Site Development Diary

4 May 2004

The forum is now online and ready to use! A few people used the test version and it seems to work fine. I will monitor it for bugs as often as I can. If you have any problems using it, do not hesitate to contact me. I hope to "skin" it later on so that it has the same colour scheme as the main site.

1 May 2004

I have updated the site "theme" so that it is a bit kinder on the eye than the one from the previous update which just had lines. The discussion forums are nearly ready to integrate with the rest of the site. Hopefully it is going to work correctly on the first attempt so that I don't have to keep it on the test server for long. At the moment I need to keep registered users logged in when they go back to the content pages, but it is a little tricky.

11 April 2004

It has been a while since I posted some news because the changes to site are not that difficult to see! Firstly, the silver frame has disappeared and replaced with smaller boxes that organise the page contents. The contents panel and the main text each have their own dedicated box. The adverts and so forth also have a box to themselves. This is for two reasons: firstly, to make it compatible with all modern browsers as some had problems when the content went past a certain size. Secondly, because there is no "frame" around everything, it is possible to use the main template for just about everything on the site, including the large photos! The new design also makes it possible for me to integrate it with Invision Power Board.

6 January 2004

The site has undergone a major overhaul which means that you no longer need JavaScript to view the photo galleries because the PHP code takes care of generating all the links back to the gallery page. You can also leave everyone a message in one of our guestbooks! Each portal has its own book, plus an additional one for the whole site. Go and take a look at them now!

17 December 2003

My biggest project at the moment is creating a guestbook. I have a working version working on my development PC and hope to enable it on the main server over the next few days.

I have added a couple more pages and updated some of the content. Unfortunately I have had to withdraw the printable page feature because it is incompatible with my new PHP code. Rest assured my plans for a complete PHP based content/template engine will feature an even better version of the old one!

19 November 2003

It has been a while since I last posted some news so here's a summary of what has been happening with the site:

• The design of the site has changed slightly - the frame now stretches to the full width of the browser window so you can see more of the page
• The garden gallery has been added! I hope everyone enjoys sharing our garden with us!
• Started to upload the programming tutorials, at last!
• You may also notice a new "Contact Us" feature which is still in development. I won't change it until I have got some feedback on whether it works and that people actually use it (as opposed to emailing the webmaster directly).

4 October 2003

Spent the last few days finalising the new PHP code and making sure it all works on the main server. I haven't noticed any problems in the logs so if you do come across something that does not look right then contact the webmaster!

30 September 2003

Creating new features to add to the website for the past few weeks:

• Page Printing feature loads the page without the frame and logos and has only simple text formatting
• Hit counters for individual pages!
• Each page displays the last time it was updated
• The garden gallery is in its first stage of development with the content just needing a little bit of editing

My thanks to Dave "Real World" Conley at PlanetBlaze for discussing my ideas on using PHP within my website!

12 September 2003

Found a better way of displaying the photos - using Javascript to open a window, generating the HTML using a PHP script that accepts an image URL as a URL parameter.

As you can see, I have experimented quite a bit with the menus! Unfortunately, because of limitations in Internet Explorer I have not been able to get the menus to stay on top of the links at the top when the main content is centred on the page. I have therefore had to align the content table to the left hand side which takes a little while to get used to. Hopefully I will find a solution soon. If you know the solution then email me please!!! They are based on YPSlideOutMenus which needed only one line commenting out to make them work with the rest of my site.

4 September 2003

Not much to report, have been outside getting some much needed fresh-air! Made improvements to the site (file) structure and added some home pages for each portal.

1 September 2003

Looked through a hundred photos from MedDivers and selected some of them to put in a new section dedicated to MedDivers. At this moment in time there are 31 images in the gallery. Set up a batch job to resize them all to lower resolution and also save a thumbnail view of each one.

28 August 2003

Have been working on the behind-the-scenes workings of the site in Dreamweaver, like getting templates set up to make adding new content faster for me to do. It would help if the manuals and tutorials did not have errors in them!

20 August 2003

Finally settled on the style for the site. The only thing I might change are the links at the top, I would rather they were buttons.

25 July 2003

Started creating prototypes for the design and layout of the site using PhotoShop. Wrote the first content for the site - our Ibiza 2003 holiday.