A new look!
28/08/07 in: Website
Welcome
to my new look website! This is a complete overhaul from the ground
up so if you find anything that's not working as it looks like it
should please use the contact form from the menu on the left to let
me know. If you do so then please don't forget to tell me what
operating system and browser you are using so I can investigate the
issue and try to fix it.
There are a number of reasons why I've taken the time out to completely rework the site...
The old site was great and I was actually pretty proud of it because although it didn't look like much, it was completely hand written by myself in PHP and MySQL. As with all things though there was a problem with this. It meant that just adding a quick feature to the site just wasn't viable. There was no such thing as 'a quick feature'. Certainly two of the key things that I always wanted to improve were the home page and the repairs section which has been growing for some time now.
So, having been a Mac convert for the last three years now I figured I would go on the hunt for some nice software to help me in a nice drag and drop way instead of coding it all by hand (as seems to be the Mac way of things) and after trying a few different things I tried RapidWeaver. The demo allows you to create up to three pages but by the time I got to my second I could see that it was great and it would meet my needs perfectly. If you use a Mac, are into producing web pages as a hobby (or maybe it's even professional level?) then you probably owe yourself half an hour to check it out, assuming you haven't already!
Apart from the swanky new look one of the first things you will notice is that the home page is now a fully featured blog. Whether I will use it for anything other than quick site updates will remain to be seen but at least the opportunity exists now for me to use it for more if I feel like it. There is a proper archive by year and an RSS feed. Go ahead and subscribe to the feed - you know you want to! (see your browser's documentation for how to do that if you don't already know how).
The other main change comes in the repair section. It was starting to get out of hand having all the different repairs listed in the menu. For a while now I've been using Circus Ponies Notebook to record my logs on my Mac and it comes with a handy "export to HTML" feature. Up until now though I didn't really know how to embed this into my own code but now that I'm using RapidWeaver it's a doddle and i've been able to get all the repair logs down to a single link in the menu and in a format that I think you'll love.
That's about it for now, all the old content should be here and in theory I should be able to add to things a lot easier. If you have any comments to make, please go ahead and let me know!
There are a number of reasons why I've taken the time out to completely rework the site...
The old site was great and I was actually pretty proud of it because although it didn't look like much, it was completely hand written by myself in PHP and MySQL. As with all things though there was a problem with this. It meant that just adding a quick feature to the site just wasn't viable. There was no such thing as 'a quick feature'. Certainly two of the key things that I always wanted to improve were the home page and the repairs section which has been growing for some time now.
So, having been a Mac convert for the last three years now I figured I would go on the hunt for some nice software to help me in a nice drag and drop way instead of coding it all by hand (as seems to be the Mac way of things) and after trying a few different things I tried RapidWeaver. The demo allows you to create up to three pages but by the time I got to my second I could see that it was great and it would meet my needs perfectly. If you use a Mac, are into producing web pages as a hobby (or maybe it's even professional level?) then you probably owe yourself half an hour to check it out, assuming you haven't already!
Apart from the swanky new look one of the first things you will notice is that the home page is now a fully featured blog. Whether I will use it for anything other than quick site updates will remain to be seen but at least the opportunity exists now for me to use it for more if I feel like it. There is a proper archive by year and an RSS feed. Go ahead and subscribe to the feed - you know you want to! (see your browser's documentation for how to do that if you don't already know how).
The other main change comes in the repair section. It was starting to get out of hand having all the different repairs listed in the menu. For a while now I've been using Circus Ponies Notebook to record my logs on my Mac and it comes with a handy "export to HTML" feature. Up until now though I didn't really know how to embed this into my own code but now that I'm using RapidWeaver it's a doddle and i've been able to get all the repair logs down to a single link in the menu and in a format that I think you'll love.
That's about it for now, all the old content should be here and in theory I should be able to add to things a lot easier. If you have any comments to make, please go ahead and let me know!
