We decided long ago that there are many other suitable hosts already in existence, and that it is not our intention to compete with those fine folk. We simply don’t have the sheer volume of clients it would take to offer anything similar to the excellent deals currently being offered by Pair.com, rackspace, or nameyourfavoritehost.here.

Dragonfly Networks will help you *find* the right place for your website to be hosted. We will help you develop your web presence until it is polished and snazzy and attention-grabbing. We will work with you and your host to make sure it is secure, accessible, and easy to administer.

But we will *not* host your site. It is not what we do.

Thanks,

- Mark

But don’t think we’ve forgotten about you all. We’ve got plenty of exciting new articles about design, WordPress, OpenBSD, and virtual economies in the works, and it won’t be long before Nick and I start posting a little more regularly.

I’d like to thank our loyal customers for helping us stay afloat through these turbulent economic times. The most rewarding aspect of our work is knowing that we’re building strong relationships with our clients and helping their own businesses grow and succeed, even when times are tough.

- Mark Beihoffer

Look for exciting new developments as the site evolves – thanks for stopping by.

The new design incorporates a variety of enhancements and upgrades, and has a completely new look and feel as well.

To summarize:

• Fluid, three-column layout automatically resizes the content to fit your browser.
• 100% CSS-based layout, no tables involved.
• CSS drop-down menus for the main navigation.
• Context-sensitive sidebars transform themselves depending on where you are on the site.
• The post archive has been completely redesigned, and has a CSS fly-in menu*.
• Attractive tag cloud courtesy of Jenni Undis.
• RSS syndicated photo feeds from Flickr’s “letterpress” pool.
• Letterpress-related links section automagically changes on every page load.
• SEO techniques have been deeply incorporated into the site.
• Related posts show up in contextually appropriate places.
• The typography has been updated to reflect a more contemporary look and feel.

*This may not however be working with Internet Explorer just yet; I don’t have a Windows machine around to test it so it might be a little while.

There is still a lot of work to be done on the site, but it’s coming along nicely and is (mostly) functional as of this morning.

We’re busy building out the e-commerce engine and loading it with products, so that should be online within the next few weeks or so, which will allow Lunalux sales representatives to restock their wholesale items, as well as making the Lunalux product line available to the general public.

It’s a very simple link manager so far, where users can submit links and descriptions, and then the links can be voted up and down by others visiting the site, enabling the links to change position on the chart frequently and ensuring that the front page always has fresh content.

Mine actually doesn’t have a pager built into it yet, so it’s still in it’s infancy, but I’m still having a blast with it and learning quite a bit about DBIx::Class (DBIC), HTML::FormFu, and the Authentication and Authorization plugins for Catalyst.

Although sometimes I’ve struggled with the project when I’ve needed to do even slightly more complex SQL queries (the syntax for doing table joins and ‘order_by’ statements is completely different when you’re using DBIC), I’m getting the hang of it finally and it looks like I might have a working, possibly even public, application by the end of the month.

I’m thinking of using it to power one or more of my domains that are currently sitting idle: I’ll most likely test it out on TCLegal.net first, seeing as that’s the main conceptual piece behind the mini-Reddit, but I’ll also probably be trying to figure out how to integrate it with WordPress, Plagger, or one of my other favorite pet projects, under some other domain names.

Wish me luck!

It should especially be helpful for Jenni, as she’s been wanting to connect to her Mac G5 workstation from home for quite some time. She does a lot of graphic design work, and it’s going to be nice to be able to spend some time at home working on her projects rather than always being stuck at the office.

OpenVPN is a fairly cool project, although I noticed that it’s either their documentation or OpenBSD’s unique way of doing things that made for a few snags getting it set up. Particularly, generating a certificate authority and the client and server keys didn’t go as expected, and I wish now that I had documented the errors I got and how I resolved them so I could post the solution here, but I was swept up in the installation at the time and forgot to take notes. Sorry!

Otherwise, once I got the CA set up and the client keys installed on the client machines, everything went smoothly, so now I’m able to connect with my laptop and ping all the other machines on the remote network as if they were local workstations. Hooray!

The other problem arose when I was trying to remotely manage our LinkSys WRT54G; it apparently doesn’t like to be remotely managed over the web, so I ended up installing TinyProxy on a machine behind the router and proxying my way in through an SSH tunneling session.

If this all sounds a bit complicated just to get remote access working, well, it was, but I think in the long run it will be worth it. I’ve just got a bit more configuration to do at home before everything will be working 100% correctly, so it feels good to see the light at the end of the tunnel (no pun intended) and know that it’s not just the headlight of an oncoming train.