Saturday, June 30, 2007

Busy Week

What a week it's been. I've just finished drafting a letter to the Social Security Review Tribunal to appeal a decision regarding some money I think I'm owed...fingers crossed.

But what's really been consuming my time has been my new website I'm working on. You'll find the test site HERE if you feel inclined to take a look but it's not up-to-date and many of the features aren't working Live. I'm really testing everything well before I upload it. My intention is to update the test site every Friday at midnight AEST so, for example, all the revisions and additions I completed today (Saturday) won't be posted until next Friday.

Updates to the test site this week include:

  • A new site-wide theme.
  • A new Blog that incorporates this theme.
  • All new MySQL database design for faster and more reliable access.
  • A search feature in the header - currently searches the blog from the blog page and searches google from the home page.
  • New PHP 5.0 page design that allows for faster site-wide updating.
  • Implemented a neat little footnote script in the blog.
Updates that missed this week's review:
  • The new graphical navbar missed addition this week as I'm still tweaking the a:hover state of the buttons. The new navbar replaces the Photos link with Media.
  • I'm still using a separate Internet Explorer style sheet until I'm comfortable with the one I'm using on my localhost.
  • The Uni Paper's database is not live so the cool home page I'm working on on my localhost isn't available. The home page on my localhost so far includes a most recent Blog Post section and a most recent Uni Paper section.
What I'm working on this week:
  • Getting the style sheets to a single sheet for ie and other browsers.
  • Getting all my font styles the way I want. I'm open to suggestions regarding the font colours/faces in the body.
  • Writing the PHP code for the Uni Papers pages (expected to take more than a week).
  • Tweaking the Home page code that displays the most recent entries for Blog Posts and Uni Paper's. Uni Paper's is the tricky one as I have five separate tables that need to be referenced with the most recent entry amongst the five being displayed. I've no idea how I'll achieve this at the moment so I'm open to suggestions.
Once all of that is completed I'll move on to populating the Uni Papers database and creating the PHP search files for the Uni Paper's site so that I'll have a functional Uni Paper's Site, a functional Blog Site, and a functional Home page.

After all of this I intend to move on to creating the media site where I'll host photos, videos, audio and some other papers and documents that I've written such as my Beginning the Tabla book. I'm not even thinking of how I'm going to lay this site out yet so don't ask, although, like above, I'm open to suggestions.

2 comments:

craig said...

yeah - get a life!

Simon said...

I've been too busy over the last two weeks to implement any updates on the test server so that's why it still appears the same...it is not a problem with your browser as some of you have thought.

I've installed a new OS on my notebook and I've had to reinstall an apache server with PHP and MySQL along with all of my code onto my local machine. Also, I've had to get familiar with a new development environment as before I was using Dreamweaver and now I'm using Blue Fish. I've been so far unlucky in getting Dreamweaver installed in WINE.

Give me another couple of weeks and the Blog and the Uni Papers sites should be active and, generally, complete.

P.S. If anyone has any suggestions for the content colour scheme then send me an email - simon.ives.undergrad@gmail.com.
The header and footer will be as they are across all the sites.