It's been a while since I decided to rebuild my website from scratch. I've been really busy with other stuff, but I finally found some time to make a simple photo album system.
Not all albums are visible yet, which is due to a conversion mistake from the old system. The missing albums are still intact, but the timestamps have been messed up. As soon as I've figured out how to fix that, those albums will become visible as well.
As promised; you - the visitor to my website - can now post comments on my blog entries. It probably needs some tweaking here and there to keep the spam bots out, but it is working as it should be at the moment.
You may also have noticed that the photos are working as well since a few days. Good grief, it might actually turn out all-right with this self-made code
As you can see, the blog is more or less back online. It's still in a very primitive phase, and lots of stuff still isn't working. On the top of the to-do list are:
- The ability to add comments on a blog post.
- The ability to search in the text of the posts.
- The ability to see photo's in the posts again (Photo's aren't working yet, video's however are).
- Etc...
On the topic of video's... I've made some changes to the system for the videos that result in much higher quality. The old videos were encoded in Adobe's Flash Video format at 15 frames per second and used up 512 KBps. The old videos have been resized and re-encoded in H.264/MPEG-4 format at 512KBps. The difference is very noticeable, I think. New videos (such as the videos I shot at the Amphi Festival) are encoded in H.264/MPEG-4 format at 30 frames per second and use up 1000 KBps.
I've been doing a little bit of research (read: I've been reading other people's blogs), and came to the conclusion that my site has too much whitespace. One of the things that didn't please me, is that my video's and photo's were small, which didn't really look very good.
I've changed some code, added some code, and spanked the web server a bit; with the result being that the video's and pictures will be more visible, and thus making the site a bit more pleasing to the eye. Both the pictures and the videos will be shown at 540x405 pixel resolution, except when there are multiple pictures of course. In those cases they will still be thumb nailed.
I've decided to merge my old website (http://www.allodox.nl) and my new/current website (http://www.ajira.eu) together. I haven't identified as AllodoX for nearly 2 years now, but I don't want to just forget and scrap my past; It's part of who I am today, so it deserves a place.
I've rebuilt most of the site from scratch (still some work left...), and added all the old content to it. The old content is posted by the user AllodoX, and the new/future content will be posted by the user Ajira. Don't worry... I'm still the same person, just with a new/different style
A little overview of what's on the site:
- Home - the page you first saw. This is the news/blog area.
- Projects - here I'll post writings, tutorials and information about projects I'm working on.
- Photos - speaks for itself, I guess... Just photo's of me, photos made by me and/or screenshots of games I'm active in.
- FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions. Here you can ask me pretty much any question - there are exceptions of course - and I will try to answer them.
- Downloads - Here you can download files that are associated to the projects section.
- Sitemap - a quick overview of what's on the site.
I started working on my new site today. Previously I used a phpbb-based portal site, but I came to the conclusion that it's major overkill for what I'm doing. So, I'm going to start from scratch, and make my own blogsite. No more 2mb patchfiles, no more weird spagetticode, no more known exploits, just pure functionality wrapped in a decent package. Stay tuned for more
As you can see, I've performed a little cleanup of the website. I rewrote the whole framework from scratch. In the old format, the layout of the site was made using plain HTML tables. In the new format, it is made using DHTML layers. Not only does it make updates (e.g. adding menus) a lot easier, but it also cuts down the size of the code by about 70 %. I'm converting some pages to the new format, so please be patient.
I've translated te site to Dutch, and made it a bit more structured.
After much thinking and haggling, it was decided to rebuild the site. The next few weeks I will be working fulltime on the design of the website, but all help is welcome for the content (reviews, tips, etc...).