Time seems to pass very quickly when you are busy. The last half of 2002 was extremely hectic and primarily occupied with a physical move to Manchester in the U.K. Fortunately over that time things stayed on a even keel. The change of location also provide plenty of new opportunities for new spaceless photos. There are now over 400 images that each page randomly chooses from to show on the left side of all the spaceless pages. I haven't sat down to work out the permutations for the front page (7 randomly selected out of 400 makes for a lot of possibilities).

The more landscape type pictures have also been gathered together in a photo album. So if you have never seen bits of the English countryside (primarily) you can take a look here.

The site now hosts a fuller version of JOSI which is now seeking journal articles for consideration under a formal academic peer review system. Visit the site for more details.

A range of syndicated content has also been added under the spaceless name. This include D.I.Y. ringtones, skins, themes and icons to download, a student guide to UK cities, a world travel guide, some software tutorials and a few other bits and bobs.

My comments from last year about grabbing spaceless.net never happened. The domain went from being expired to be registered with little or no gap. I certainly don't see much point in visiting the site as it is one of those 'girl with a webcam' scams.

There's still more to come as well. I am currently in the process of digitising the contents of a street magazine from the early 1990s called goole. It was something that has been sitting around waiting to happen for a while but the server space and available time were both a bit restricted. Hopefully this will all go up in the near future.

Other material to go up includes the contents of a conference proceedings, Rethinking the Social and some of the source code for the scripts on this site (which I seem to permanently promise but never get around to doing).

Lots of maintenance going on too. The Virtual Library for Online References was fixed up today and I am hoping to sort out all the issues with the Humanities HUB very soon too. Despite this part of the site being the original motivation for all 'this' it seems to be the most neglected part of the site (except the sexuality section which always gets lots of traffic - can't think why).

The logs show up all sorts of weird but interesting factoids. For example in November spaceless served over 3 Gb of files while December was much quieter with only 1.8 Gb of traffic. The Virtual Library page generates the single most amount of traffic on the site followed by the chat pages and the Humanities HUB. The photos page and the Clan Fletcher book also see their fair share of traffic. But as the site now has '100s' of pages of text I'm not sure it is a content in any sense.

More interesting, are the locations of the visitors to the site. This includes... Australia, United Kingdom, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Austria, Greece, Japan, United States, Netherlands, Brazil, Germany, Belgium, Poland, France, Hong Kong, Argentina. Estonia, Latvia, Trinidad and Tobago, Faroe Islands, Niue, Namibia, Luxembourg, Kyrgyzstan, Seychelles and Aruba. I think it is interesting anyway.

In case anyone is asking, the thesis is going just fine. I have made real headway in the last few months and can actually see an end in sight. The 'semi-rural' location must be beneficial to writing.

News: 11th March 2002

Things have been somewhat more stable of late. The new service provider shut down the site briefly (for about 18 hours) late in February as they felt that a rogue spaceless script (the one that generated listings of book titles) was causing undue load on the server. This script had been running happily on the old site for a fair while but as it is the service provider who has the hand on the switch we can't really argue.

Discount clothes Cheap Calvin Klein The library of images continues to grow. There are now 245 images that are randomly cycled on the home page and individually on the other pages. This means that sometimes the layout and feel of the front page is impressive, somethings interesting and sometimes awful. It may be a case of having to categorise the images to get a pleasing balance and not just a purely randomly generated selection. This is most definitely a low priority though.

The webtours system is up and running. The concept is that a person can create a selected tour of websites or images that are online in order to present a coherent and consistently narrated tour. I had only seen one other (rather simpler) systems on the Web and it seems like a useful idea. I am using the webtours to guide students through various topics relating to computing. The system is based on a MySQL database so it seems to be fairly sturdy and this enables the system to do searches and manages a count of how many have started and how many have finished each tour. There a couple of minor details to go but we are hoping to realise the source code into the public domain (and from there some of the other code we use too).

The first screensaver from spaceless is also up. It isn't the apex of screensaver design, more a test of the software we are using to create the savers. However, more savers are planned including a 'photographic tour' of some inner city Brisbane suburbs, a saver dedicated to Guy DeBord's Society of the Spectacle and, maybe, the 'wit' of Ronald Reagan.

