PlusNet Community Website

I popped down to the Slug & Lettuce on Wardour St last night for the Chinwag panel discussion on “Real World Usability”. It was a good evening but ultimately the free bar and comfy sofas didn’t quite make up for the lack of direction in the discussion. More…

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Introduction

This post is intended to explain how our Authoritative DNS (Auth DNS) system works.

It is a moderately technical document and it’s target audience is the enthusiast interested in how we run a DNS implementation at a medium-sized ISP.

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This news is a couple of days old (at least) but it’s worthy of posting up here because  YouTube have released an API that allows developers and enthusiasts (we used to call you ‘webmasters’- whatever happened to that phrase?) to re-skin the ‘embedded’ video player. More…

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As some people will realise (and others may not) - the Community Site is built using a collection of Open Source Software - specifically WordPress for the blogging aspect and SimpleMachines Forum for the forum aspect. There’s also a collection of Backend Plugins which we make use of which are Open Source, and some which aren’t - although these are the few as it’s mainly ones we’ve written which won’t be of any use to other people.

In this blog post I am going to be taking a look at some of the ways in which the two pieces of software we use to power the site differ and some of the challenges this has caused us.

Be warned: some bits of this post may be ‘geeky’ and technical and include code examples. Sorry!

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Error messages are often a cause of frustration and yet it isn’t hard to create error messages that are helpful and even make the user feel good! More…

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Yes we did meet up last night

• Tam continued is work on some prototypes for how we’d model the login boxes for the community site with OpenID in mind. You can take a look at his current prototype concepts.
• Colin has resurrected his work with combining OpenID with Cryptocard’s two part auth system. He’s been struggling with getting the RADIUS client working.
• Paul consulted with Nigel (one of our architects) about how to get OpenID into our portal authentication system. There’s a convenient spot for it to go in, a gotcha to do with accessing a PlusNet identity provider from a PlusNet webserver and the necessity of a security review of any code added intended for live.

What did I do? I refreshed myself on the phishing stuff following last weeks Cryptocard conversation. I was mostly working through the examples talked about in Marco Slot’s Beginners Guide to OpenID Phishing.
He describes 3 different ‘levels of phishing’ which openID is susceptible to. I’ve made the links available to our developers internally to make sure they are aware of thinking of these things.

I can’t help but wonder if you can get around the ‘level 2′ phishing approach via the use of some sort of referrer checking. I.e. are the images being loaded on this page being called from the correct OpenID login form. If not, display phishing warnings. Is that simple to get around? Or does it add a sufficient level of difficulty for the phishermen to not warrant the effort?

Feel free to debate below

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This week we had Mark Kacary from Cryptocard in to talk to about their managed 2 part auth services. We’ve been mulling over integrating it with a PlusNet OpenID system for a long time but have never been able to dedicate the time to progress it. The guys seemed quite enthusiastic about implementing it and were confident that it wasn’t going to be too taxing.

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Over the past few weeks (months even!) I’ve been putting together a plan of what we (in the Web Development Department) would like to move forward with, in terms of improving the self-service convenience and self-help tools available on our http://www.plus.net/ website. We refer to such a vision as a roadmap. It gives us focus for the strategic activities we are expecting to undertake this year.

I’m a realist and I know that unexpected challenges, and conversely, opportunities, will come along and disrupt our plans. But there are things on here that we MUST deliver this year and we’ve already made a good start in the first two months of 2008.

Read on if you like.. it does go on a bit.
 

 
Online Support Roadmap Spring 2008 (click image to download)

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So, a lot of my colleagues at PlusNet know that I like a jolly good knees-up, the occasional beer (ahem) and talking about technology, especially where it can enhance my life and work. The chance to combine all three is usually an opportunity not to be missed, and one such opportunity came up last Wednesday at Leeds GeekUp. More…

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I blogged last year about the software development teams that we have set up in India so I thought that now was a good opportunity to bring everyone up to date with the progress we have made and of our future plans.

In my previous post I didn’t give the real big picture around why we are diversifying the physical locations of our software development team, so grab a coffee and read on…

PlusNet’s internal Operating System (known as Workplace) is an extremely large and complicated software system that has been built-up over the previous 9 years. Way back in 1999, PlusNet’s software development team consisted of myself and 3 other guys, sat round a single desk at Victoria Quays, Sheffield. The live web-servers were located under the desk, so quite often you’d get up to make a cup of tea, kick the power cable out and the website would go down for a few minutes while we waited for the server to reboot. This is how it was back then; a small group of people around the business worked round the clock, 7 days a week to build up the business, build the system, support the customers, fight the fires and put in place automated software systems that enabled our customers to “self serve” instead of having to call and speak to our customer support centre. More…

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