Website Archives

Yet another change to the website. We've lightened the background color and gone with an icon theme for the menu across the top, then moved the detailed menu to the bottom whilst removing the big footer. There's also a wavy line graphic at the back of the menus to add a bit of artistic flare.

Just decided the old header and footer was a bit old school and took up too much space. So I changed it.

There's still a bit of work to be done here. I need to figure out what I want the logos to look like and add them in. The ones that are there now are only intended to be temporary. I will probably also do something so that when you mouse over the icons, they either change or the background changes.

Other changes in this batch include removing the “blog bar” at the side of the blogs as this was redundant except for the search box which I've now put on all of the blog pages instead. Everything else on the blog bar is repeated in the detailed menu, so there's not really a need for it.

Got round to doing a bit of tidying up. Rather than writing a blog article each time I post photos onto the site (so that a link is provided in the weekly email), I've edited the way the photos are posted so the weekly mail will automatically pick up a section and provide links to photos if a new category is added.

I'd had a few comments that there was too much on the ExPerryMental page so most people missed the most interesting thing being the ability to enter text and have it move round the screen. I've still kept the full page (on the link just provided), but have created an ExPerryMental Home Page that can be used to access either the full page or:

• Bounce that just has the logo floating round the screen and the ability to play music.
• Chequers that just allows you to have the background show different patterns and colors.
• Text Play (the most popular) that just has the text placement and rotation functions.

Finally, a few changes to the home page and the creation of a genesis page all of which is described in the EBR Business Plan Revealed blog article.

Well, this weekend's last frantic creativity has been to setup a web front end to my mail server. Rather than simply downloading one of the hundreds of free ones, I decided to write my own. Why? I have no idea at all! It just seemed like a good idea at the time so I did it.

After pulling a very frustrating all nighter to get this up and running, it's now there. It's a little bit more complicated than you think, especially when you want to deal with attachments. You need to build up a Mulit-purpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) message. So I've read many articles on yet another standard to abide by.

Interesting thing is that the php tools I'm using didn't seem to work out of the box as I thought. There's a function called imap_mail_compose that you use to build up your email (construct it right to conform to the standards), but it doesn't actually tell you how to send the bloody thing once you'd created it. Through trial and error, I managed to get it to work by deconstructing it and putting the header in one bit and the body in another bit of the imap_mail function that actually sends it.

During this endeavor I had problems with my "mulit." No, not a bad haircut spelled badly, but the word "mulit" spelled badly. I needed to set a header type to "TYPEMULTIPART" and screwed up. But that did allow me to find out that you can create your own header records, so I include a turtlehead status with all of mine rather than using something inane like "importance" or "sensitivity."

So why call it Turtlehead Mailer? Well, that's because it's not a technology break through, more of a technology poke through, and it allows me to spread more crap across the cyber world. So look out - if your screen turns brown, you may have been hit by a turtlehead mail.

As we get close to Christmas, I'm not going to be taking on any major development projects, but there is time to clean up some things. As an example, I've enhanced the main vote page so that the legend centers (which it has to for this week's vote as the options are rather lengthy) on the graph.

One of the main things I've been waiting to do, but needed more data is to make the archives a little better to view. There are now three ways to look at the blog archives:
Browse by titleBrowse 10 listings at a time

Browse the full list

Who can forget classics like Cheeseburger Murders or Mr O's Invasion of the Trevors? Well, most people probably which is why I've created this means of taking a look back at what was.

I've also provided the same archiving access to the historic votes. In addition here, you can view the vote as a single entry and it will display the graph of the vote results.

Wow! In my continuing effort to produce stuff that nobody will use, I've created some exceedingly useless pages in the Fun Stuff section. I've titled this new epic ASCII Fun as it kind of plays on the ASCII character set.

Basically, you get to type into a field and instead of entering letters, it enters the corresponding ASCII code of the letter you typed. And - it changes the color of the page to a color derived from the ASCII code.

You may well ask why? And as soon as you figure it out, let me know, because I haven't got a bloody clue. I was messing around with something else and needed to find the ASCII keys to use the left and right arrows to move through database records and I kind of ended up creating these pages.