There are also a series of reports online too. They are all basically public domain reports from the US. I have had the archive of reports for about a year and thought that some were 'curious' enough to warrant putting online. It also concerns me that while the reports are 'interesting' they are not necessarily worth paying $5 - $10 (each) and I have seen some mail order companies on and offline quite prepared to charge that sort of price for them. caveat emptor. With the number of scams and spams I have been receiving lately it is important that people can identify them. In some cases, such as the Nigerian dam money scam, falling for these tricks can be quite fatal. Look at scambusters for more details.

Despite only having a very beta site up and running, our proposed journal of society and information is already getting attention. This one is going to take a bit of work but in the long run it will be an important element of spaceless.

spaceless.net and spaceless.org both appear to be offline. They are not connected in anyway with spaceless.com so that's really just an observation. However, the spaceless.net domain registration also expired in November last year so it looks like it may be no more. We are contemplating re-registering the domain to offer a free email service again (through a reputable third party email provider this time!).

The logs for last month are also interesting. We finally cracked 2Gb of data transferred. This is despite changing providers in the first week of the month and being taken offline for our rogue script. There were, on average, just under 1700 pages served each day for an average daily transfer rate of 90 Mb. People from .com and .net addresses were the highest users followed by Australia, Canada, UK, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Israel and the Netherlands. However, visitors came from 'everywhere', including Niue, Faroe Islands, Belarus, Colombia and Internation (from the .int top level domain - a rather rare one).

This month's traffic has been slightly quieter so far. We are still working on the various promises from last month. The new sub-menu system indicates where these new features will eventually 'sit'.

News: 12th February 2002

The first update for the year... The entire site disappeared into the aether around the 3rd of February. The former hosting provider imagelinkusa.net decided that having the source code for an MOO on the private part of the spaceless account infringed their service agreement. They terminated the account and refused to reinstate it. This was only revealed about 3 days after the event. We did receive a backup of the entire site which made reinstalling the site much easier with the new host provider - besthost1.com. The only material lost was about 4 days of chat archives from the 29/Jan to 3/Feb.

This could not have happened at a worse time for spaceless. January 2002 was the most trafficked month ever. During that month spaceless had nearly 200 000 page views and it transfer 1.9 Gb of data. February was also looking impressive. 250 Mb of data had already been transferred in the first three days of the month. At the moment, after the move to the new host daily traffic is standing at about 1500 page hits a day and 80 Mb of data being moved.

The 'upside' to the move is that the new host offers accounts which have 500Mb of space instead of the 50Mb that we previously had to juggle. This opens the way for a number of projects that had been on hold. Spaceless now has a personal organiser, an ideas generator, email reminders and free hosting with a simple web based interface. We are also testing a new interactive system for the humanities HUB and place to create an our.spaceless site with a directory of links recommended by spaceless users. We are also working on getting the NewsGroups system up and running (with new code) but the lack of decent free newsgroup servers is a small problem here.

All of this is in addition to the news parts of the site added mainly onto the lifestyle pages including recipes and other 'normal' portal things.

Other projects are to offer a customisable "my.spaceless" system to try and offer a way of putting all the best (in your opinion) bits of spaceless in one page. This is also to overcome for regulars the changes in main menu on the home page which has changed noticeably with the addition of pop up submenus.

So far offering @spaceless.com addresses through a reliable system is looking more difficult. It will happen.

It has been a busy 10 days or so.

News: 6th Decemeber 2001

A lot time between updates... There is now a new drop-down menu on all the main pages. This leads to all the main pages on the site as well as a variety of freebie and rewards sites and a couple of services.

There is now a random book list that appears at the bottom of each of the chat pages. This list new, rare and used books. These lists are pulled from a variety of sites and more bookseller's offerings will be added as we work out how to link directly to titles. You can also browse the complete listing by category by going to the allbooks page. More specialised categories soon.

Each chat page now also links to an auxillary page. In the case of the more 'academic' areas this leads to the humanities HUB. We are currently working on a system to manage and maintain the humanities HUB through a web interface. Other less 'academic' discussion groups lead to lifestyle pages. The two completed at the moment are travel and internet computing. More of these to follow.

We are still working on the usenet news interface. This is really a problem with free usenet servers not the programming itself.

The next big project is too extend the work and use of the humanities HUB. The first step will be the libraries OneSearch. Basically this will be a single interface to library catalogues around the world. Useful for researchers and inter-library loans?

