Welcome to the new and improved site
Latest update:
Bob has gone the way of the dodo... RIP bob! So, I've replaced him with a shiny new system! Debbie v2 is now hosting all the sites and is a lot quicker than bob, though a little noisier! I'm hoping to migrate the servers onto Xen based virtualisation, but it's going to have to wait until I've got some spare time!
Previous updates:
July 2007
Just a quick update this time around. I've added a bit of javascript code that allows IE 6 to render transparent PNG images correctly. I tried the site from work and it looks horrible due to Internet Explorer not adhering to standards... I got it from here, it's simple enough to get working and it seems to work OK :-).
June 2007
I've now migrated the sites off debbie and onto bob. There shouldn't be any real difference, but it means less noise and power usage for me :-) The gallery pages are loading a little slower, but I'll be upgrading bob in the near future and patching php and installing an optimiser, so hopefully that'll speed things up a little!
January 2007
Yet another update! I've changed the backgrounds, added some pop up text for the menu system and moved things around a little to make it work better on smaller screens. I've also added a fair few links to the site, so clicky on the menu linky!
A more geeky version is that the set of JPEG files for the backgrounds has been replaced by a single PNG image. This file is partially transparent and the menu layers the image on top of itself to create the darkened hover effect. The popup text is done entirely in CSS using text inside 'span' tags, then posistioned to the top of the menu on hover.
16/12/2006
The latest incarnation shouldn't look any different from the previous incarnation, but the PHP page generating the site has been slimmed down (from 7.5k to 3.9k). Mainly through my discovering the joy of PHP functions :-)
I've also upgraded Apache to use the mod_gzip module, which compresses the outbound HTML page for faster transmission and less bandwidth usage. Having tested it on the site, most pages are about 60%-90% smaller to send to a web browser! This should make the page load quicker and have less impact on my web access!
7/12/2007
The basic layout the same, but made it look somewhat nicer than the 'grey on grey' look that I had before.
I've also updated the way the site works on the server. Previously it was just serving HTML pages, now the pages are stored in a mySQL database and retrieved by PHP and displayed. The links page is dynamically generated, returning all the links in the database and formatting them nicely into HTML.
The links page is a little sparse at the moment, but I'm moving links across from my bookmarks to the page, so there should be some more there soon!
I've also written a page that I can add/edit pages without too much effort. Took me a couple of days to figure the code out, but it all seems to be working now.
