From Bottleneck.org
Is this thing on?
Ok, you'd be forgiven for asking, since I've not updated in so long. But I do have a reason. Or at least an excuse.
I'm spending quite a bit of time working on a "new" website. The main points of it will be quite a bit less screen clutter, leaving more screen real estate for content (content... what's that, eh?) and a much improved gallery.
The site will still be powered by MediaWiki, but I'll get rid of the two column layout, which I think tends to make everything look a bit too crammed in on non-widescreen displays ;) Instead I'll change the "Blog" and "Featured" bits into a one pane series of "News" items, an idea stolen largely from (inspired largely by?) the Facebook news feed. In the feed, I'll include "blog" style entries, featured pictures, links, etc, and I'll find some way of categorising the entries so it's easy to browse older versions.
Additionally, and this is the main reason I'm reworking the whole site, I'll be trying to put up way more of my pictures. I'll be throwing away the current, rather rubbish 'dump a load of thumbnails on a page and dedicate a dead-end page to each image' way of presenting them, in favour of using Coppermine Photo Gallery to present my pictures in a much friendlier, more navigable, and searchable way. The gallery will be themed to match the main site and hopefully will integrate with it pretty seamlessly.
The whole lot is likely to be running on a Linux VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosted by WebFusion who are the hosting arm of Pipex. Hopefully longer term this will enable me to bring all of my email management into the same server, which will give me plenty of control and remove my last dependencies on favours from mates to run my domain!
Anyway, watch this space - but not too hard!