A recent thread on the Story Reviews & Author Feedback board brought up several minor improvements that might be made here on the Archive. The moderators have thought of other possible changes as well.

Unfortunately, our sole program wizard, Talula, has a full-time job and also needs time to eat and sleep (and play with his demanding pussycats). There just isn’t enough time for him to do much more than keep the current programs running smoothly. He managed to write the program necessary to recreate the Fiction Archive, but he’s up to his eyebrows in work and will soon be moving to a new house that will require some of his attention.

The Eunuch Archive is in need of a volunteer, computer competent (e.g., coding skills), who can assist in moving us forward….

According to Talula, what the Eunuch Archive needs is someone who is capable of standard lamp skills heavy on the css and ajax (xajax and jquery). We are aiming to make very dynamic pages that don't look dynamically made using skills and techniques that are currently in use or have not been invented yet (or we get to invent). Web page security is extremely important. vBulletin skills desired. Good MySql skills required. Artistic and graphics skills desired. Very good PHP skills required. Python skills desired for future.

OK. That is some of what we are looking for immediately. Secondary skills are:

Able to build and maintain a fully functional linux server either standalone or virtual. Pop3, imap, smtp, named, apache2, php, mysql, rsync, clamav (just to name a few) are all standard features. Debug skills required.

Backup maintenance desired.

I work in IT. Finding a skilled programmer with system admin skills as well could be difficult. I can build and maintain servers, and I am very familiar with Linux and Windows server administration, backup administration (very familiar with LAMP servers) but I can't code worth a crap. You often find one or the other, and those that are great at both is sort of uncommon. Excellent graphic design skills thrown in to that mix as well is like looking for a unicorn

My suggestion would be to look at local colleges and perhaps offer them some work as an internship. Often times you will find a CS major looking to hone their skills - sometimes for credit, sometimes just to get better at what they do - if you have some short term projects to knock out. Having a long term server admin would be critical for you so you keep up with patch management on the server for security and performance purposes. Once a CMS such as VBulletin is in place (including what changes you intend to make now), only minor changes periodically should be required.

Disclaimer: that is just my experience for the last 15 years. YMMV.

I'd be willing to help out, but I too have a full time job.

Built and ran (the technical/network side) an ISP from the ground up, inc everything from the bandwidth accounting to email (before management broke the bank). Still run my own server in the corner here, have two VPSes (guests not hosts) in the US. My curent day job is heavy coding, php, javascript, perl - currently porting dos software to perl and javascript (custom webkit frontend - but chrome was our prototype) other work projects include a multi-million dollar website (feel free to pm me for a link)

I aimed to be a sysadmin, programming was my hobby (oft used to enhance sysadminning) - then work took my hobby and made me hate it while leaving the sysadmin skills untouched.

Incidentally, may I suggest sphinx for full text searching?

I write PHP currently for a living (bleurgh), I currently use MSSQL in my day job but obviously have some MySQL experience, use JS/jQuery/AJAX daily, CSS skills are currently a bit outdated but they're there. I'd be willing to learn Python or if it helps I've got experience in C. Forum coding experience is with SMF, and I've coded a little for Joomla and Wordpress. You really do not want to see my graphics "skills"

Free time varies from "tons" to "headless chickens"!

It would be lovely to be able to help a place that's helped me.

I'm sorry talula but it appears I don't have permission to send messages? I can't reply your pm.

icarryherproperty (imported) wrote: Thu Jan 03, 2013 7:58 am I'm sorry talula but it appears I don't have permission to send messages? I can't reply your pm.

You have now posted 5 messages. You can now send PMs.

icarryherproperty (imported) wrote: Thu Jan 03, 2013 7:58 am I'm sorry talula but it appears I don't have permission to send messages? I can't reply your pm.

You can now. One has to have 5 posts on the forums in order to be able to use the Private Messsage (PM) system.