The Official Xanjax Blog

My apologies for xanjax.org being down and/or broken over the last couple of days.

I decided to change my web hosting service as it had been getting slower and slower; probably due to overselling services and therefore being overloaded I suspect.

Regular dead time of 10 seconds or more was hardly the way to showcase Xanjax technology, I’m sure you’ll agree!

As misfortune would have it, my yearly subscription was automatically renewed at least a week before expiry; just before I had decided who to host with.

The previous hosting service, Bluehost, would not admit to poor performance, but did agree to a refund. I asked them to refund 9 months of the 12 month subscription, which would have left me nearly 3 months to organise things. Bluehost however, decided to fully refund and immediately cut my service instead, without even verifying if that would be alright. Of course, I was left with 3 websites down and nowhere to go.

It’s pretty obvious I’m not going to recommend Bluehost to anyone but my worst enemy!

Because I’m a cautious type, I have always made sure to host, and register domains, with different companies. This saved my bacon because I was able to point my domains at new my domain name servers just as soon as I had a my new hosting service organised. Luckily, I had nearly completed the move before being cut by Bluehost. My other sites were up within about 20 minutes of re-pointing DNS, but unfortunately xanjax.org took over 24 hours.

Be warned! If you’ve got domains registered with the same company you host with, you could be inviting trouble. Just imagine if your domain name is a ‘free’ domain with a hosting package. You probably would lose it, in similar circumstances, pending the outcome of a legal battle you may not be able to fund. If your domain names are presently with your hosting company, whoever they are, do something about it.

As it turns out I’m much better off now. I found a far superior hosting service to any I’ve used before, using exclusively GPL open source software. They even offered to sponsor xanjax.org – a fantastic result!

Many thanks to Thomas Goirand, CEO of GPLHost, not only for providing far superior hosting service, but also for providing xanjax.org with a valuable sponsorship. Xanjax is now hosted at gplhost.com on a Xen Virtual Private Server. Xen is open-source virtualisation software for running multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single computer. Thomas has written DTC, an open-source domain and hosting control panel, which together with DTC-Xen (which he also wrote) provides the key to domain and hosting services on Xen virtual private servers.

David (chappo)

Naturally there are some issues, especially so early in the release cycle!

If you find more, please add comments with details.

Opera is not supported yet supported as of 20080410 with addition of cancel bubble code.

Konqueror is not supported yet.

Safari in not tested at all yet and may or may not work.

Classes in IE. This one I hadn’t noticed during development. CSS classes don’t work in any version of Internet Explorer. This is actually due to a well known bug in IE with setAttribute. Ugly hack for know is to use object loads for any page needing classes. I hope we can get around this one!

Navigation Bug in IE. This is minor. If you navigate all the way back out of Xanjax, back in and all the way forward out again, then back in again, the last page will be correct but location bar reads entry page rather than the exit page.

Navigation Bug. When entering a new hash location while in Xanjax location bar stays on this hash until navigating out of Xanjax and back in again. Navigation still works. This is caused by browser behaviour and may not be fixable. It’s not that common for people to type into the address bar after having arrived at a site, so this is not considered to be all that serious.

Navigation Bug. Presently, typing a hash while in Xanjax will not work unless the hash is already known, such as in the menu or the content being viewed. This is because a dynamic algorithm is being used to create anchors. I’ll probably revert to static, or better to a combination if people think this matters. Please note that all inward links using either an ordinary *.html path or a #hash path work.

Query Strings.  Presently, query strings are not working in internal pages, but work fine from external inward links. This is due due an oversight in the hash creation algorithm and will be fixed.

This is the place to report and discuss Xanjax bugs, or post snippets of fixup code or improvements you would like officially included.

If you post often, or would like to submit something larger than a code snippet, please consider becoming a Xanjax maintainer. There are a few conditions of course in the interests of quality control and in maintaining the Xanjax philosophy of smaller, simpler, faster code.

If submitting code please submit only original code you have written, or code which is already under a free license compatible with the GPL. If you would like your code included in Xanjax, you will need to make a declaration that your code is original and available under the GPL. This is to ensure Xanjax doesn’t become the target of a patent or other intellectual property dispute.

Code is included into Xanjax only at the discretion of the official development team. If you have something useful, and for some reason it doesn’t get included in Xanjax, nevertheless it may be very useful for Xanjax users, so don’t be disappointed.

If lots of modules get submitted, we’ll add an unofficial modules download area for them.

For general assistance, or just to talk about Xanjax, please use the Xanjax Chat area.