The other big news is that spaceless.com will be decamping to Manchester (UK) in 2002. This will not affect the site but there may be some downtime in terms of maintenance.

News: 21st October 2001

Domain changeover seems to have worked pretty smoothly. There are still some mail glitches that need to be sorted out.

I added a selection of wallpapers to download and I'm working on a couple of screensavers. Watch out a couple of the wallpapers are big and are a bit of download. I'll fix these up as soon as the transfer is all sorted out.

News: 18th October 2001

Due to a lost email or two the transfer of the domain to a faster server hasn't been as smooth as it could have been. The spaceless.com domain name does not seem to go anywhere at the moment (for me). The backed up site is being reloaded onto the new server. Telnet access does not work currently so it is not possible to reactivate the chat pages (for the moment) or to retrieve the last weeks archive of chats from the old server. I will keep working on this.

Added additional images to incorporate a total of 151 images that are randomly displayed throughout the site.

The site is now fully meta-tagged as well.

The mail settings and the 'behind the scenes' part of the site is all a bit in the air. If you have a spaceless.com mail address or have mail redirected and you are not receiving any message - you will need to contact me

News: 14th October 2001

Add a navigation menu to the left menu of the chat pages. This allows navigation directly between chat pages rather than having to navigate up and down pages

News: 8th October 2001

Corrected an error in the left menu bar of the chat pages - now the links open up in a full screen. It is probably better that way.

News: 1st October 2001

Put up a video page of streaming videos from AboveStream.com. They are a bit more interesting than the usual material that floats around the web.

Put up two new images ...random land and random sky.

Created a set of pages related to art works I created through the early 90s. I will try and not make a habit of this.

Fixed the meta-search engine. Many of the engines' results were getting mangled. I think that directhit.com may actually be blocking scoot-a-scope from retrieving results.

Fixed the concordancing engine. It works quite nicely now.

...and spaceless.com has another 50 Mb of disk space to play with (for the moment). Unfortunately, the control panel for spaceless is not working at the moment so I can't read the stats for the site (maybe no-one actually visits the site). I have also linked in 'geobuttons' for the individual chat pages and the WWW Virtual Library. The stats show the physical location of visitors to these pages. Interesting for trivia nuts particularly the fact that visitors to the chat page from Australia outnumber people from the US and elsewhere..

News: 10th September 2001

Added more new images to the random collection. The Viper Lounge, LA | 1313 Mockingbird Lane, LA | A Salem Witch | Anti-Graffiti Unit | Originally O'Hare Airport | Highland Liquor | A Lock, Dublin | Street-scape, Dublin | Lismore Shopping Square Sign | House, Wynnum | Basque Festival | Basque Festival | Bosnia, ABC News | Makara School, NZ | Neolithic Settlement, Holyhead | No Pleasure Gardens | Boise River, Idaho |

News: 6th September 2001

A number of changes have happened since the 5th of July. The code red worm prompted me to put up a page that shows the number of attacks that spaceless has received from this worm. Spaceless cannot be affected as it runs on an Apache/Linux combination. Anyway, it isn't really very exciting but it is here

I finally sorted out the streaming audio. There are now 5 songs to choose from, although they are fairly ambient as this seems to hold up best on the low bandwidth format. The links to CDNow often provide more tracks from the same bands. What the heck, I'll even add requests if I have the music.

The beta for the revitalised Humanities HUB is online and accessible. The database is fairly small at the moment but hopefully the many people who were trying to use this part of the site over the last 2 years will have something to look at now. We are going to implement an editorial system so that if people want to take closer control over a small part of the site they will be able to. We certainly don't claim to have indepth knowledge of all these areas. Eventually each editor will be able to add and delete links as well as add a welcome message for their page(s). At the moment we are just looking for expressions of interest.

Added a new discussion group - .

Added 5 new images to the random collection.108 | 109 | 110 | 111 | 112

Started work on an Australian weather report - very rough but you can look at the weather for Brisbane here.

Put a 'free for all' page onto the site just to see what links get posted.

And the upshot of all this is that spaceless, out of complete ignorance to its name, is currently soaking up about 34Mb of its allocated 35Mb. It looks like it might be time to get some more disk space.

