Following a request from the blosxom mailing list, I’ll be packaging up the flavour files and associated style sheets used on this blog for download. I’ll post here when they are done. I’ll need to remove some “specific” bits which won’t make sense for other people first tho 🙂
Site News
Changes and updates to this website are reported here. Feel free to ignore them if you’re following along via feed.
New Domains Registered!
Well, just for something new, I’ve just registered dentedreality.org and dentedreality.net at Go Daddy. The DNS won’t have quite kicked in yet, but shouldn’t be too long (a day or so should do it).
And Then It Was Live!
Yes, I finally got my new site live, and it all appears to be working, including the new and fancy, blosxom-driven “Notes” section.
This has taken quite a bit of work to get live, but I am quite happy with the way that things have turned out. The main addition(s) that I want to make at this stage are writebacks on my Notes section, so that I can hear what you guys out there have to say about things, rather than this being a 1-way only information device 🙂
Keep an eye out for the ability to comment on my postings here in the nearish future (hopefully!). When I get it working, it should also allow for trackbacks, so you can register comments on my posts on your own blogs if you like
More Projects To Come
The main 2 sections of the site to be completed are the projects (still have some micro-sites to put together here) and the search system. I will also need to bring across the copyright info from the old site, but that will largely be copy/paste. The search system will be the most interesting part to develop, and I have some nice plans for it as well – We’ll see what I can do as far as combining 2 XML documents and an XSLT together (server-side using PHP of course!) to create the results.
The projects really could use a little work, but I just don’t have time to work on them right now. Once the site is live, I will be working on RESTments again to get that going, and then when that is up, the projects will all receive a make-over to ensure that they work with PHP’s register_globals off and magic_quotes_gpc off as well. I will also eventually get to working on new versions of webpad (which I have some great plans for) and AvantBlog (want to make a few versions, so that there is one for each major type if possible.
So now, with no other external contracts to take up my time, it is just a matter of not falling asleep and then all I have to do is my website, should mean that it’s up within a week or 2.
Good idea for the calendar in the archives…
Just had a good idea, it’d be nice to have the calendar display the month which the current (requested) post was made in. So if I just go directly to /archives/2003/12/* then it would display the month of December, 2003 in the calendar.
Shouldn’t be a hard modification to make, and I only have to make it to the archive processing script – so should be easy. I’ll add it before the site goes live.
Slowly, slowly…
I am making progress on the new site. It is taking longer than I had hoped, but that is mostly because I actually took the time to enjoy my holiday, rather than spending the whole thing working on this 🙂
I am currently working on the Services section, which will include details about all of the things that I can do for clients, including some “elevator-pitch” style descriptions of what some of the things mean, since it’s likely that they will be new concepts for a lot of people I deal with. I am going to be trying to simplify things as much as possible with the descriptions, and provide examples or diagrams if at all possible!
It’s times like these that I wish CELIA was active already and filled with useful information and resources, then my job would be simple 🙂
Trudging Along
Work on my site is coming along. I have added in blosxom v1.1, which went pretty much without a hitch. I had to modify my template slightly, but that was more because of my dodgy custom handling, rather than anything to do with blosxom itself.
I’ve been spending some time on the projects section, getting the project pages up to scratch and re-formatted; it’s looking pretty good. I am taking a few of the old projects offline, because they don’t have any documentation, don’t work anymore, things like that 🙂
I’m not going to put a date on when the site will be live, but given the current progress, and the list of things to do still, I would estimate about 2 weeks. Here’s the current list;
- Projects Sections
- Blogger API (functions, classes + meta)
- phpMassMail (also requires some work to make it 4.2+ compatible, and re-format documentation to include)
- JSSearch (would like to get some more information/documentation/examples included)
- JSValidate (want to update this to include the ability to open a popup window rather than an alert – optional)
- Client work and websites
- Contact Form
- Layout/design
- Contingency design
- Processing/handling
- Result/output page
- Search System
- Layout/Design (of the results, as well as extra options, defining manual entries etc)
- Processing system (integrating my manual results with Google/XooMLe’s results)
- Management of my manual entries (and a decent name for them 🙂
So there we go. That’s what I’ll be working on in the near future. And for those interested, I will be creating a custom search system, which integrates Google‘s results for within my website (using XooMLe) with a selection of manual “Top Picks” or “Best Bets” which I have selected for certain terms. I have the rough idea planned out already, just need to implement it in code. I will probably make the code available for download once it’s complete as well, so keep an eye out for that 🙂
That’s all for now – time to get back to life.