About Start@Iluvitar

Start@Iluvitar was born as a collection of my bookmarks from my home computer making them available to me from anywhere connected to the internet when I wasn't at home.

As the number of links grew (over 300+ now), organization became a problem and links were organized into categories with sections that could be hidden at the click of a mouse. Now, Start@Iluvitar is much much more than just a set of links. Start@Iluvitar contains many nifty things that make my daily life on the web easier to manage.

Noteable Features:

Multi-engine search form: Want to search using Google (Preferred) or Altavista? Just click on the search engine name before searching to change your preferred engine for that search.

Daily Weather: Daily weather is retrieved from internet weather sources periodically throughout the day and the weather for the next 5 days in the week is shown using icons at the top of the screen. The city of which the weather is displayed can be changed by a simple click on a link next to the city name on the page, which stores the city in a cookie on the browser for future views.

Mcdonalds McDeal: The McDeal of the day is shown at the top of the page. (I keep forgetting what it is).

Section Hiding/Toggle: Certain sections and subsections of links can be toggled, or alternated between different parts of the list. Simply by clicking on the section headers.

Bookmarks Page: Database driven bookmarks page in a hideable layer allow for quick addition and removal of bookmarks from anywhere on the web with quick and simple authentication to access administrative permissions. Bookmarks can be added simply by typing in the name of the url (title is parsed automatically by the script accessing the associated url), or by entering the title as well, and can be deleted by a single click.

Notes: Database driven notes section allows for an easily accessible, centralized, note storage system. Notes can be text-wrapped or not, and syntax highlighting for over 10 programming languages can be applied on a per-note basis. As well as making certain notes public viewable or private viewable only.

Sitescan Integration: The Sitescan is fully integrated into Start@Iluvitar and displays the last few sites that were updated as well as their change times.

Email Notification: (Disabled) Email at 3 different addresses is checked on every page load and notification is shown next to the link accessing each of their respective webmail portals.

New Window Launching: Toggle'able setting through the use of a discreet checkbox next to the search form to make links spawn in a new window or not. Setting is stored in cookies for future memory.

About Iluvitar.com

Iluvitar.com (Now on it's 7th version) is my personal presence on the web. Used to be Iluvitar.net and Iluvitar.org as well, but 3 domains is just rediculous for something like this.

Previous versions can be found in the Graveyard, though not 100% functional.

All versions of Iluvitar.com have been made from scratch using 100% homegrown code. This version was written in PHP (changeover from Perl) with a MySQL database backend. As well, version 7 now relies heavily on CSS for almost all its visual appearance.

Noteable features:

Search Engine: Database driven search engine allows quick searching and access of any of the hundreds of news posts and comments. Search results are scored and displayed in order of relevance.

Bayesian Spam Filter: All news comments and guestbook entries are passed through a bayesian spam filter and messages with a high probability for spam are flagged for review.

Sitescan: The Sitescan is a tool that periodically crawls the web to determine if specified web sites have been updated or not. Includes smart filtering to ignore small changes as well as allowing for different timers on a per-site basis. Moreover, the sitescan can group together multiple pages on a site to be reviewed and update the site if there are changes to any of those sites.

Style Theme: CSS Based styles themes can be easily swapped to immediately change the visual look and feel of the entire site.

Administration: Administration of news entries, and all database aspects of the web page is done through a dynamic administration section of the site.

Scrolling Menu: As of version 6, Iluvitar.com has featured a scrolling menu bar written using javascript/dom and CSS.

Markup Filtering: Comments and guestbook entries are parsed with only approved html markup being allowed to be passed through. The rest is converted to display only. Permitted tags are able to be changed on the fly to accomodate changes in web standards, or the webmaster's preference.

RSS Feed: An RSS Feed is generated and accessible at /iluvitar.xml