progoth.com

OK, if you haven’t noticed….I have a new website.  You can get to the old one at oldsite.progoth.com, but a lot of it probably will be broken.  But I’m not worried about it.

I imported some of my more interesting news articles from the old site.

It took me 2 or 3 weeks to do this new site, working when I wasn’t doing school or work stuff.

If you care about details, the new site is written in php (obviously).  I have one file, index.php, that has the layout and holds the information about what other pages exist.  Then I made *.php.inc files for all the pages you see, specified by index.php?page=whatever.  They have printTitle(), printSummary(), and printPageContent() methods that are called by the index, and then they can have their own functions to do their thing.  I handled protected pages by putting them in a password protected subdirectory (such as /administration/), and symlinking to /index.php in each one.  I wrote it to be flexible, so when I moved the new site from /~Progoth/beta/ to the main location, all I had to do was change one line at the top of index.php for all the css and images and whatnot to work.

I also converted all of my MySQL stuff to use PostgreSQL, a much more advanced open source database.

Pretty much the only thing I didn’t rewrite for the new site (that I actually kind of care about) is the ability to update information on site users.  But, out of >160 users and 2 years of using the usermanager, I’ve used the Update feature a total count of Never times.  So I figured it wasn’t worth it:)

Yeah, I’m not really into the whole website thing.  Not anymore, I guess.  But I had to renew my domain today, and I did.  So I guess that calls for something.

I decided that that something will be a new site design.

This design was made for me freshman year, it’s a great design.  But it’s old.  Half of the links probably don’t work.  Lumpy promptly lost the images used to make the menus, so I can’t change them.  So I’m going for something lower bandwidth, easier to maintain, simpler, standards-compliant, and, unfortunately, boring.

Since I can’t design websites, I started at Open Source Web Design, a resource I discovered while checking out Ogg Theora.  So I took a design, made it XHTML1-transitional, separated colors and styles into CSS, did some tweaking, and ended up with a base design for the site.  You can look at it here.  Next on my list is to write code to support it through Perl, PHP, or maybe even Python, probably with some SSI, so I can make an easy-to-maintain-and-update site.

And here’s a picture of my newly cleaned and layed-out desk, with me making this entry and working on the new site…

I totally redid almost everything on the site to use Mysql instead of the flat text file database system I wrote. Well I didn’t replace the whole system just the methods used to store and retrieve data. It seems to be working just fine, but please email me if you find anything weird with the site. I’m sure there’s stuff I need to fix. In fact, I know of one thing off of the top of my head. I need to go to bed though, since 6 am comes awful early. Anyway. Yeah. I turned 19 today, btw.

Oh yeah…somewhere along the way my counter got reset. I think that’s because I had some process go psycho and it filled up my linux partition, and no matter what I deleted it stayed full. So I think it didn’t rewrite the counter file or something and so got reset to zero. How depressing.