The Britboard and Toytown Munich have been merged to create Toytown Germany. Whether or not the new site will be greater than the sum of its parts is something we’ll have to wait to find out.
When the 2 sites were merged we found that Invision, the developers of the forum software that we use, don’t provide any way to merge two separate forum installations, so we had to do it ourselves:
The above image of the mdid.net website as a graph was created by Websites as Graphs.
The Britboard – Discussion Forums for Expats in Spain
EDIT: Looks like Simon didn’t pay his bills – the site has been down for a few weeks now…
This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs (and aggregation sites) are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).
Recently I had some difficulties setting up a password-protected directory on my server, which is hosted at Easily.co.uk.
The response from Easily’s helpdesk was less than encouraging:
Please note that we do not provide such support to help you configure the site.
so I had to make do with the information I could dig up myself on the internet.
After about a week of struggling, and with the help of the good people at this USENET group, I finally managed to get it to work.
I’ve written a quick how-to, which I hope will help anybody else who comes across this problem in the future. Assuming search engines archive this page and people are able to find it, of course…
First of all, don’t try to call your password-protected directory "admin". It seems that Easily have set up some kind of override on authentications for directories with that name. Other names should work OK.
In the directory to be protected, create a text file called .htaccess. This is the file that will control the access to the directory.
The content of the file should be as follows:
where domain is the name of your domain, for example www.mydomain.co.uk, and username is the username you use to connect to your server via FTP.
The most important part of the .htaccess file is the AuthUserFile parameter. This specifies the location of the password file. Note that the directory is within the user area of your server. Putting it here means that it can’t be downloaded and attacked to find out the passwords.
The next step is to create the password file itself. Create a text file called .htpasswd and upload it to the dirname directory in your user area. The content of the file should look something like this:
where each line specifies a username and an encrypted password. You can generate your own username and password combinations here.
And that should work. The only files you need to have in your protected directory are the .htaccess, your index file, and any other content that belongs there. You can even copy the same .htaccess file to other directories on the same server to protect them too.
References:
I’ve created a forum for ex-employees of Sony in Munich.
Sign up here.
The new Britboard forum is now up and running and already has 26 users since opening yesterday morning.
The Toytown Munich site has been updated. It’s now a full city guide, updated (almost) daily with new material, including all the restaurant reviews from the Munich Dining Club and a significant number of bar and club reviews licensed from the Groovy Munich book.
:: mdid :: 
