’m planning on seeing if we can upgrade the old blogs (an old version of wordpress) to a newer version that has the export feature, then importing into the new system. Once everything is migrated, we can let the old system quietly die.

Things I’d like to see done after that:

• Forums. I might have another shot at running a forum. If BBpress intergrated with WordPressMU blogs, then it would be my pick since if would effectively be single sign-on .
• Wiki. The old ByteClub wiki has some good content on it, even if it doesn’t get updated much. Lets bring it over and see if we can’t inject some new life into it.

Clinton and I have talked a bit about what to do with ByteClub, and he’s keen to start recruiting again through the ICT Faculty. I think it’s a great idea, but we should probably all have a think about opening registration up a bit. We have alumni now, and I don’t see the point of a Swinburne student only approach. Perhaps we can selectivley recruit some other people as well?

Zooba has also asked for Trac to be installed. This revives an idea Clinton and I had ages ago about having our own project hosting via ByteClub. I see no reason why a ByteClub account shouldn’t come with a blog, forum access, SVN storage space with Trac based project management and access to that projects repository.  I know I already have a couple of projects in mind that I could use the repository for

So let me/us know if there are any particular features you’d like to see in ByteClub.