Chances are you already have heard of this since it's all over RandomBase already but in case you didn't: we have started our own free subdomain service, named va.my. The fun thing is, it's easy to remember and it is just like any second level tld, examples are .co.uk and .co.jp. The difference with the other TLD's is: ours is completely free. So, RandomBase > ICANN.

Now go register your free subdomain to prevent whining about someone else taking yours before you could.

I have finished a new project of RandomBase, movStream.com. This cute little search engine can find direct music links, streaming tv shows and movies. I hope to add eBooks and maybe even torrents soon, but am already quite satisfied with the way it works now.

As you might notice, the domain name suggests a more "peekvid"-like approach, but for a number of reasons we didn't continue with this plan. I hope however, to start some new websites on subdomains, like familyguy.movstream.com and add Family Guy streams here. These subsites would focus on the most popular shows only probally, or what'd you expect?

Ever noticed how many websites you try to visit from the frontpage of Digg are down or load very slowly? This isn't coincidence of course: you're one of the thousands and thousands of visitors to that site in an extremely short amount of time.

The problem about some sites that get on Digg frontpage is that they're on shared hosting, and once their company figures they're making the server unstable: suspend it.

RandomBase once got (for whatever reason, but it sure helped) somewhere high on Stumbleupon and the result can still be seen on our homepage, the second line under statistics:

Most users ever online was 424 on 03/16/08.

That's a lot more than our 30 - 50 average we have throughout a normal evening. Luckily we didn't get suspended (that was only later after RandomBase started growing like mad) by our shared hosting provider but I received a very threatening mail that night... If we made it for some reason on Digg homepage on 3 march, then RandomBase wouldn't exist anymore, at that time we couldn't afford a dedicated server like we have one now, and losers as we are, wouldn't have tried continuing this project.

RandomBase.com just received a small upgrade to the comment system for news messages, you can also include your website address now, free backlink!

The old music search page was kind of annoying, after entering a search term the next job was to actually find a working link. Our new page uses a huge database of known links that work. Because of the size of the new database, querying it can take a few seconds, but once queried it'll deliver you a nice set of working links!

The programming stage has finished only a few minutes ago, r0bin is now working on the design. Expect a release in a few hours!

edit: released!

For the people who don't read the mainpage, we have a new crewmember: r0bin. He is currently delivering excellent design work, and fits perfectly into the team. If you are interested in reading/seeing some of his work, why not visit his blog?

Some features have been added to the RandomBase homepage, such as the hover effect for the 'projects' buttons. I'm also considering permanently adding a live users online feature, that is automaticly updated, which gives a nice dynamic feel. To test this out, just go to randombase.com, press F5 or "refresh" in your browser to make sure the cached Javascript files are also updated. Now enter this in your URL window:

javascript:liveUsersOnline()

And some text will be added next to the menu, just a fun toy. The current refresh rate is five seconds. An other change is the changed urls for some links, like the affiliate buttons. It is no longer just the plain url but:

track.php?continue=<url>

Don't worry - we're not sending personal data; it's just a method for us to track the amount of clicks sent to a link, to get an idea about the popularity. And a last not-so-major-change is the news archive url, no longer ?histpage=1337 but /history/page/1337, just for SEO purposes. I'd probally need to change the track url too for SEO purposes then.

Remember my post about stopping comment spammers with Javascript? It has proven to be a very reliable method as long as you make sure to change the data that is generated with Javascript from site to site. A little example of only today from "spam that didn't quite make it":

[root@rbox /]# cat /var/log/randombase.com.log|grep "POST /news"
87.255.64.233 - - [19/Apr/2008:01:18:31 -0500] "POST /news/33 HTTP/1.1" 200 8922 "-" "-"
87.255.64.233 - - [19/Apr/2008:01:18:35 -0500] "POST /news/33 HTTP/1.1" 200 8922 "-" "-"
83.247.31.93 - - [19/Apr/2008:02:12:29 -0500] "POST /news/33 HTTP/1.0" 200 8811 "-" "-"
83.247.31.93 - - [19/Apr/2008:02:12:31 -0500] "POST /news/33 HTTP/1.0" 200 8811 "-" "-"
85.232.230.225 - - [19/Apr/2008:03:10:46 -0500] "POST /news/33 HTTP/1.1" 200 8924 "-" "-"
85.232.230.225 - - [19/Apr/2008:03:10:48 -0500] "POST /news/33 HTTP/1.1" 200 8924 "-" "-"

In this case it is clear they tried to spam us, no useragent nor referer set.

Now we have our own server, time to put some good usage to it too: there is now an IRC server configured on randombase, for a number of reasons. We invite everyone to open a channel or join #randombase or #rootshell for more security orientated conversations.

randombase.com
Ports: 6667, 6697 (SSH)

Or a direct link for clients that support it. All credit for installing/configuring goes to Preddy.

I have finally fixed PerlForums, seems like RandomBase in general has been fixed now! Please report any bugs you see so we can fix them.