I’ve decided to take some time out of development of DXAnywhere to give everyone some details about how the development progress is going, if you follow either @m3php or @dxanywhere your probably aware of most things but not everything gets tweeted.
Since August the development of DXAnywhere has increased a fair amount and from when I gave an overview to the project at the RSGB HFC the system has changed, and the features have improved.
The current system is focused on 3 sections you have the dx cluster, which provides access to the cluster network allowing you to pick out the spots your after either by watching the main list, or you can select the band you wish to look at. Within this section you can also set DX alerts these can either be sent via email, twitter and soon SMS, the system checks the database every 5 minutes using a perl script then sends out any alerts which need actioned.
Example of a Tweet
DX Cluster also allows you to view the solar data in graph format either in monthly or yearly format, giving you a good idea about whats happening with conditions or perhaps the lack of conditions. We are also sending the solar data to twitter using @DXAnywhere this is done on an hourly basis.
Total Spots Graph
You can also find a number of statistics graphs showing total spots, bands and spots, you can easily spot the major contests on the yearly spots graph!
The next section is Profile, this is the social hub on DXAnywhere which still has a long way to go, the basis of this section was my final university project so theres plenty of bugs to fix but it allows you to create a profile and become friends with other users.
After this we have the Applications section which will evolve over time currently you can use the prefix guide if you forget a prefix, and there’s a very early beta of our mobile logger which allows you to quickly store QSO details and download the ADIF for your main logbook later.
None of all this development hasn’t problem free the nature of the system consumes a lot of processor power and memory with the large amounts of data flowing around, the alerts system has had a number of rewrites I finally switched the script from PHP to Perl which fixed the major issues, which has stopped the server from crashing!
Currently in development is the sms system this is not only for alerts but will also be integrated within the rest of the site, allowing you to send details of prefixes and even when someone makes a comment on your profile, this will be subscription based but the costs have been kept to a minimum. Next due a new iteration is the mobile website, which will integrate all the features of the browser based desktop version.
To sum things up development of DXAnywhere is strong, features are being added on a weekly basis so its worth signing up and taking a poke around to see what you can do.