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What is Canadaka.net?

I started this site as a fun hobby site because I loved my country and have always been very patriotic, the same is true today. But Canadaka.net has grown from a small hobby site to a large growing internet community.

CKA is a site to promote Canadian patriotism and nationalism. A Canadian portal offering news, content and large forums. CKA News is a community driven social news system, your one stop shop for Canada related news. Each day members submit news from around the web, the most popular stories stay on the front-page.

The CKA Canadian Forums are one of the largest Canadian forums which offers a broad range of forum topics. With a concentration on political forums a valuable source for the latest political news and opinions across Canada.

The forums offer a very broad array of features and unique customizations, makine the CKA forums the best Canadian community online.

Aside from the active an forum & social digg-style Canadian news, CKA offers other Canadian content such as jokes, short stories, editorials, games, videos, maps, Canadian themed wallpapers, information & stats on Canada, picture galleries and a specific gallery devoted to beautiful Canadian women depicted in tasteful photographs. The entire site is community based, members can contribute to almost all parts of the site though submitting content or posting comments and ratings.

People Behind CKA

CKA remains the pride and joy of me, Trevor May. I am really the only person behind CKA at the moment, I have slowly built the site over the years and contributed much of the content. But my goal with the site was always to be the architect, I create the systems for content, and the community of members help to provide the content. So without the support of the contributing members the site wouldn't be what it is today. Credit also goes out to the forum moderators and admins, without them the site would fall apart.

CKA was always been a hobby for me, but more recently I have been devoting more time to developing it, and treating it more as a business. Although I am the sole behind the scenes person currently, I am always on the lookout for the right person to join the team, a possible partner. If you are interested, please contact me.

Canada Kicks Ass History

This is a pretty rough idea of the history of the site, my memory is not so great at times, well here we go!

I started my Canada Kicks Ass site way back in 1998. After learning basic html, I made my first version of Canada Kicks Ass on good old geocities site, everyone starts out on geocities right! The site was a simple static site, like most geocities site are/were. I then moved the site too my isp web account on uniserve.com, and used a url redirector http://zap.to/canadakicksass. The simple pure html version of the site stayed pretty much the same for a long time and unfortunately is all but lost in the depths of cyberspace. I have found a small glimpse of the site on archive.org, none of the images work though.
http://zap.to/canadakicksass on archive.org
In this period I also used another url, canadakicksass.terrashare.com. near the end of what i like to call the static days, the site was hosted on a site i worked on, hopebc.com

Sometime around May 2001 i moved the site onto Northwebs.com a small hosting/design business me and some friends started. I then changed the url for Canada Kicks Ass to http://cka.northwebs.com. At the same time is when i turned the site into a php/mysql driven site, this begins the dynamic area, and the start of the CKA community.

Here you can see one of the first versions

Then on October 30th 2001 i registered canadaka.net. The site went through many design changes, but ididn'tt really work on the site much until early spring 2002. I then started really putting some work into the site, adding content, and most of all promoting it. Submitting too search engines, link exchanges, all that good stuff. The effects of all my hard work did not begin to show up till mid summer when the hits on the site started a steep climb upward. I added more and more features to the site over the summer, and finally at the end of the summer opened the Forums. This is when the CKA Community really started to grow. At this time i moved Canadaka.net onto my own Win2k server off Northwebs.com. And now with the ever growing popularity of the site, and the growing community, is gives me more drive to work on the site. But with the size of the site getting larger, i am in need of help. I have some awesome forum moderators, some people doing wallpapers and such and used to have jmjinks doing some writing. But the site is in need of some backend help, help with the php programming. Also is in need of news posters. So if you want to contribute to Canadaka.net please email me at trevor@canadaka.net

Well that pretty much sums it up, the future looks bright, the visitors to the site continues its march upward. So what are my goals for the site i the future? To make it the best Canadian Content source on the web, and a great news source. A place where you come for all your Canadian news fixes, and community, kind of a like the neowin, slashdot, or shacknews for Canada. I want to add lots more Canadian Music and Canadian tech content.

I thank you all for visiting and supporting the site, Its Been Fun! (last update, 2004)

Technical Stuff

Here is the current hardware the site is run on. Both these rack servers are co-located at Peer1 Networks at the Harbour Center in downtown Vancouver.

Main Server (Runs Canadaka.net and various other sites)

• Dell PowerEdge 1950
• Windows Web Server 2008 R2 with IIS7 running PHP 5.x
• 2 X Intel Xeon X5460 3.15Ghz (Dual CPU'S)
• 16GB DDR ECC RAM
• 2 X 73GB U-320  SCSI 15,000 RPM hard drives

Database Server

• Dell PowerEdge R200
• Windows Server 2008 with MySQL 5.x
• Quad Core Xeon X3220 Processor 2.40GHz
• 4GB DDR2, 800MHZ
• 146GB 15K RPM SAS SCSI & 128GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD

Site Code

The core of the site has been run on phpnuke since sometime in 2001, but over the years I have modified parts of the code and made many additions. As well as writing my own modules and other custom scripts.

Mods/Hacks - This is a list of some of the mods made to the phpbb forums for CKA The Canada Kicks Ass has numerous mods, some of which are custom made. here is a list of some of the mods & hacks (NOTE: Many of the mods are only viewable when logged into the site) Recent Topics at top of forum index, collapsable forum categories saved in a cookie, view post sin last 24 hours, search topic title, detailed statistic page, report posts, moderator reported posts page, medals system(randomly viewable under avatar), Arcade!, arcade trophics(viewable under avatar), weekly music chart, staff and ranks page, country flags, gold membership(gold maple leafe beside username, no adds on site), gender mod, birthday mod, personal picture, quick reply, translate entire thread, translate psot to french or english, signature editor, points. Detailed custom profile pages, with various forum details, user details and detaisl of ways the user has contributed to the site, example here.

Forum Software: pnpBB 2.0.2x intigrated into phpNuke 7.6