The one positive thing is that I've used this new knowledge to create a manual slideshow, so, if you want to view a slideshow and determine the speed for each picture you can either by clicking on a “next” or “previous” button or by using the left and right arrows.

In the meantime, amuse yourself with the ASCII Fun

For anyone who's interested, the upgrade of all the server software has been completed. During the last three weeks I've been testing newer versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP on the development box. A couple of minor changes were required to some of the code. (I had a work around for how the post function dealt with quotes ["] when submitting from fields that seems to have been addressed so the work around has been partially removed).

For anyone who's not interested, why did you bother reading the previous paragraph?

Originally this article was going to be title “Ginormous” and lead in by saying that I've not played with anything this big since the week Karen left me on my own. But that left me with a couple of problems. First, you'd know I've been dreaming again. Second, it doesn't quite fit with the “bar humbug” misery I try to spread this time of year to counteract the mindless happiness that goes on.

So, what the hell am I even talking about? As may have been hinted at from the forum entries and a previous blog Quiet Week, I've been working on redesigning the way the photos section works. And it's now complete! And you shouldn't be able to notice! Hence the appropriate title of “what's the point of it all?”

All of the previous structure is still in place, so if you have old links they will still work for the time being. If you go to the main photos page you can still follow links to the same things as before (although on different pages) and there's the addition of a photo database link that will take you to a selection screen that enables you to customize your own selection criteria rather than being limited to the links that are provided. You can also broaden your search if you want as I've thrown over more photos than the ones on the standard links, so if, for example, you wanted to see more photos of leopards you could do so.

The thing is that absolutely nobody is going to want to do this. It's going to be a completely unused function even by the relatives as they're only going to be interested in the “published” photos at the end of each link.

More coding went into this than any other part of the website as it's fully integrated with Adobe Photoshop, so I can manage and publish photos from there. Even more coding than the home page (and yet the majority of the change is transparent to everyone as it should look and feel the same as before the change). Technically it's brilliant. But nobody is going to appreciate it or even care about it.

In all likelihood this could be one of the biggest wastes of time. And yet infinitely satisfying which I'm sure says something about me.

I've put some photos up under the San Francisco Bay Area section of a couple of walks that we've done:

The funniest thing that happened was a very strange comment by Karen. Part of this walking malarkey is intended to allow me to get to photograph some of the wildlife. Rather difficult when you're accompanied by a squeaky stroller and a noisy two year old. There was one point when I saw a dragonfly and thought it would be cool if I could get a picture of it when William came plowing through obviously scaring everything. I made the comment that the combined noise of the stroller and William were scaring everything away. To which Karen replied “What? Do you mean the animals or the grass?”

I didn't answer the question at the time as I don't think I would have come out with anything constructive. It did amuse me for the rest of the walk as I had visions of grass jumping out of the ground and running away.

This site now has forums! I've created a section for forums. Levels have been created to group the forums and make it easy to find what you're looking for (or at least give you a fighting chance). The logic behind it is simply:

Category -> Sub-Category -> Thread Title -> Thread Details

Each level is a one to many relationship, so, for example, each sub-category can have many thread titles. A simple example would be a category of “Sport” could have a sub-category of “Football” then a thread created on “England need a new Manager” (just to be topical) and then the thread would contain individual thoughts / comments related to that topic.

Full instructions on the use of the forum have been created or you can go directly to the forum home page.

I’ve changed the appearance of the website. There is now a blue background to all the pages instead of white – whoooo! What’s more interesting is the home page. I’ve jazzed this up to make it a little bit more intuitive and to get more content on there. Note that you can click on the boxes at the bottom (photo/video and vote/fun stuff) to change the view in the panel.

You’ll probably also note that I’ve changed the menus. The big buttons are gone in favor of a simple bar that brings up drop down menus when you mouse over. Again, this is designed to make it more intuitive as it allows for more detail (and more links) to be included without taking up a lot of space.

Forgive me if you come across any errors. I had to change quite a bit for some of this. If you do find any, please let me know.