Blog: Articles filed under website

When I first purchased paid hosting in October 2005, I needed a domain name. I needed something snazzy, so I chose tachyondecay.net. Then I needed a domain registrar, so I registered tachyondecay.net with Yahoo!, since I already had a Yahoo! ID. Nearly there years later, all is good. I’ve got two domains registered with Yahoo!, no complaints. Until now….

Recently I learned that Yahoo! had raised the price of domain renewal to $34.95/year. Considering that the average is usually around $9.95/year (which is what it used to be), and some places are cheaper, this move could seem baffling. Of course, Melbourne IT, the company through which Yahoo! actually registers these domains, charges $35/year. So there may be something going on behind the scenes there … Anyway, regardless of the reason, I am not paying $35 when I can pay $10. So I packed my bags.

I‘m not sure if I actually mentioned this, but recently I registered benbabcock.ca (it just points to this site) from Netfirms. I used Netfirms instead of Yahoo! because the latter can’t register .ca domains, and Netfirms seemed like a good choice. So I took this opportunity to consolidate all my domains at one place and moved them to Netfirms, where they are happily residing together now. I don’t have any complaints about Netfirms’ service—I didn’t about Yahoo!’s either, except in price. Netfirms charges $9.95/year—that’s in Canadian dollars too, so it’s slightly more advantageous to me (at least when our dollar is worth less than the US dollar).

Anyway, that’s my interesting domain name experience for the week! If you’re looking into registering some domain names, and you don’t have an extra $35 burning a hole in your pocket, then check out Netfirms. Godaddy is good too, I hear—it’s what most of my friends recommended, and it’s probably where I would have gone had I not already had a domain at Netfirms. Considering that a domain name is your identity on the Internet, choosing the company where you register and administrate that domain name is important indeed.

Those of you not reading this through a feed (that is, if anyone actually subscribes to my feed…) will notice things looking a little … different.

This is the long-awaited, long promised redesign! The previous design has been in use since before my site moved to A Small Orange in October 2005. It was time for a change, time for a fresh look, time to update the site to better reflect me. That was a challenge on its own.

As I began toying with designs, I had to confront the question What reflects my personality? What could I put in my personal site design? After all, that’s the only purpose this site has—it’s a vanity site. I could incorporate pictures of me, except I don’t have many. Maybe some scenes of Thunder Bay. I toyed with various concepts and positioning. Eventually I struck on the idea of using a vertical banner image of my socks-and-sandals photo. It looked nifty and different, plus it is most definitely me. I like socks with sandals.

I chipped away at the rest of the design piece by piece. I found a good stock photo of a tea cup to include in the background. I added some content to my about section. And it all came together. It’s been a lot of work, but I’m fairly pleased with the final result.

I‘ve aggregated more content by including widgets that show what I’m reading, what I‘m doing, future plans, and even sites I think are cool. These will automatically update as I update my information on those various websites, which means less maintenance for me.

The photo gallery has also been redone to use a framework that accesses my Flickr photos. Unfortunately, I’ve run into some configuration problems with it—I‘m very much aware of the unfortunate error message you’ll receive if you try to view it right now. I hope to have that fixed soon. Also, I will eventually get around to styling the scripts wiki to match the rest of the site layout. I decided not to wait to launch the design.

Now that I‘ve given my website an overhaul, I will try to overhaul the documentation for VSNS Lemon and then release VSNS Lemon 4.0 (which is what this blog now uses). After that, I have a new coding project I’m really excited about. It’s kind of massive, however, so I’m not sure how well it will go … we shall see.

Wow! I‘ve got paid hosting! All thanks to A Small Orange!

I’m now going to work on rejuvenating it. The database backup is from October 10, so if you posted any comments or such after that date, then they’re gone … sorry. It appears this mean the entire guestbook is gone. I should get to bed, but I’ll put it back up tomorrow, so sign it again then.

I actually did things today, which is scary. Once again, this proves that boredom is dangerous.

I had the whim to make an alternate style sheet for the site, so you can switch them easily from the View menu using Firefox. If you use the Switch Styles link to switch styles, a nice little cookie will keep track of whichever one you like to use. The waterfalls in the Thunder Bay style are Kakabeka Falls.

Planet InvisionFree is an aggregate of staff blogs at InvisionFree. Finally! Instead of checking lots of RSS feeds, I can just use the one feed and keep track of the staff. I‘m sure those blogstalkers will find it convenient too.

I’ve become tired of searching for lost boards, so I wrote the Lost Board Locator that quickly searches all the servers for me. Far easier than typing in the server numbers over and over.

Watched Cellular tonight. It was better than Phone Booth and I enjoyed some parts of it. The movie got better toward the ending as the corrupt cops were revealed, the beginning was a little slow.

I‘ve updated my blog as best I can. The RSS feed is hopefully working properly now, and I’m just waiting to iron out a few more bugs before I publicly release version 3.1.

As for other news … there isn’t much.

Today, it feels like I got a lot accomplished while at the same time I did next to nothing. Or is it that I feel like I did a lot while accomplishing next to nothing?

I went biking with my brother down to the university and back. It was an interesting experience. I’ll probably be biking to university in two years. Cheaper than driving if those gas prices keep on going up.

This blog now has an RSS feed that I cobbled together, and which I’m still trying to badger to work. I‘m also working on setting up a Coppermine photo gallery. I’m working heavily on improving my blog, but now I’m going to take a break, maybe get some writing done.

Just performing some general clean up of the site. I’m tweaking the design and reconfiguring it to have friendler URIs. The site will soon be XHTML 1.1 valid, rather than XHTML 1.0 Transitional. You may have noticed a few sections disappearing or getting buggy. I’ll fix those soon, once 3.0 is out and I have a working archive function, the news archives will be back up. I pulled the Writing section because I thought it was poorly done, I need to redo the content.

I’m still working on VSNS 3.0, so far all I have left are: the comment system (tweaking it), the skin (not started), the semi-WYSIWYG buttons (not started) and to finish tweaking a few other bugs.