View and vote on the article here: CyberArmy Presents: CASee and CAMPSITE
CyberArmy Presents: CASee and CAMPSITE| Category | | | Summary | | One of the great things about CyberArmy is that it is an extensible platform. CyberArmy is a plug-and-play community, whereby members are able to attach their projects and work. This is either done through the CyberArmy backend engine, Dinah, or through t |
| | Body | One of the great things about CyberArmy is that it is an extensible platform. CyberArmy is a plug-and-play community, whereby members are able to attach their projects and work. This is either done through the CyberArmy backend engine, Dinah, or through the brigade system which includes separate but interconnected websites. What these sites don't do, CWP does in by extension to all others. CASee and CAMPSITE are new tools of this extensible system.
Campsite and CASee were released as public betas on October 21 and November 11, 2005, respectively. They are the children of the new SAS subgroup CyberArmy-Wide Projects (CWP) , whose goal is to rapidly develop and maintain such large specialist core CyberArmy services.
CAMPSITE: Gather 'round the Fire
CAMPSITE is a throwback to an earlier project, HomeSite. Homesite was a system of hosting that predated both the current .plan system and Blockhouse's free hosting for CyberArmy Brigades. HomeSite was a licensed platform that Pengo (aka Overlord) spent hundreds of dollars for to give members their own CA-hosted websites.
However, as hosts changed and CyberArmy evolved, many of these older systems went the way of the trash can, never to return. For years, Blockhouse has provided a non-profit solution to CyberArmy's professional hosting needs, but individuals still had to pay if they wanted hosting. Thus, there was still a need for something like HomeSite.
On October 21, 2005, CAMPSITE was released to the public. CAMPSITE runs with no formal ties to the user database. How CAMPSITE works is by allowing existing users to sign up through a GPG based system. The signup grabs the user's GPG key from their .plan, and creates an authentication session via a scheme I created called NeoLingo. A very large passkey is generated randomly for every user, and this key is encrypted to their GPG key. The user is then given a challenge-response dialog where they decrypt this information to reveal the secret key, and only the user the key is meant for can see it. Successfully completing these steps results in the system creating an account for the user and providing them with login information.
The accounts are the exact same hosting that Blockhouse provides, except that they are for individual users and do not include scripting, email, or databases. The allocated space for each account depends on the rank of the user and whether or not they belong to a brigade. The exact sizes are available at the sign up page. At this time, Sered ranks are not figured into hosting allotments.
At the time of this writing, CAMPSITE is still in beta, and has 14 active users.
CASee: Through the Looking Glass
CASee is a central portal for the CyberArmy Network. It is the digital glue that links everything together. If you think of CyberArmy as a web, with strings going out from it to each brigade site's index page, and strings going between all of the pages, then you have an idea both of the CyberArmy Network and of CASee.
While the network has existed as long as brigades have had their own websites, navigating it has always been a challenge; even experienced users such as myself were completely unaware that many of these sites existed. The problem with navigating CyberArmy stems from the lack of a centrally controlled navigation system. Even if all our sites shared a common method of navigation, there are so many sites that any universal navigation system could not fit comfortably into a toolbar. As CyberArmy grew, so did this problem.
On November 11, 2005, CWP released CASee as a solution to the problem. CASee is based on the free open-source Sphider search engine. After a brief beta period on our own test sites, CASee is in a second phase beta at http://search.cyberarmy.net with a completely new look and design thanks to the volunteers at the Multimedia Design Forum on CyberArmy.
It is still in beta because it still contains some minor flaws. However, it is fully functional and is now the best way for all of our members, new and experienced alike, to find their way around the CyberArmy Network.
CASee includes a category view for direct navigation, but the really attractive feature is the search function. Basic search will pull up links from within the CyberArmy Network, not just the general portal entries found through the category view. Search also supports an advanced option which allows for more refined search terms as well as limiting searches to specific areas and sites. Searching for encryption, for instance, will bring up results from all areas of the network, while advanced searching would allow for searching only for encryption tutorials at CAUniversity.org, or only for encryption code at OSIX.net, or only for discussion about encryption on the Cyberarmy.net Security Forum, or from all three at the same time while blocking results from any other location.
Where did these projects come from, and where is CWP going?
On October 12, 2005, I requested to be reinstated as a Marshal of CyberArmy. Even at that time, a plan was forming in the back of my mind that something could and should be created to fill a gap in CyberArmy. What we were missing was an extensible brigade that did nothing but work on improving the community.
To do that required thinking literally outside the box. To facilitate CAMPSITE and CASee properly, they had to be plug-and-play with both CyberArmy.net and the associated brigade sites. That meant that CAMPSITE and CASee had to reside on their own individual platforms and provide the necessary tools to integrate with any associated site. By working outside of the Dinah "hardcoded" box, these projects would instantly have more flexibility to adapt and adjust to the community's needs quickly. By leveraging Blockhouse assets, I was in a prime position to do just that.
After a quick consultation with Craytonic over at the SAS brigade, I secured a spot for the new brigade (called CyberArmy-Wide Projects or CWP), announced my return, and got to work on the first projects, CAMPSITE and CASee.
CAMPSITE was an almost purely technical job. CASee would take some background research into the CyberArmy Network before any code implementation could be done. So, while I got to work on CAMPSITE, Craytonic got us our first recruit, Fingerlessknight, who got working on CASee research.
One of the key principles of CWP is work at breakneck speed. Obstacles are not an option. The speed of development greatly affects the projects themselves. Solutions to difficulties can often completely change the depth and scope of the project. This is one reason why CWP does not pre-announce projects we work on beyond a conceptual codename. CAMPSITE, for instance, was originally going to be a blog-like personal CMS system for each user. This was quickly abandoned because of the time constraints of coding such a system. CASee, on the other hand, quickly abandoned the notion of a home-grown spider engine, of which we only had a prototype. CASee switched to an open source solution, and moved on.
Each project went through only a few days testing before going active. The release did not wait on a CA subdomain or any real design implementations. These were all done on the fly after the actual code was made public.
The future holds great opportunities that CWP will be taking advantage of. Projects average a three-week span from birth to release. CWP is taking extra time on the next project because of the demand of a lot of hand created work. CWP's next project is codenamed MonkeyWrench, which is due out no later than January 7, 2006. All we can say about MonkeyWrench is that it will do for brigade standards what CASee did for the CyberArmy Network. As for what the rest of 2006 holds for CWP, if we can imagine it, you will see it.
Credits
For these projects, CWP would like to thank all of its members as well as: Craytonic for technical advice and brigade support, PrincesSoha, Sorcer, Fu, TanMonkey, 1746, Snarkles for graphical work, and the CyberArmy Administrators for subdomain assistance .
Resources
CAMPSITE - http://campsite.cyberarmy.net/
CASee - http://search.cyberarmy.net/
CyberArmy-Wide Projects - https://www.cyberarmy.net/brigades/967/
Blockhouse Hosting - http://www.block-house.com/
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This article was imported from zZine. (original author: Ikioi)
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