I already asked mitch to make me a new banner, so I’ll have one of those one day. I almost went with a theme that would have allowed me to reuse the old one…but I wanted a change.

Daniel Ryan (I’m assuming that’s his name) was kind enough to make themes and make them available for download, and help me out when I had problems. So that’s where this theme comes from. I’m not really a pink/purple fan…but you cannot deny the hottness of this theme.

I totally want some of this:

went to vanessa’s church today, it was pretty cool. but I really really stood out. we went to a single’s class and I was the only guy with hair longer than 2 inches, literally, (out of like 15-20), and we won’t even start on the piercings. he was talking about qualities to look for in a spouse, or something…the first two were honesty and responsibility, and yeah. eh, I don’t know where I’m going with this. Oh yeah, one of the things was a piercing, because he knows how to pick out jewelry, and knows about pain.

hongry

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:)

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…

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.