Loose rumours (a.k.a. news)

Delayed launch and why

If you read this you might wonder what the news item below is about. The site was ready for launch on august the 12th and I tried to launch it, however there were complications. It turns out the webhost only supports PHP4 and not PHP5 which meant that _nothing_ worked.

So how come I can read this now you might ask. The answer is that I finally took the time to write that small page cache code and what you're getting is simply the cached pages generated locally on my machine and then uploaded to the server. Since I don't update often this isn't a problem and the end result looks all the same.

Site revamped

Yes, that's right, to everyones amazement I've _finally_ taken the time to give this site a facelift! I'm not sure how long the old site lasted, but it's probably something along the lines of 3-4 years. And the fact that I had a new one ~90% complete (it was missing the news section) on my HDD for at least 2 years just goes to show my lazyness.

The good thing about the never-launched-dust-collecting design I had on my HDD is that what you see now is mostly based on that design, except it won't look pretty in any resolution below 1024x768. I've also put together something better than the old logo, though it's still pretty lame, but hey, at least it features a cow!

So what does this all mean for you? Well, the site is now built soley upon modern techniques using so called div-elements and CSS instead of tables like the old one did. This means it should degrade nicely, i.e.: if you turn off the CSS support in your browser the site is still usable. It also means that changing the design in the future should be really simple as all that really needs to be poked at will be the CSS and any images I want to change. The new site is also nicer too look at than the old site was. The URLs have been niceified thanks to mod_rewrite, more content have become available, the previous design only featured the content now available under the 'projects' link. One downside though is that the lines have become longer which isn't a good thing, and not until CSS3 is out and implemented in all major browsers there will be a nice column-splitting fix.

The backend have also been completely recoded from PHP4 with HTML and PHP all togheter in one big mess into nice OOP PHP5 with _complete_ separation of logic from presentation. This is something you want from a coding viewpoint as you won't have the to manually filter the presentation from the logic while reading the code. There's still one feature missing though that I want to add, and that's a cache. Seeing how rarely I update anything it's just a waste of CPU cycles letting PHP generate all the pages whenever someone is browsing my site. It would be better to cache the generated XHTML into files and serve those instead, the server would still have to execute a little PHP for that, but it'd be far less than now.

Anyway, enjoy the new site, I'll probably tweak the design some every now and then so don't be surprised if you notice small changes since your last visit.