It's been four whole years since my website received a major refurbishment and it's now time that it did.
The major refurbishment will retain the exact same layout design but will focus on better performance. It will use my Girder framework and will integrate more deeply with Dash.
Speaking of Dash, I have not worked on Dash for a while, but with the new refurbishment, I aim to focus on making it easier to work with.
I have been contemplating this redesign since the launch of Girder and the new Jambour Digital website, so now it's actually coming to fruition.
I've also been building a few other websites as of recent, and due to their success with clients, the change seems to be very obvious.
It's happened again, I've moved up even further in the Alexa ranks in my latest check!
Since this time last year, my website has increased 5 million places in the global rank!
I will admit, the last few months have been very busy with Dash improvements and I've neglected my own website.
Not any longer! I'm working on improving a lot of stuff. Things like email that used to work before my change to a VPS package just worked, but not any longer. For this to work, I'm going to need some assistance from PHP Mailer (I may just use Dash Mail to do this - the wrapper around PHP Mailer) and I'm going to need a new email address for my domain.
After working on Dash day in day out, I've become really obsessed with clean and neat code. Refactoring Dash became a hobby, not a chore. But now I've got a lot of work to do with refactoring a lot of my own website (just the backend stuff, so you'll hardly notice anything happening).
Anyway, at the present time there are a few issues with glyphs not displaying correctly, so if you do find anything wrong, feel free to leave a comment below.
I introduced my gallery over 3 years ago when I decided to write in whilst on my yearly get away to Dunkeld. I have finally updated it.
This means that I haven't quite finished adding the original content to it, but you'll see it performs much better for both my server and for you in terms of waiting.
Please be aware that some links on my website will no longer work as expected if they link to the gallery. I aim to have my gallery updated with all the content from the original gallery by the end of tonight. I also realise that a lot of people aren't even interested in my gallery as of recent, but I also have to point out my gallery is not for everyone. I built it as a way to share photos with my family and to build my own kind of 'scrapbook' of photos.
As the pilots of the planes that crash into the Severnaya bunker say in Goldeneye:
Negative so far. Everything seems normal
Well, now everything actually is normal. The transition has been made from jamiebalfour.net to jamiebalfour.com. jamiebalfour.com now points to my new host, jamiebalfour.me and jamiebalfour.co.uk will be here in about 2 and a bit months' time (due to restrictions on the transfer of domains, they can only be transferred 60 days after registration, and sadly .co.uk renewed automatically just before I started the transfer).
I had to make some changes to BalfBlog, and I have no idea why these changes were actually needed, but they were (actually, come to think of it, I have a rough idea it might have something to do with the DocumentRoot directive in Apache2, but I'll test that out).
In the meantime, if there are any further issues across my site get in touch via Facebook or my contact form on my website. I've still got a lot of stuff to try out at the moment so the site may have some issues due to this.
What's new
There's a lot of new stuff coming to my website because of the change to running my own system from the ground up (well in a VM).
My favourite new feature is the use of PHP 7. PHP 7 is supposedly up to twice as fast as PHP 5 and I see a huge performance gain on my website. OPCache is enabled to reduce the amount of time spent parsing the PHP in the first place too. My site was always fast but now it runs only one core and 512MB of RAM and yet it performs better than it did on the shared host where I had 3GB of RAM and four cores. Ahh the benefits of VPS!
Now that I am finally nearing the finishing line for this huge change to my website I'd like to update everyone on what's happened and what problems exist.
First off, I now have a new website, jamiebalfour.net. This is only temporary. I will be switching back to jamiebalfour.scot as soon as I can (I'm awaiting transfer on this). All of my subdomains are currently hosted on .net, and whilst this may change, I'm not sure there's much point in worrying about this kind of stuff.
More crucially, since I'm now hosting on a VPS, I've had to learn how to do things without cPanel and the like. Nothing was too difficult. I originally worried about setting up subdomains but they've been painless and easy and I also like doing things this way a lot more.
HTTPS or SSL is also now free since I found a fantastic CA that offers free certificates. I'm limited in space and memory and CPU power, but despite this, I've still found this to be a more performant option.
From One.com to Arvixe
One.com was the second web host I ever came to, the first being 123 Reg but I never took advantage of it as I had no idea what I was doing. When I opened jamiebalfour.co.uk in 2010, I never thought about using it for anything at all apart from sharing my software. In 2012, I decided to ditch the original template and begin a redesign. Still not a web developer myself, I went for a table based design. In early 2013 I decided to build it to do more. I learned both PHP and CSS and made my first dynamic website. In the second part of 2013, I learned JavaScript and responsive design and made my website more flexible and dynamic.
In 2014, I made the change from one.com to arvixe.com. This was a big change for me. It sparked the point when my website had a meaning to me and that I actually was interested in web development for the first time.
As well as this, the plan was to use the new package to do more than just that. I wanted to run Python-based and Ruby-based websites on it too. Alas, this never came and the site was merely the way I managed to expand my website.
