My Website

Hi, everyone! I hope you have had another wonderful week. This past week I focused on the plug-in BuddyPress and started working with another plug-in called JetPack. BuddyPress has great chemistry with OneAll because BuddyPress allows people to register under an account on your website and interact with others much like any other social media website. JetPack is a WordPress extension from WordPress.com itself. It allows people to subscribe, share and many other basic functions that may come with a blogging site or any website for that matter. 

To go into more detail on BuddyPress and relate it back to my research, it has allowed me to control information people must enter when registering for an account. For example, generally when you create an account on any website, you have to enter the basic information: your name and email, gender and age, maybe a description of yourself for your bio. These are all things I can control with BuddyPress. Once a person has registered their account and activated it, they are allowed to, like most other social media websites (this is the basic idea behind BuddyPress), interact with others. You can friend them, update your social status, post to a wall which can be liked, shared with others, and commented on, private message others, and much more. I think it is a really unique plug-in. I will be sharing the link to my website, so you people can go play around with it. It's not a perfect website, so there are many things that need work, but that's not important to me. Some buttons don't do anything and I don't need them to -- they are more just decoration. Just have fun exploring: My Website. 

As for JetPack, I have only just recently started implementing it. As you read in the beginning, that is what it does. I am not all up to date on what it does because I am still learning about it. Relating it back to my research, I know that it will allow for improved analytics and sharing with social media that could possibly be attacked -- I am not saying it will be attacked. It is very unlikely. I will be able to share more about this plug-in next week.

So, now I will give you a few tips when navigating my website site. When you first register and enter in the required information, you will be asked to activate the account. An email will be sent to your email address where you click on the link and activate it much like any other. It will probably be in your Spam, so make sure to check there. Another rule of thumb, some buttons don't work and the website may change on you. That just means i'm working on it. Other than that, go crazy, explore, give feedback. I will obviously be on my website from time to time, so if you want to talk to me, just message me there if you can find which account I am on. I have a lot. 

This is pretty exciting for me. Being able to run this website with people on it provides a cool feeling that I can't quite describe. I hope you like the website and I will be looking forward to seeing you on it. I hope you have a fun and exciting weekend. Signing off, Adam.

OneAll

Hello everyone! Welcome to my blog's second week! To start of this post, I would like to give you an overview of what I have done, and then go a little bit more in depth further on. To start this week's work, I was given some plug-ins to use on my website, but this week I focused on OneAll, a social networking API, or application public interface. I will be doing more than one plug-in a week, but I also had to setup and get my website working before I could actually isolate and observe what the plug-in actually did. 

WordPress, the open-source content management system or CMS, is what I built my website on. Using Pantheon, a website management platform, I was able to create and host a WordPress website for free using a provided domain. Ironically, it was first a blogging website and still is a popular one. I will insert a picture of what the cover of my website looks after this paragraph. Now, OneAll, the social networking API, allows users to login to my website using various social media, whether that is Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Plus, the list goes on. After initializing the social media with my account, a process i'm not going to bother you with, I would be able to take a look at information that that user has when signing in under that social media. For example, under google plus, I could be able to gain access to your exact location, while in Twitter, I can really only gain access to your email. Wouldn't you feel safer if you logged in under your Twitter account instead of your Google Plus? Now, of course, when logging in, it will tell you what the website devs and admins will gain access to. Just make sure to actually read it. Don't worry, it's not as long as the terms and conditions where you just hit accept. So this is just one example of what my research this week has given me. There are many other plug-ins that I plan to research in the future that are much more in-depth, but here is the first one.

I also figure you viewers want to know what my work looks like. Since I work from home, I guess I will have to take a picture of my desk to show you where I am whenever I am working. Here it is:

I hope you have an idea of where I spend half of my day now.

Anyways, I hope you enjoyed reading about my second week, also the first week where I really got to dive into my work. Have a nice weekend!

The Most Interesting

Hello everyone! I hope you have had a wonderful week. I'm going to start off by saying this has been one of the most interesting weeks of my life. Quite a bold statement, I know, but I can back it up. But before I start my tangent, I would like to talk about the progress I have made on my research.

Due to events that happened this week, which I will talk about later, I did not really get too involved in my research until this Friday (that being the day this is posted) due to time constraints for both me and my mentor (no longer on-site). We met today to talk about about the future of my research and my work with him. You all know what the research is; however, after our long meeting we have finally landed on a solid starting point. No longer will I be working on the internet presence of Fighter Base specifically (I will still update you all if you want to know about its progress). Instead, I will be tinkering with a software called WordPress. Essentially this is one of many means to create your own website, and, with the use of Pantheon, a website management platform, I will be able to test a false website created by me through security plug-ins which will allow me to imitate what goes on on any website when you perform certain tasks such as signing up for a subscription through your Facebook account. All of this will allow me to gain the necessary knowledge I need to help you, an average consumer, make the correct the judgement call when faced with a risky situation online. I hope this all makes sense. I would have been doing a very similar thing with Fighter Base, but this gives me more freedom to test more theories. As a side note, I did get to test the game in all it's virtual reality goodness which is pretty exciting considering it was my first time ever using virtual reality.

Alright, so I bet a few of you are still wondering what made my week so interesting. It was just this past weekend that I was flown out to Maryland by myself to take some tests at the NSA headquarters. That's right, you read that correctly. I would have taken pictures, but this being the NSA and all, I couldn't exactly just bring my phone in and take a picture, so you'll have to just imagine what it looked like. That's not true, I do have a few pictures, but it's just some very bland trees outside my hotel room.

Anyways, I am an applicant for their summer internship where I will doing... Stuff (they haven't exactly told me yet since I don't have my security clearance). But, what was most exciting was the polygraph test I had taken. Now I can't tell you what questions they asked me nor how the polygraph works. You may be thinking to yourself: Isn't this just a lie-detector? Yes and no. It is much harder to tell the truth than you think it is. For example, there was a question that I was obviously telling the truth on -- for simplicity's sake, let's say it was murder (something I obviously haven't done)-- it still spiked. I'll leave it up to you to figure out why it would spike. I will be flying out again in the near future to take some more tests which is absolutely exciting for me. Now do you understand why this was one of the most exciting weeks of my life? Pretty cool stuff don't you think? If you have any questions, include them in your comments below and I will reply as soon as possible. Thanks for tuning in this week.