Craig in feed form

I have finally moved away from my previous website host, Servelocity. For too long I have been putting up with a very old and peculiar setup which has curtailed my fun to a great extent. Servelocity (and many others) seem positively backwards in their insistence on hanging on to legacy stable software.

I’ve been developing another section for my website, but I’ve been using XML processing features not available in PHP 4. Now that I’ve shifted to a more modern host and the holidays have come along I can finish off the section and add it to my website . It is something that I have been developing with help from some researchers at The Open University and hopefully will eventually be published on SourceForge.

During the switch I’ve also taken the chance to change to a much cheaper (and less flexible) hosting package. This unfortunately means that I have had to say goodbye to a lot of content which I was hosting for various people. Although I say ‘unfortunate’ I am actually rather glad to be rid of them, as I no longer have to worry unduly about breaking my website on a whim.

I changed the look of the website a little while back, as you may have noticed. It is quite a significant departure from the previous style and layout. The two main changes are the new colour scheme and the inclusion of a number of feeds on the index page.

Colour scheme

I was inspired to change to a much darker scheme having read an article on how the colours effect the energy required to display a website. Essentially, bright and light colours require more energy from your monitor.

Feeds

These feeds represent online content which I have created. Although in the case of recommended posts and bookmarks this creation might be considered a bit abstract. This was an idea I had a long while ago, and then not so long ago came across a way of quickly and crudely implementing it.

Up until today the feeds have been read, parse and output each time the page was called. This was causing significant delays in the page loading times. As of today a static file containing the parsed feeds is generated every 12 hours. The index page then calls on the static file when a request is made which means that no time is wasted on parsing the feed and preparing the output.

For those interested I’ve done this quite simply by writing taking a php file that was parsing the feeds and having it write the output to a static file. I then have a cron job run the php file at 9am and 9pm everyday:

0 9,21 * * * /usr/bin/php -q /PATH/generate_static_feeds.php > /dev/null

The last bit of that command “/dev/null” sends the output into the ether. Without it the server will e-mail the output of the script… which for some purposes can be rather useful.

In time I’ll be working on a more complex way of displaying the recommended posts, which will allow me to write a little note to go with each explaining why I have recommended them.

I’ve been working for quite a while on the launch of a new website for PhotoSoc.

This is the largest site I’ve ever attempted and hopefully it won’t all come crashing down around my ears. The site consists of a single framework integrating a calendar (based on a heavily hacked WebCalendar), forum (using PunBB) and a custom built photo gallery. Working with WebCalendar has been a painful process, it is a very poorly written and required substantial hacking. PunBB on the other hand has been almost trouble free, the website user system is based on the PunBB database and despite this the only customisation I’ve done has been entirely superficial.

Although as it stands the site is not complete or fully polished, I’ve just come across some real work so some features I was hoping to implement are going to have to wait, or just be forgotten.

Over the Easter holiday I managed to find some time to tinker with a few new features for my website.

Statistics

Update This is no longer available

This grew out of my insatiable curiosity which has meant I have sought to record visitors to my website for some time now. I forced myself around to doing so, managing to get it started by combining it with a new fascination for Google Maps. There are quite a few features I would like to try to work into it, but I think the basics are there. You are being watched! (But only if you visit the index page).

Polyliner

A tool for drawing routes onto Google Maps, and associating information with it. This is very much in development at the moment, and there are lot of things I’m not particularly happy with. This came from a need to display migration routes of my ancestors to be place on the family website my dad was is developing.

I put a contact form up for my website, so that folk can get in touch with me. Instead, the sort of people I don’t want to be associated with, started trying to use my form to send mass e-mails, and spam etc… as a result I had to take my form down for a little while, but it is now back up, with an extra layer of ‘checks’ added in.