I’ve decided on my major personal web projects for this summer. For a long time, mzonline.com has been in need of some serious work. It’s got far too much verbage, not enough pizazz. I need to take the axe to parts of it…and keep the good stuff while making it a little more eye-candyish. So that’s the first project (probably an ongoing one…since I really need to come up with a new design for it).

The second is the Monty Python site. This will probably be the first completed project…and will take part in several phases.

The first phase will be to completely move it over to the Wiki side (much like I did with this site).

The second is to make it look better. It’s kinda plain, and also needs pizazz. This will include a special TWiki skin made for it (like I did for this site, although presumably different in many ways).

The third phase is to ‘secure’ the Monty Python images I use throughout the Holy Grail Script. This may coincide with the the first phase, depending upon the work. For instance, the main problem I’m having right now deals with random bulletin board (forum) users from around the Internet deciding to link to these images (which get many hits per day — sometimes in the thousands). I’ve won a particular battle with an online RPG-type game, but am slowly forced to ‘remove’ images as they get abused from other sources. This makes me unhappy.

The idea is this: I need to find some crafty way to only allow visitors viewing the (authenticated — e.g. only I allow — like referrals from mzonline.com) pages with these images to download them. The ideal way (and probably the way I’ll do it…ultimately) is probably to script something up (with Perl/CGI or PHP — both of which I’d have to ‘learn’). This would be a script which checks the http referral and approves/denies appropriately. The major plus to this is that it’s completely server-side (requires no interaction with user or need to store something on the user’s machine). The major minus is that I’d have to probably write this myself…which would take time. However, I’m already using something similar to this!

My CommentsQuestions and EMailMatt pages make use of a form handling mechanism which does this exact check (it’s for anti-fraud use — so people I don’t know about can’t use my form handling program to do uncool things). I should be able to modify this in some way…given some other examples and such.

WOOHOO! After some brief browsing at Matt’s Script Archive, I’ve found exactly what I’m looking for, minus the http referral stuff. So, this seems feasible. We shall see…

The last web-related project I have on tap is to redo all the other ones…or make appropriate adjustments. Until then…

This post was upgraded to the MZ Online Blog on 8/20/07