News: 5th July 2001

The email system for spaceless has been altered. The old ghostmail system was not working well and a lot of messages were bouncing to me. There is still access on the email page. The email page now offers signup options for spaceless.com and education.gs addresses as well the capability for loggin into 'normal' POP email accounts (such as telstra.net and other ISP accounts). 'Old' user of spaceless.com email addresses will have to contact me to transfer the addresses over to the new system (sorry about that).

I have also tried to get the streaming audio working again. The instant messanging system is coming soon.

Hopefully, I have fixed up the digests of the chat system. The approval link is shorter and easier to cut and paste (if you have to). The system should be working again.

News: 15th June 2001

Added a new category to the main page of the site - headlines. This page provides access to local and international news stories from a variety of sources. The news is constantly updated through the day and night. There is a little bit of preference towards US oriented news but this is balanced with material from other world regions. There is also daily software downloads, book and film reviews and jokes. (I'm working on the crossword and horoscope still!).

Also newly available is the ability to receive a daily digest from your favourite spaceless discussion board. You will receive a separate digest for each board you subscribe to. The digest will be posted at approximately 6.00a.m GMT each day.

Technical: 15th June 2001

I think I've broken the streaming audio again. I am trying to test it on other machines just to be sure. Coding is also underway for an email interface that will allow you to check 'normal' mail (like the address you get from your ISP or work) directly from spaceless. This won't work for hotmail but it should be useful for people who use lots of different machines, travel around a lot or use 'locked down' machines (like you find in university laboratories).

I also repaired the meta-search engines retrieval of Altavista and Webtop links. These sites had changed formatting and the meta-search wasn't locating the information correctly. I also have in the pipeline an option to use 'unusual source'. This is for when your search totally bombs out and it might be something not commonly found on a webpage.

Technical: 7th June 2001

Got the streaming audio (am radio quality) applet working for Netscape browsers. Also attempted to implement the Jabber instant messaging service (and server) on spaceless - didn't work. All the discussion pages were updated to include a left hand side menu (this wasn't there because I was being slack). This menu includes links to the music as well as the meta-search engine and this news page.

Technical: 6th June 2001

Fixed the search parameters for Scoot-a-scope (the meta-search engine). The URL links extracted from searches done at the EntireWeb search engine were being cropped when they were too long. The background colour in the irc applet was changed to white in the interests of readability.

News: 1st June 2001

Added a new category to the main menu. The diversions link offers a collection of puzzle games, arcade games and sound and image generators. All of these are third party java applets. They will probably just be a reason to keep me online longer. (Getting this lot online overcame the other task for the day - which was to get the subscription system for the discussion pages working.)

News: 31st May 2001

Anita Greenhill one of the co-founders of spaceless.com will be in Korea and the USA later in the year. If anyone would like to meet Anita face-to-face please contact her beforehand. Anita is presenting papers at the PACIS 2001 and AMCIS 2001 conferences (Information System conferences). If you would like to see her present these papers you will need to register as a day visitor to these conferences (there are registrations fees for both conferences).

Anita's Itinerary
Seoul, Korea	19th June 2001 - 23rd June 2001	presenting at PACIS 2001
Boise, USA	26th July 2001 - 30th July 2001	attending IFIP 8.2 2001
Boston, USA	30th July 2001 - 6th August 2001	presenting at AMCIS 2001
Los Angeles, USA	6th August 2001 & 7th August 2001	?

Technical: 31st May 2001

There is now a mailing list for people to announce when they will be online and chatting. See the chat page

Technical: 29th May 2001

The web-based chat is now being archived and is searchable. See the chat page

Technical: 28th May 2001

The education.gs website has also been transferred to imagelinkusa.net. This server will support the spaceless site with mail services. The spaceless.com's mail services are delegated to ghostmail.com and consequently cannot be manipulated. The education.gs address will replace those services and allow spaceless to offer lists and the automatic mailing out of daily chat sessions.

Technical: 26th May 2001

Transfer of hosting services for the spaceless domain from digiweb.com to imagelinkusa.net. After 4 years with digiweb the service we were getting was increasingly patchy and prone to timeouts. This appears to have something to do with the company being bought out by interliant.com. After nearly 10 days they have still not replied to my query about being unable to log into the site and repair the damage they did when they transfer the machines around.

imagelinkusa is cheaper and provides more options for the domain. Subjectively, it also appears to be noticeably faster.

contact
Gordon Fletcher or Anita Greenhill