BIOS LEVEL

Since I replaced my aging Asus Z71V notebook with a Macbook a month or so ago, I’ve been without Linux. My desktop is set up more for gaming than regular usage, so naturally it’s running Vista. This has become an issue over the last few weeks while trying to review some of the fantastic products we’ve received. BIOS_LEVEL’s primary focus is Linux compatibility and performance, so how is that to be measured without Linux?

I’ve contemplated setting up virtual machines on either the MacBook or Desktop, but Linux wouldn’t have direct control over the majority of the hardware, so it’d be useless in most cases. We’re waiting on a new motherboard from EVGA to put together a new Core2 Duo machine that should solve this problem, adding another box to our lines (dedicated to Linux).

My temporarily solution has been to use Knoppix for all the minor hardware we’re received, such as mice and headsets, but for an upcoming review, I’m going to have to set up a full install on a machine to get certain things working. Wish me luck!

We’ve chosen Revver as our primary video host instead of YouTube. Why? By default, Revver licenses videos with a Creative Commons license, a sort of open source license for artistic creations like music, video, and prose. I’ve also found that its player works better on Linux than YouTube’s. Should a viewer be at a computer that doesn’t have Flash installed, he or she will another format in which to watch it, since Revver has a QuickTime version available too.

We may put a video on YouTube here and there for greater exposure, but we’re confident in our decision to choose Revver for the majority of our videos.

Though it doesn’t support it officially, Revver’s engine does seem to work with Ogg, a particular favorite container around these parts.

Be sure to check out BIOS LEVEL videos on Revver.

We’ve started a fan page on Facebook.

BIOS LEVEL fan page

Fan pages allow sites to send updates via Facebook’s message system. It’s a great way to stay updated if you don’t like using our newsfeeds.

We’ve now published three reviews. From BIOS_LEVEL’s front page, you can read our reviews on Crucial’s Ballistix Tracer RAM, Thermaltake’s Soprano DX, and the Ratpadz XT. I’m very pleased that we’ve been able to review three products in our first month of being open. We’ve also kept up with posting 2-3 news articles a day as well. There is always something new on the homepage from day to day, but more external links than original content.

This will change. We’ve got some downtime before more products arive, so we’re writing a few articles based around Linux. Some may deal with software, while others with hardware, or a mix of both. Sufficient to say, I think the content will be quite original and hopefully popular. We need to find more Linux-related sites to advertise with. To aid in this, we’re also going to have to do a lot more advertising than what we’ve done so far. We need to reach out to other Linux-related sites to advertise our reviews and articles. We have high hopes and aspirations, so I can only hope we’re able to meet them.

As a side note, BIOS_LEVEL is now in the top ten for the Google search term “Linux Advocacy”. Might be time to update some of the SEO in the meta tags. Aaaaaaaaaaand, we’ve got to get a new theme for this blog. This one is just too thin.

BIOS_LEVEL just published it’s first product review, the Ratpadz XT mousepad. I’m pretty excited. I finished writing it at 4:30AM, and sent out a few e-mails to other review sites to get some linkage for today. It’s time to try to drive some traffic and give the site a bit of a stress test.

I’ve got another review already in the works, as I previewed a week or so ago in the previous post. But we’re still waiting on more products to arrive in the mail!

As we near our opening, we realized we almost overlooked an important aspect on our website: an RSS feed. This blog has it’s own feed, but the BIOS_LEVEL main page has no feed of its own. While I was looking over this, many important questions arose:

1. How many items should we display?
2. Should we include articles and news, or a separate feed for each?
3. Should we allow links and images in the feed?

Luckily, it didn’t take long to decide on what to and what not to include. The final product gathers the latest product reviews and news feed. It orders them in time of posting, so everything is always up to date. This is not only great for us, but also for the sites that we feature in our news feed.

The only issue I ran in to was the merging of several database tables into one. Rather than query to MySQL database twice: once for reviews, and once for news, I chose to make a single query using the UNION term. It merges two queries that have an equal number of columns into a single table, where I can sort the entries as I please. The final product looked like something as below. Slightly complicated to read, but oh so fantastic in usage!

$query = "SELECT title,shortdesc,'a' AS type,UNIX_TIMESTAMP(id) FROM articles LIMIT 3 UNION SELECT t.topic_title AS title,p.post_text AS shortdesc,'n' AS type,t.topic_id AS id FROM phpbb_topics t,phpbb_posts_text p,phpbb_users u WHERE t.forum_id = 10 AND u.user_id = t.topic_poster AND t.topic_first_post_id = p.post_id LIMIT 7";

Oh, and you can’t subscribe to it yet. We’re putting it under feedburner in the morning.

We’ve all had our hands full the past two weeks, as most of us are staff with Pittco, which just held it’s 8th event this past weekend. Those of us who aren’t staff with Pittco were also there. As a result, progress was a little hampered, but we’ve still sent out quite a bit of e-mails looking for products to review. We’ve got a few in, so this is just a small preview of what’s to come in the next week or two.

Finally, our content management system is nearing completion. Don’t ask me what took so long, but between vacation and a slightly-renewed interest in Unreal Tournament 2004, there was a nice long delay in there. Now, however, I’m happy to report that I’m back to working on the site on a regular (nightly) basis.

Surprisingly, we’ve got a few products coming our way in the mail. I can’t tell you what they are yet, but maybe I’ll post some pictures of the shipping boxes to give you an idea when they come in. Stick around and tell your friends, BIOS_LEVEL is officially opening its doors in a few weeks.

BIOS_LEVEL’s main page is currently down until we make the forums more secure. Since we use phpBB’s login system, our homepage is disabled when the board is disabled. I’ll take a look at this in a day or two, I should be able to add in an if statement checking to see if the board disabled or not. If it’s disabled, then it simply disables the session management within PHP. Problem solved, maybe?

Until we’re back up, why not check out my new server case, Colin’s adventure of installing City of Heroes on Linux, or Zack’s new lolnamil.

Finally back with some progress updates (I’ve managed to tear myself away from World of Warcraft, evil thing…). Once again, I’m focusing on the Articles & Reviews section, for some hopefully obvious reasons.

“Read More” linking to the article’s URL now pops up. The URL is more or less the same, but with the article’s id (a unix timestamp) thrown on the end.

http://www.bioslevel.com/index.php/reviews/aid/1167847140

Ideally, I want to get around to editing the whole system so something like the following works:

http://www.bioslevel.com/reviews/apples_2007_domination

It wouldn’t be too hard to, just a little modification of the code and .htaccess. I’m not going to worry about it for now, as we should be focusing on the content and overall site appearance first.

Once you click on the “Read More” link, the article’s title pops up. Also, the location on the top bar is altered to reflect your new location, tracing all the back from each child category to the site’s front page. The CSS needs adjusted to make the link colors for these more appealing, but you get the idea of what it’s doing. Thusly, depending on how late I stay up tonight and how early I wake up tomorrow, we could have a “working” reviews section by the weekend.

Stay tuned!