Within the first year or so, I experience a huge amount of downtime. Almost half of the first year I was thinking about moving away from Arvixe. Toward the end of 2014 however, I was moved from Seahorse to Ayeaye. It offered 3GB of RAM and a quad-core CPU - a huge improvement. I saw much less downtime and my site was far more responsive. As time went on my demands became bigger and bigger and Arvixe was perfect for this.
Arvixe to A2Hosting
After 3 years of Arvixe to the month, I decided to switch to A2Hosting. This is a huge change that brings lots of new benefits to my website, particularly, as mentioned earlier, VPS hosting. I've been contemplating VPS for about 6 months now as it would allow me to do more than just host a website. It will also give me the flexibility to experiment with other technologies such as Node.js, Django (Python) and Ruby on Rails and much more. I've got less space on this server but I'm not bothered since my whole website and all of its subdomains and my projects comes to less than 4GB.
I've now officially abandoned jamiebalfour.scot on Arvixe and until it moves over, jamiebalfour.scot will be unmaintained. jamiebalfour.co.uk will also be in the same boat until it switches over, which will yet be another 60 odd days since it auto-renewed before I could stop it.
I'm hoping for a very happy time now with my new VPS package and I hope to have my website fully up and running by the end of the next week!
I've finally made the move from shared hosting to VPS!
This change is the biggest site change I've made in 3 years. But three years ago when I switch to Arvixe's shared hosting I didn't know as much as I do now about server administration so it was a good move to switch to a more advanced shared hosting package that Arvixe provided from the One.com shared hosting I started in 2010.
Arvixe has been great. Apart from downtime which I experienced in the first year, I've had no real trouble with them. Now that I'm a pretty mature web developer and system admin, I felt it was time to make the next move.
VPS
Virtual Private Servers are basically a system running in a virtual machine. I chose to go for the un-managed VPS, which meant I had a lot of work to do and there's no support. However, I've persevered and made it! And you are now on my new jamiebalfour.net website.
Oh yeah. Also, this is actually costing me slightly less every year somehow because now I get SSL free which means that I don't pay $30 a year for it.
Morning everyone. Today and tomorrow I will be doing some essential site maintenance that will take down every subdomain hosted on my website. Some of the more popular ones are clickit.jamiebalfour.scot and code.jamiebalfour.scot. blog.jamiebalfour.scot will still redirect you to my blog.
I'm hoping to minimise the effect of these updates but I realise that BalfBlog and ZPE both depend on code.jamiebalfour.scot to check for updates so they will not work at the present time.
The last few weeks have made my website more secure and more performant. I have spent a lot of time making my site work with cron jobs so now my site it is even easier to make a cron job as well as improving my own admin portal, automatically backing up the site every month, backing up MySQL databases automatically and so much more. Most of the stuff I am doing is all about refactoring code and making my site more efficient. I'm also preparing to move to a different server with the possibility of VPS being enabled, so I want my site to be able to 'just move' to that server with minimal disruption by making scripts that do all the resetting up again for me.
Thanks to some of the comments I received today about my website, which were largely positive, I will be changing my website quite considerably.
The comment that has stuck with me, and it's reinforced by the fact I've thought about it myself is that my website has become too big. I've developed a plan of action to tackle this problem in as few distruptive steps as possible (since now my tutorials have been gaining more popularity and my website is being used by many, I don't want to disrupt that).
My plan is this:
- Revert back to a single blog again, my Projects Blog will move back into my main blog.
- I will merge Software into my Projects section.
- I will create a completely new website (I've been thinking about this since early December) for my professional works
After hours of work and countless cans of juice, I have finished my website update for early 2017. Nothing has changed on the front-end except for my menu, which now implements BalfBar 1.2 and also now has padding on the dropdowns as well as new uppercase text.
This update did focus primarily on updating the back-end, primarily introducing DragonScript 2, the replacement for my January 2015 DragonScript package. This new version is much faster and works on the idea of hashing data rather than storing it in an array. It's a huge performance improvement that makes this website speedier than ever. On top of that I have been stripping parts of my website that are no longer needed with a focus on not only making the website faster but streamlining it so that it is easier for me to update and add to.
Disruptions have been minimal as I continued to support DragonScript version 1 on my website simultaneously with DragonScript 2, but as of five minutes ago, the two year old version has been retired.
Will DragonScript 2 get a release? I doubt it. I don't plan to make it available now because it would be too much work since it is now intertwined heavily with my website. It is possible I will develop a more open, WN Project based on DragonScript, but not yet.
Finally, on top of the menu getting a little update. I decided to push my dark theme further on my website, and for the first time have built dark code samples. The choice to do this was inspired by the fact I now use Adobe Dreamweaver again, and I really like it's dark theme. This now makes them easier to see on top of looking much nicer.
var x = "Test"
This update removes even more skeuomorphic designs and focuses even further on the flat design. It does however retract a bit on the statement I made about getting rid of curves, with more and more objects across the site being curved. Alas, I could not resist a couple of circular objects and feel they fit better than the square ones did.
