fine whine

For over three years the front page of my website has been relatively unchanged (take a look), and to be honest, it looked more like 2002 than 2004.

Until today. Today I finally switched over to a new design, and completely new underlying programming, that I began working on back in March. I'd intended it to be an April 1st prank (the working title was 417), a past-the-trend Web2.0 redesign, but April 1st came and went and I was nowhere near being able to flip the switch.

Well, now I've flipped it.

It's still not 100% complete - I really wanted to build my own photo gallery, and intend to do so still, but the two boxes of thumbnails on the front page are actually the result of a fair amount of coding, and more than a few tools for fetching the images from Flickr and showing them. A complete list of the tools I used and am using is beyond the scope of this post, but the number of them that I tried and didn't use would be four or five times as long.

I still have a long way to go with bringing all of the old stuff to match the new, but given what I'd done with those pages sometime between 2004 and now it won't really be that big of a deal to update them all together.

One thing I'd really like to highlight, though, is the code directory. Right now there's only one page there, the monkeymaker, but I think that my fellow Columbus residents* may find it to be useful. Launching that has been something I've meant to do for quite some time, but I never got around to writing up that post.

For that matter I'd been meaning to do the rest of these updates back in August when I discovered that my web hosting had changed, breaking almost all of what I'd coded, down to how I'd referenced filenames. I made enough of a nuisance with the hosting company to get some of what I needed fixed (Not bad considering how little money they'll ever make from me), but the rest of the broken stuff I needed to fix by hand.

It's been an interesting challenge - there are a lot of things that just don't work right, but coding around them has been almost fun, and certainly educational.

It's a never ending learning process, though - and if you happen to find something I still need to fix, or have any suggestions, please feel free to contact me. Thanks in advance if you do.

* At least the ones that use both Firefox and the local library with some regularity.