KuraFire Network

It's been something far too long since I've updated, but with an meeting on Web Standards coming up next week, I feel compelled to give at least some sort of status update.

Before I get into apologizing for the inexcusable lack of updates, I want to note the following: there is another Web Standards Enthusiasts meeting planned for Saturday, January 29. This will, again, takes place in the Netherlands, so if you're interested and are either living there or have the ability and willingness to go there, please regard the details as found on Mark Wubben's site:

The meeting starts at 1pm (13:00) in front of Leiden CS (Centraal Station). After that we'll go to the Bruine Boon, down the street from the station, where we'll have lunch and beers and so on. If there are enough people there'll be a dinner afterwards, probably at our usual place: pizzeria Karalis at walking distance from the Bruine Boon.

Present will be:

• Anne van Kesteren
• Faruk Ates
• Hayo Bethlehem
• Sjors Rijsdam
• Rob Mientjes
• Mark Wubben
• Also:
• Robbert Broersma
• Pieter Wigboldus
• Egor Kloos

If you are planning on coming, please contact Mark Wubben, who has taken it upon himself once again to coordinate this meeting. Thanks Mark, for that.

Now, on to apologizing for, or rather, explaining the lack of updates for the past month-and-a-half (my god, has it been that long already?). It's been an inexcusably long time, I agree with that, but I have a pretty darn good reason for it nonetheless. Let me explain myself.

For the past two months have I been working in 5th gear on finishing Snelsite, the completely Standards-Compliant Content Management System, by Media Design (where I work). It's still not entirely finished, in that we haven't taken it out of Release Candidate stage, but it's getting very close now!

This CMS, which also happens to power The KuraFire Network itself, is the result of roughly one year of hard work, blood, sweat and tears, 40 hours a week of coding and 20 hours a week of keeping up to date on weblogs on Web Standards, %XHTML% and %CSS%. But man, has it been worth it!

Once finished, it won't really be finished, of course, because no good piece of software is ever truly finished. There are already a great number of additional features and extensions planned for it, which should gradually be added over the next months and, probably, years. As long as we have ideas, we will extend and improve on the system, and after working in this company for over 2,5 years I can safely say that we'll never be out of ideas. We strive on being innovative, here at Media Design, and Snelsite is a great example of it.

Over the coming months I will discuss all of the features and aspects of Snelsite here, whilst upgrading the site to the latest version (it's currently running on a 4-months old Beta), but for now a short list of why Snelsite simply kicks ass:

• Complete Web Standards Compliance, with 100% guaranteed valid XHTML output
• A fully SEO-focused URL structure for all areas and content of the site
• Works great for sites of any size, from a small 5-page mini-site to massive sites with hundreds of users and thousands upon thousands of visitors
• 100% CSS-styling; no tables used anywhere except for tabular data (such as calendars)
• Extremely customizable; everything can be adjusted and extended with minimal effort
• Clean, semantic markup -- ensured!
• Very userfriendly -- no technical knowledge required whatsoever
• Lightning fast to create huge sites with

Keep in mind that this is a Content Management System made for businesses, government organizations and educational systems (schools, colleges, universities), and is not "just" a Weblog system (even though it can work quite well as one, obviously).

The coming weeks will have me be even busier than before as I lay the finishing touches to this product that I've truly come to love. Then, once the coding of the main system is finished, I'll be spending more of my time on writing articles and stories (yes, fiction) for a variety of websites, which will all be made with Snelsite of course. Next to that, I'll be adding the much-needed features such as Comments, Feeds and User Registrations: expect those three added before the end of February.

Rests me to say that I'm sorry for not keeping you all informed on the current goings-on in my life as Web Standards enthusiast, but I hope you'll forgive me, in light of what I have been doing all this time. Also, if, somewhere in the coming few weeks, this site starts giving errors and/or sees the visual styling disappear, rest assured that it'll just be me finally updating it and reworking the templates.

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