A lot of work has been going on behind the scenes which has prevented, or should I say, distracted me from posting. Aside from that, ye olde RL obligations that I dare not bore you with at this time. In short, I haven't had as much time to write code as I've wanted to lately, however, I am at least still following the master plan and have made some critical changes recently for the better. Here is the low-down on what has and hasn't happened yet, as well as the basic wish-list for the upcoming month.

• Authentication, Signup, Login/Logout/Forgot Password, Anon Contact & User Management: In short, this code has yet to be merged into the live site. I expect to finally get around to it this month! Due to some massive changes, I will have to rewrite parts of these items.
• Site Template Engine: I have made massive changes to the way content is generated and embedded into the site template. The new methods are really clean, more simplified yet more extensible. The all-new lean, mean template machine, for lack of an actual name for the code I have created for this site.
• Theme Engine: Not really an engine per-se but rather a simple function to modify variables and conditions related to the use of style sheets and associated graphics. I have been playing around with various CSS ideas and close to being done with version one.
  
  We'll have red, blue and gray to start with. I thought about being cheesy and having a function randomly select a theme on every page load. However, that would be even more annoying than the blink tag. Instead, I will occasionally change which theme is to be displayed and eventually have folks vote on which they like better. Ultimately, this functionality will be used to allow members that login the ability to choose which theme they use. Pretty simple stuff and it has been fun playing around with it.
• metaChunk: With the major changes to the low-level template engine, I have spent a lot of time on this piece of the puzzle; created some new functionality, deprecated some items and changed others. Some items will be recreated this month, such as how variables are passed into form fields from previous GET/POST calls, as well as a function that can take a tag from a piece of content and use it to modify HTML header, meta tags and the like. This already basically exists but not for every possibility.
• The Extended Wish List: Pending everything I've already mentioned gets done on-schedule, the next step is to evaluate, and possibly rewrite, the way access to applications works. In addition, I will probably tweak some of the admin apps I have ready to roll out, such as the user manager and article publisher. If time shows to really be on my side, I'll squeeze in creating the blog tool and finally get around to blogging some eve oriented content. I wrote what I need a few years ago but can't find the code. The good news is that it is pretty easy to write something that spit out some XML when a feed reader comes crawling in. So that is on the horizon but don't hold your breath because it is down the chain a bit, time and weather permitting.

All in all, I'm having fun and looking forward to this being fun for others. I have so much planned but I don't want to give it all away just yet. However, stay tuned and soon I will provide options for being able to contact me, for those of you interested in what's going on here and where it is headed. Thanks for dropping by and check back in the next week or so for another update.

If you are just stopping in and notice a major lack of pretty much anything you would expect or imagine, have no fear. The site is not abandoned or being neglected. I am slowly but surely merging my code behind the scenes and getting everything in place. Here is a brief list of some of the items being worked on:

• Authentication: Signup, Login/Logout, Forgot Password. This code was completed last week on the dev site and will be merged into the live site this week and re-tested. Keep in mind that the site is not accepting users at this time. You can sign up but no access will be granted until a later date.
• User Management: Admin utility to add, edit and delete users as well as grant/revoke site access. I have written two applications for this and finally decided on which one I like better. This will be merged into the live site this week and a couple of new features will be added.
• Anonymous Contact: Basic contact form and back-end utility to view/manage/sort form posts. This is done. I just need to tweak it a bit and make a few changes. This will also be merged into the live site this week.
• Message Board: I have some old code that I wrote that is basically a message board front-end which includes an admin utility that allows you to add/delete sub-boards as well as some basic moderation features where you can delete messages in sub-boards or lock threads as read-only. To be honest, Aside from the way it looks, I don't really like how I built it and I think I can do better. I'll probably merge what I have into the live site this week and grant access to a few beta testers to login and play around with it. It may turn out to be rewritten or expanded upon or otherwise I may just scrap it and start over. I may end up putting some 3rd party open-source forum system in place. I don't really know yet. We shall see.
• metaChunk: I have created my own content management/template system that incorporates this thing I created called metaChunk. Basically, it is a macro 'language'. I use 'language' loosely. It is really just a function that looks for special macro tags in chunks of content that are to be embedded into the rendered page. So the template system does its magic, dumping chunks of data into the template. Each chunk of data is preprocessed by metaChunk. The program finds a specially styled tag and this triggers an action, whether it is grab another chunk of data from somewhere, execute a function or script, modify the chunk of data, etc. You can pretty much make it do anything you want. It is very simple and extremely extensible. At any rate, I'm playing around with some new ideas and will implement metaChunk along with a new CMS and template engine that I'm working on. You won't ever know it is there, it will just work. You click a link and all this stuff will be friends and spit out pages for your enjoyment.

First of all, welcome to Doomstar.com and the home of Doomstar Intelligence. The site just went into development today, APR 15, 2009, so please be patient while things are put in place. This corporation initially exists to test web-based applications being developed for a general-public EVE tools site launching later this year. Future business plans for this corp will be announced in detail at a later date, however, the corp's general focus will be as a for-hire covert operations and procurement services provider.
As for this site, regular content will be available for the general public in the near future.