Site update

Friday, 1st February 2008

I intended on making at least one post in January, but looked like I missed the opportunity by a day. I hope you all had pleasant breaks (and here I refer to breaks from my inane ramblings, not any religious festivals).

The lack of updates stem from having precious little to talk about; I've been busily trying to redevelop my website into a single, modular, extensible code base rather than having a large number of insular sub-webs.

Here's a whistle-stop tour of the various iterations of my website; whilst the underlying technology has improved in quality quite significantly it's evident that I couldn't design good looking websites for toffee.

Initially I just used the site to provide links to and information about the various calculator programs I was working on - hence its name, calc83plus. This was hosted for free, and so was just static HTML with each page having different content copied and pasted in.

I decided that this was a bit inefficient, so in the second version used javascript to draw a consistent header on each page. The content was much the same, I just changed the logo and colour scheme.

I eventually ended up with a real webhost, so changed the name and redesigned the site, adding my VB6 projects to it. I evidently decided against the javascript trick and was now using some ghastly frameset solution.

Hang on, this web host supports ASP scripting, and I know VB, so... why not make it server-side script driven? So I did. This version of the site allowed me to log in and post news articles directly with comments, and used server-side includes to insert the body of pages into a template.

I switched web hosts, and had a static placeholder page up for a fairly lengthy period until I decided to use my new PHP knowledge to build something that I could use to provide an image gallery for some of the VB and C projects I'd been working on. The host also supports ASP, but I'd decided that I never had anything interesting to say anyway so a news and comments system wouldn't be of much use. An inextensible system meant that the various new projects I developed ended up scattered all over the place in unrelated sub-webs and news posts resumed with my GDNet+ account.

Which leads us neatly to this; a design that is quite blatently "inspired" by GameDev.net's (and provides news updates by screen-scraping GDNet) but which can be used to host information about pictures, projects and a gallery in one centralised location and can be easily extended with new modules.