Whilst not necessary, I do build a lot of customisation features into my website. One such feature is the Invert Colour feature that inverts the colour of the page and it's contents - using a black background and white text making it easier to read. All features are used throughout the browsing session of the site or you can choose to store them in a cookie on your computer so that every time you visit the site these features are enabled.
Now I'm adding another customisable feature to my site with Dark Mode. Dark Mode is a similar functionality to Invert Colour. The only difference is that it only affects the menu. Please take a look at this:
Aim: The aim of the latest update was to make the website more consistent across multiple platforms.
In the last major update prior to this (3.4), I changed the site to have multiple fonts across the different platforms: Helvetica was used on Macs and iOS devices and Segoe UI on Windows and Windows Phone devices.
Today, I'm happy to announce a cross platform Open Sans font has been installed on to this website. As well as that there is a far more consistent search box on the site with no issues on any of the modern browsers.
Safari
Firefox
Chrome
As I did last year with my website, I have decided to theme my site based on events like Halloween. This year the site is totally different from last year with a special font for the top and the headers. The site will still work as before, only some parts will look different.
Enjoy.
For the last few days, until today, my website has been suffering from some troubles due to server problems. I would like to say that the server is running fine now and my website displays correctly.
I have not been adding a lot of content to my site because of the fact that I have resumed university, but I would like to point out that the Python tutorials are coming along now.
Within the next year or so I intend to extend my tutorials further by adding 10 new tutorials in the following:
- Apache webservers
- BlackRabbit Script
- C#
- CodeIgniter
- CSS
- Java
- JavaScript
- Java Server Pages
- Latex
- Python (I'm learning more about this day by day)
This will likely be the last post about improvements on my website because I intend to stop fixing my site from now on.
The changelog has been getting less and less attention because of the fact the site is very neat and how it's meant to be.
So this post will cover the latest things to be completed on the site.
Firstly, it's performance has been improved considerably, pages have shrunk in size considerably as mentioned in a previous post. This means it is faster to download and view the site.
Secondly, a new design was tried on my website, but it moved back to the previous design - I am honestly happiest with the design as it is.
Thirdly, it's had some new features added and older less used ones removed.
Fourthly, most inline styles have been removed.
Finally, the blog is looking really looking good.
My website has taken yet another step in the right direction being optimised further, which further reduces the size of the site.
Currently, the largest page on the site is 1.6MB, which is a large page for a mobile phone user to view, but apparently spot on the average page size according to this website. Having said that, my largest page is actually my photo gallery, which is not exactly something I imagine mobile users to be using everyday.
My front homepage comes in at just 795KB and my About me page comes in at 728KB.
Most of this saving comes from gZip being applied to everything on the site, minified CSS and JS, compressed images, much less HTTP requests and less third party linked tools.
I have recently not been posting much to my blog and I must apologise to my readers for this.
However, since I have new stuff to review, I will be focusing on reviews this week, particularly the MacBook Pro Retina which I just received today.
My blogging system is still underwork and I hope to have a good system in place by the end of September.
I have been working on a variety of different tutorials, particularly the VB.NET tutorial and the HTML tutorial so please take a look if you are interested in either of these.
Until the next post, goodbye.
Welcome to my even newer blog!
This is my third blog on my site, and this time powered by some clever magic provided by a system called JBlogs. Notice the "JB".
The point is, this is my CMS (content management system) that although is missing a back end, has a really nice front end at the moment. I wanted to 'integrate' my blog better with my website, so I built a PHP blog myself that will retrieve all of the posts etc. and place them on the page. The styling for the page is down to my actual website. This means that anyone can just use JBlogs on their site so that their blog fits into their site. Now why didn't WordPress do that?
I was slightly sick of the separate design WordPress offered on my blog so I decided to make it more part of my website.
JBlogs is still under work, but I feel it is now ready to be used.
As you will likely know, I've changed hosts for the first time since the debut of this site in April 2010. My new host is a bit more expensive than the standard package I got with my last host, but I get a premium of extra features with the new hosting package.
The new site host has so many things that the previous did not have that it would take forever to post about them all. The key features however have been outlined below:
- PHP (yes, my previous host had this too)
- MySQL (same story here) but I can have as many databases as I wanted
- Ruby On Rails (something I want to learn) and Ruby Gems
- Perl (again something I want to learn)
- JSP (I'm not really that interested in anything related to that coffee bean)
- SFTP (basically a much more secure FTP using SSH)
- Control over Apache server handlers (excellent feature!)
- SSL support
- Multiple database accounts (higher security)
- Direct FTP from PC or Mac without the need for an FTP client (my previous host offered this, but it was one way only, you could download a copy of files and have to upload them, this way it works like a drive on my computer, so I can update straight to the server and the operating system does the rest.)
- HotLink Protection! (haha, you can't just HotLink my CSS anymore! And it works beautifully, just try to navigate to my CSS files such as my template).
- A built in image manager to scale down images etc.
- Quick Joomla, WordPress, phpBB creation (I may bring back phpBB in the future, by the way)
- Better control over the subdomains on the site
- Plus unlimited bandwidth
- And unlimited storage vs 30GB at the same price with my previous host
- 6 domains rather than one.
