Contact Page Layout Change

I’ve had a couple comments (and agreed with them) that having the images at the top of the contact page the way I did, kind of took away from the rest of the content of the page. (And it did.) Having the four ‘pagemark’ images up at the top, and making the user scroll down to get at the actual page content, was a bad idea.

So, I’ve made the necessary changes (some CSS re-writing and minor semantic updates,) and, voila! You’ve got a new contact page layout. (Which I have to say, looks much better.)

Posted in Design Notes, Post-It Notes at 7:51 pm on Feb 15, 2006 by Chris

Banner Update

With the recent [behind-the-scenes] upgrades to the website, I thought it was time to quickly go and streamline the site’s banner. I’ve since done this, taking the file size of the banner from nearly 300K (really slow to download) to 95K (much faster). So, for anyone out there who’s visited my site before and had to suffer from a really slow banner download speed, I apologize; it’s fixed now. :)

Happy surfing!

Posted in Design Notes, Post-It Notes at 4:55 pm on by Chris

Portfolio Splash

I’ve added the Portfolio Splash section to the main page, both to spice things up there as well as to draw attention to that section of my site. My intention is to have it set up that each day a different ’splash’ is selected from my portfolio and placed up there. That way the content will stay relatively ‘fresh’ and keep things from getting stale as it were.

At present I don’t have the updating function written or installed, due to time constraints, and a need for attention elsewhere on my site. However, within the next couple of weeks, I plan to be putting a little bit more time into my portfolio and its content, and I would expect to see that upgrade come along with that.

My idea is fairly simple: the Portfolio Splash section will either be a php include file that gets swapped out daily with one of a number of pre-prepared ’splash files’, or it will be a database-driven thing, with a flag set on the item that is being shown that day.

I am leaning more towards the former idea than the latter, as it will lend itself more towards keeping database-traffic (and thus site load time) down, as well, it will require less setup. (I’ll only have to put the changing script in place and develop the files as opposed to having to write an interface for it in the control panel, or hacking it into WordPress.)

At any rate, stay tuned! More, greater, and newer things are coming to this little corner of the web, courtesy of yours truly. :)

Posted in Post-It Notes, To Do List at 4:31 pm on by Chris

Crisis Recovery

Caveat: Everybody makes mistakes, and I don’t mind letting people know that I do too. Just keep in mind that I am at least able to fix the ones I make. :)

Let me start this post by saying, OMG have the last two days been SCARY! I honestly am not sure what transpired the other day during security a security upgrade to my website, but something seriously messed up my WordPress template.

Admittedly, I was working on a few different things at the same time (you should never do that when dealing with massive amounts of code that are running the live version of your website.) As a result, I ended up with some kind of conflict that I wasn’t able to easily track down. It looked much like WordPress was trying to access its content in two different databases. One, where it was supposed to be looking, and the other where it had no business whatsoever.

So, after having a complete heart attack and patching over the hole by uploading a copy of my WordPress database to the database it was looking in (so as to get rid of the error messages potential users would be getting,) I investigated the problem. As near as I can tell, I changed something in the website’s backbone that caused the conflict, but despite hours of tracing and re-tracing the pathways there, I couldn’t find anything wrong. I shut out the conflicting scripts (things were still working okay) and went to bed.

Today, I started over; development server up and running, fresh WordPress install, porting over code piece by piece until I had the whole thing back together and up and running. (No errors, btw, the code I had was unmodified since I saved the security changes I made.) After running into one glitch with my banner, I was able to switch the ‘clean’ site out for the ‘buggy’ site and away we’re going.

I guess that the moral of this particular post is, BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP!!! (And don’t forget to include a real development server in there somewhere.)

Posted in News at 2:33 pm on Feb 14, 2006 by Chris

Blog Splash

Just as a note to the general public, in case anyone thinks that I’ve gone design crazy on my front page: I haven’t. I’m just testing something out.

At present, there is no notice of any changes to the site blog on the front page. I would like to change that, and perhaps in doing so, draw some more attention to the main content-driver of the site. (Apart from the Portfolio, that is.)

So, I ask you to forgive me if it looks a little bit heinous at the moment. I’m presently working on a solution for that.

Posted in Post-It Notes at 10:23 pm on Feb 11, 2006 by Chris

« Previous entries · Next entries »