Also, many of you will be happy to know we will have a much more extensive manual. =]
History of Vlinto - October 17, 1999
Development for Vlinto has frozen for the time being so CustomCGI can handle
the large amount of custom application requests. Until we can find more
qualified programmers, Vlinto 2.0 will be on the back burner.
History of Vlinto - October 10, 1999
The pre-release test went well, just a few details to work out and some
improvements to make on the admin interface
History of Vlinto - September 30, 1999
Copies of the pre-release of Vlinto 2.0 are scheduled to go out on Saturday.
Pricing has not been set at this time, although pricing won't be that much different from Vlinto 1.x. The most likely change will be a lowering of the license cost for each user, and a rise in the base cost (currently $199.99).
The manual for Vlinto 2.0 should be much better than any of CustomCGI's other so called manuals.
It's not too late to request features! Email them to features@customcgi.net. Only a few Vlinto 1.x owners have been requesting last minute features.
Probably before January there will be an updated version of Vlinto which will include any features that were left out of 2.0.
History of Vlinto - September 22, 1999
The messaging system is quite weak. We will let you know soon if it will make the final release.
History of Vlinto - September 12, 1999
Almost two years behind schedule, Vlinto 2.0 will soon be released. It is under it's final stages of development, and updates go to beta testers this week.
The main theme for Vlinto 2.0 was designed by Hugh Buchanan, and if you contact sales@customcgi.net we can get pricing information for custom theme designs.
It has always been an objective to make the visual aspects to Vlinto 2.0 easily customizable. We feel confident that they are, however the option does exist for you to have one professionally made.
Why the long pause? Call it politics. The main issue is that we have a flood of custom requests, causing development to slow down on our own projects.
As for a feature list, here is a brief one:
History of Vlinto - December 9, 1998
As you might have guessed, Vlinto 2.0 will not arrive in January. Vlinto 1.41 is out now, and contains some valuable updates. Banner scripts and CGI->Email scripts are now built into the base package.
As for why Vlinto 2.0 is not out, things have been too busy with various other web sites and projects. Plus I've decided to create the main theme myself. Take a peek here.
History of Vlinto - August 8, 1998
Vlinto 2.0 will be released Januray 1, 1999. In the mean time, look for version 1.1 to arrive with a few more features and a few less bugs.
History of Vlinto - July 10, 1998
Work for Vlinto 2.0 is fully underway. Web designer Geoff Booth has been commissioned to design four themes for Vlinto, to be completed by January 1, 1998
In future weeks, beta demos will be available, as well as screen shots
History of Vlinto - May 9th, 1998
[Vlinto] 1.0 can now be yours in less than 24 hours thanks to some minor refinements in the script. All work on [Vlinto] 1.0 has ceased (except for the naming implementation and work on the help documents).
With luck, the help documents and name will be chosen within two weeks.
History of Vlinto - April 28th, 1998
It has been 8 months since the basic shell of Vlinto emerged into a functional program. With roughly 30 "off days", and various other days of "downtime"; Vlinto 1.0 is ready to be released, pending its naming. A contest is being held to name Vlinto.
It is now time to look towards the future. Vlinto 2.0 is estimated to be out within the next four months and will be bigger and better than ever before. Most likely a total rewrite, Vlinto 2.0 will be faster and more streamlined than 1.0. We already have brought the ability to host many users without ftp or telnet, but there are many ways to improve. Look for features such as:
A lot of work would go into a program that would provide free web space to anyone who asked. We needed a way to easily maintain any users we have, and a way for them to cheaply upload their files.
It didn't work to be very easy, so we decided to give them unlimited space for just a single HTML file. With CSS proving to be very good in creating many wonderful things, we decided that was best. So I began work on a script which allowed a user to create a web page file. It was very easy to use, and all you did was pick from a bunch of server-side menus what background graphic to use, and horizontal rule to use, etc. There was also an option to edit your index.html file (once created) in a text box.
At this point in time, I was fairly new to CGI. I had known Perl for some time, but CGI was new to me. For what the script did, it was very well done.
One day it all changed. The site was almost ready to go up, when someone else entered the picture. The wacky Alaskan introduced me to a mild-mannered Californian who was selling virtual servers at a great price. I jumped at the chance to own my own server so I could finally get my web designing business off the ground. I spend the next several months not doing web designing, but instead working on various CGI scripts for this mild-mannered Californian. With the virtual server, I decided to host other people too.. but this was put on hold while I worked on CGI scripts. It took me several months to build up clients and to start making some money off the virtual server.
But my mind never left the original idea to provide free web space to users. I was pointed out to various scripts on Matt's Script Archive and Cgi Resources. I saw plenty of scripts that could handle file uploading, and file management. But non were able to take on multiple users! I found some very good file-upload scripts that were reliable enough to use. I then downloaded all the freeware scripts that could manage files. I deleted the one's that didn't work.. and took a look at how they worked. I also spent a lot of time in #perl and #cgi on EfNet. They all visually looked the same (very similar to Geocities'). I can't honestly claim to be the original author to some PARTS of the original Vlinto. The original script was a mesh of a lot of freeware snipets of code.
As far as code from scratch goes, about 90% of the current code is from scratch. Many scripts I downloaded claimed they did many of the functions of Vlinto, but I found them either insecure, difficult to use, or unreliable.
The original Vlinto script was not intended for distribution. It was intended to be used by the free homepage program only. When various people heard about it, demand instantly grew. I was told that this package could make me rich, and people started bidding on Vlinto. I had to then re-work parts of the script and seperate the variables from the real code to make it easier to set up.
Sadly, it was still too difficult for the average user to install, so I decided to install the script on the intended machine for free. Once you have done it several times, it can be done in a matter of minutes!
I would like to officially thank: