In January of 2015, I redeveloped the backend of my website and released my DragonScript powered website. DragonScript is not really even a programming language or anything, so the name is a kind of misnomer, so I wasn't entirely sure about it, but I kept it anyway and it's my plan to keep the name.
My latest changes will be known as DragonScript 2.0. This is a backend change that should not affect the front of my website. However, it is a huge change. Part of this change is developing my old BalfPHP file into a more modern, object oriented version. DragonScript 2.0 focuses on a much cleaner and a more efficient, as well as overall faster, development that will focus on what's actually needed to make my website function and removes a lot of the ugly bits that were a part of it before. As well as this, DragonScript 2.0 utilises an object oriented approach.
As part of a few fixes I laid out on my own website, I have decided to updated both BalfBar and BalfBlog today.
Most crucially, BalfBlog received an update that makes it more compatible with future versions of PHP. When it was written it was written for use with PHP 5.2. Now it is compatible with newer versions of PHP so you should have no trouble installing it on your newer installation.
BalfBar has now received an important update that adds more flexibility to the SASS code (and even provides all of the settings to rip off the menu from my own website) as well as changes that make the JavaScript more flexible.
BalfBar is receiving a big update this weekend!
This update focuses on changing the menu items from being absolutely positioned to fixed positioning. This will allow a lot of new things like scrolling (hidden overflow doesn't work well with absolute positioning, since the element resides inside it's parent, whereas fixed detaches it). The menu will still look exactly the same but the way the items are positioned will allow me to finally bring scrolling to the items and allows you to set a maximum height to the items.
As much as I am more a fan of green code (CSS) over the yellow code (JS) for design and layout, I feel that using it was more appropriate here for what is being done, since it will give a lot more functionality.
This is currently experimental since this change was implemented in next to no time (only took me about 30 minutes to implement) and therefore not tested enough yet. I will post more in my Project blog when more becomes available.
This update will become BalfBar 1.2.
I will be trying it out on my website soon too, so keep an eye on it!
I didn't think it was going to be easy to set up push notifications for BalfBlog and that it would take quite a long time for me to work my way through the OneSignal API but alas I was wrong. BalfBlog now features push notifications, and it's deeply integrated too, meaning that it's built in to the settings.
Subscribe to my main website to subscribe to this new form of notification!
After messing with some ideas, I finally decided to ditch my oversubscribed underused newsletter system on jamiebalfour.scot and replaced it with push notifications. These push notifications are achieved thanks to OneSignal's service.
Push notifications represent a much lighter way for me to develop a communication method, similar to Twitter and allow me to send much smaller and more frequent messages to my subscribers. On top of this, they allow me to get immediate results out there. They are a huge part of the open web and moving towards a more standards based approach.
My plan is to deeply integrate these push notifications through OneSignal into BalfBlog in the near future. At the same time, I will also integrate them into my website.
As well as this, users of my website who can login will be the only people to receive email updates. These will mostly be related to software alphas, beta versions and new features to come to my website as well as my software.
Finally, the subscribe page (which was also the very first bit of PHP I ever wrote on my website) will also be disappearing. Well, not entirely. I'm going to keep it with details on how to subscribe, including a button that will help you to do so.
I hope this is satisfactory with everyone, but if you wish to be unsubscribed from my website, please email me now using the contact form on my website.
You can easily subscribe for push notifications through the button that says 'Subscribe' on it or by clicking on the button below:
In the next few weeks I'm going to begin work on ZPE again. I'm focusing in on improvements to the actual compiler and I am looking at new things like function inlining and so on to improve performance. I'm also going to be quite daring and look at parameter optimisation for static parameters, since I do believe this can be achieved in ZenLang.
The next version will also add even more functionality in other areas such as the GUI mode.
Also, currently recursion is not working perfectly due to changes made to make it more efficient. If you bare with me I will be working on this at some point in the near future again.
Today I released five new transitions for BalfSlider. They are:
- Fall
- Top-to-bottom
- Bottom-to-top
- Stretch-top-to-bottom
- Stretch-bottom-to-top
They are available in the latest version of BalfSlider or as plugins for older versions.
I'm particularly happy with the fall transition - this is the first transition to rely on CSS for transitions too.
A lot changes in BalfBlog very quickly. Today the new poll system was added amongst other changes including the removal of reversing posts (this is coming back in a much better way) and better internal layout including a new BalfBlog constant which is basically # ASSETS # (without spaces between the # characters) which if I put it in this post will give me /blog/assets/2016/11/the-new-balfblog-journal.
However, I do not want my personal blog to be filled with all of these posts, and my project blog is also beginning to fill up.
But BalfBlog provides a nice solution to this! Yes, I'm speaking of Journal Mode. This will also allow me to restrict the blog to people who I have accepted to read the blog. So you'll now need to register to view the whole changelog of BalfBlog.
Since 2007 when the iPhone took the world by storm mobile web browsing has continued to grow in it's user base and now for the very first time it has overtaken desktop browsing. Of course, this is based on just one figure, but it's now very understandable as the users of smart phones are at their highest.
Whilst I'm not surprised about the situation in relation to my own website since it has been this way for the last 3 or so years with my website (more than 60% of requesting coming from mobile devices), I do regret that my recent developments on my website have focused on the desktop browser a lot more than mobile (not to say that my mobile website isn't perfect anyway) in the hope to revive the desktop version of my website. As I mentioned, all of these updates will likely be to no avail since the majority of users across the web are from mobile devices and it will likely keep going that way.
Now Google's proposal, which later became requirement, that all websites must implement a mobile version makes far more sense. Why rank a website highly when it doesn't support the most used platforms?
You can find more about this at alphr.com.
Finally, after many years of planning, I will be bringing polls to BalfBlog. This post will soon feature one.
Also, I'm not planning on adding a way of creating polls into version 2.2 of BalfBlog, just for parsing them. So if you do want to create a poll, create a poll.xml file in the content directory for the post you want to have one. Note that version 2.3 will not use the poll.xml file since I plan to change the way in which this works.
