Thanks to Johannes, Reflection (the theme that I use for my photoblog) has become very popular over the last couple of weeks. Apologies again for those who tried in vein to download it whilst I had server issues – that should hopefully all be sorted out now.
This post is just to let you know that development is still very much alive and well and I have a bit of free time to do some work on it over the next few days. Here’s a preliminary list of improvements:
- Create a simple admin interface for easier modification of header image and little features that I’ve hard-coded in.
- Add support for tags – really, I don’t see the point in adding category support at this point in time.
- General code improvements to make the animations a bit faster, and port everything over to the latest version of mootools.
- Clean up CSS – much simpler ways of making the drop-down menus work.
- Fix rendering support in IE6 since it’s currently all broken.
Please let me know if you want anything in particular, either in the comments or drop me an e-mail.
6:24 pm | Posted in Web Development
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Like pretty much everybody else out there, I use Google Analytics to help me figure out how much traffic I’m getting and where it’s coming from. And finally, I’m starting to get some more visitors!
Until very recently, it looked like this site was pretty much blacklisted by Google. I’d type in my name – in quotes – and find this site on about the tenth page. And hell, it’s not like my name is even common. But I noticed a week or so ago that I was getting 30-40 visits per day, which is far higher than is usually logged.
Pretty much the most common keyword is linked into my CheapVPS review; in fact, I was pretty surprised to see that it’s actually the fourth result for CheapVPS. I’ll be writing a follow-up to that story soon.
Other than that, better photoblog integration is on the way, just as soon as I can find some time. We’ve got about ten different things going on depending on the day thanks to Christmas, and finding the time to sit down and figure out something to write is pretty slim (hence why I”m writing this at 3am… whoops).
3:22 am | Posted in Personal, Site Development, Web Development
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The lack of activity from myself has been quite profound lately, but regretfully the thing that’s made me finally get around to writing is the closure of Sayonara’s blog. Unfortunately he feels that he can’t dedicate either time or money to maintaining the site and giving it the attention it needs, hence he’s shut up shop and called it a day.
I believe we’ve both been around for a similar amount of time, and personally I rather enjoyed reading the site so it is a big shame to see it go. So if you want some free hosting, then send me an e-mail me or something.
I can certainly relate to his position. I find that the main problem is finding the motivation to sit down, think about what needs to be said and then actually write the damn entry. The last two paragraphs, for instance, have taken approximately twenty minutes to write because I am only writing in-between simulation runs. Even then I’m not entirely satisfied with what’s been written, and unfortunately most of my posts come out either as rather dull or overly sarcastic – hopefully I am neither in real life!
Another, somewhat different problem is that half the reason for this blog existing is the photography side of things. With all that’s been going on at Warwick over the past few weeks, I just haven’t found enough motivation to get out there and take some shots. However this will change soon, as I have enough money and justification to get myself a shiny new 40D in the next few days!
But fear not – I will soldier on and continue to blog about useless, dull, and mostly meaningless things because I enjoy doing it. Watch this space.
7:07 pm | Posted in Site Development, Web Development
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So, after nothing for almost two months, the first post is going to be about changing servers! How interesting? No. But read on for a review of my new hosts after two weeks.
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Continue reading “CheapVPS: a 2-week Review”…
11:15 pm | Posted in Site Development, Web Development
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Thought I’d test out the latest Firefox 3 release (codenamed Gran Paradiso) to test out the apparent speed increases. Have to say that I’m bloody impressed – there is a very noticeable speed increase, especially with the JavaScript effects on the homepage. Apparently that’s all thanks to Gecko 1.9′s usage of Cairo as a new backend.
Funnily enough, I also downloaded and tried out Apple’s Safari for a few sites. I think it lasted about 20 seconds before it got closed and completely destroyed from my computer. Don’t know what it is about that browser, but I absolutely hate it.
Anyway, even though it’s currently at an alpha 7 release, everything’s reasonably stable at this point so you might want to try it out.
9:32 pm | Posted in Apple, Computing, Web Development
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After many, many days of painful procrastination, I’ve eventually got around to implementing some of the changes to the layout and improvements to the JavaScript running the site. Photos in the Photoblog (and indeed on the index page) are displayed much differently now, as a smaller thumbnail; partially it looks better, but mostly it improves the page load-times.
Other than this, I finally fixed some very nasty IE6 rendering bugs on the sidebar. As you can see, the advert has changed shape; this was the main cause of most of my woes. Eventually the sidebar could expand, but this requires me re-editing images that I don’t have access to at the moment. And the JavaScript tabby slidey thing now works on IE6.
Hurrah! Now back to checking my e-mail with the frequency of an OCD sufferer.
8:50 pm | Posted in Site Development, Web Development, XHTML/CSS
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It’s taken pretty much all day, but finally the new layout is ready. It’s been changed a lot since the last time, since I wasn’t very happy with how it turned out. Let me know what you think!
Apart from layout changes, there’s a shiny new toolbar using mootools 1.1. Also, the AJAX search now actually works – shock horror. I’m planning some more exciting stuff tomorrow, as well as reverting to my old lightbox layout with the reflections.
Currently, IE6 support is crapped up, but I really can’t be bothered going through the CSS tonight trying to find the odd pixel jumps here and there which messes everything. I hate IE.
11:54 pm | Posted in Site Development, Web Development, XHTML/CSS
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After a really good day in terms of web development work (not so much in terms of revision though), I’ve spent a bit of time tidying up the JavaScript and WordPress plugins to make them a little better in terms of bandwidth and usability.
I decided that I didn’t want the hassle of fiddling with moo.fx every 20 seconds, so I’ve upgraded everything to use mootools; basically the same thing, but more modular and generally quicker to load and render. Unfortunately this meant that the script I use to display my photos, Litebox, wasn’t going to work any longer as it depended upon prototype.lite.
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Continue reading “Shininess Increased”…
7:24 pm | Posted in Computing, Site Development, Web Development, XHTML/CSS
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Well, after an extraordinarily long period of development (over 2 years at least), vbLatex has finally made it to a public release. You can read all about it here.
vbLatex is a relatively simple plugin that uses dvipng and LaTeX to bring pretty math rendering to your vBulletin forums. I’ve gotten a fair number of e-mails about it, as it’s the system that we’re currently using at SFN – go and visit to see it in action.
The concept is Steve Mayer’s latexrender class; I felt I could improve somewhat on the this class but right now there’s no significant improvements, other than the switch from ImageMagick to dvipng.
Right now development is at what I regard as an early beta stage. Basically, I haven’t worked on the script for a good 9 months and I don’t plan to add any significant revisions until at least July due to my preparation for exams and other committments (this blog included).
There is a good chance that this could break vBulletin at some point, and your users simply won’t be able to see any threads. If you can’t figure out what’s wrong, then feel free to e-mail me.
Anyway, enjoy, and hopefully there will be more updates to it reasonably soon!
12:11 am | Posted in Computing, LaTeX, PHP/MySQL, SFN, Web Development
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