Blog: Articles filed under website

Hello September. I have missed you. You might be my favourite among all months, but don’t tell the others. And no, it’s not because my birthday is in September (although that helps). Nor is it because September signals the start of fall television, with new episodes of Castle, Chuck, House, Stargate Universe, etc. More than any other month, even that notorious January, September is a month of changes and new beginnings. For those of us biased in our perceptions by our position in the northern hemisphere, summer will soon be a memory; the leaves will change colour; and I’ll be back in school, where I belong.

I spent this summer doing research and quite enjoyed it. We didn’t make as much progress toward a solution as I had hoped, but I learned a lot, both about mathematics and research in general. I’m comfortable using LaTeX (which is sexy) and have had some experience with Macaulay2 (also pretty hot). I even went to a conference, something that surprised me.

With my research finished, I have these two weeks off before school begins on September 13. Next week I return to work at the art gallery. I don’t look forward to returning to the job that much; my relative solitude of this summer has left me even less eager to interact with people in a customer-service-based position. But I do miss my coworkers, my fellow front desk attendants, so I look forward to returning to them.

I anticipate another great year of school as well. This is my honours year for my math degree, and the Honours Seminar will consist of a sort of research-based project supervised by a prof. We’ll have to write a math paper and give a talk. This is a nice departure from lecture-based courses (I don’t much care for lectures); also, having done research, read papers, and written up results for the past four months, I feel somewhat prepared.

And with summer endings and fall beginnings come changes. My site last had a major redesign over two years ago. I’m still happy with the design in general; however, there have always been certain rough edges I wanted to correct. Now I‘ve done so. A few weeks ago, I rolled out tweaks to the design and significant changes to the backend.

I’ve reorganized the content on the home page. It’s my portal on the Web, something that lets people access my content whether it’s on this site or elsewhere. I‘ve tried to lay it out so that everything is on offer.

You’ll also notice that I have a new background image. Now that is definitely tea. The other image was tea, but ambiguously so, and the berries were an odd addition—it was a very Christmas-like cup of tea. It was the best photo I could find at the time. This new photo is exactly what I envisioned when I originally decided to use a cup of tea as my background image, and I‘m very happy with it.

For a long time, the only real content on this site has been my blog and the About section. Everything else consists of links and a little aggregated content. I have plans to change that soon and add more pages dedicated to original content (or specific aggregated content). For example, you’ll notice that my home page no longer displays my most recent book review from Goodreads. I want to keep my home page compact, and you can easily access my 15 most recent reviews from the books on the sidebar. Instead, I intend to create a new section of the site devoted to my reading habits—not just reviews, but top 10 lists, statistics, etc.

This sort of flexibility is thanks to the new backend. I’ve finally gone over to the dark side and started using a CMS—but not just any CMS. It’s Symphony, an XSLT-based CMS that is both minimalist and developer-friendly. The custom-coded backend I was using was rubbish, and I don’t need anything as powerful as an entire framework. Symphony is exactly what I need, and I highly recommend it.

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.