God you love it. You want to kiss it, and you want to smell its bum.
Well bollocks to it, thought I.
I decided to put the site live because I couldn`t wait any more. As you can see, there`s not a huge difference in what`s on the site, but under the bonnet things are a bit more tidy.
The main difference is a change to navigation, which has now been moved to the top of the page; eagle-eyed viewers will notice that it looks different in IE to decent browsers. The text is intentionally small-ish, but I may do away with this in favour of a more uniform browsing experience – if IE supported CSS2 properly, it`d be a lot easier.
Anyway.. down to the site changes.
We now have:
* A brand new Illustrated Smiths section, which allows users to upload their own files – it`ll then be really quick to approve submissions and get them on the site
* A site map in case things go pear-shaped – there have been a few changes to the site and a lot of old links will no longer work, so it`s a good place to go if you`re lost (on a site with about 3 sections, this might be difficult..)
* A contact page where you can send me a nice e-mail – please use this if you find any problems with the new site; I`ll keep an eye on the server over the next few days and fix anything that`s obviously buggered
Still to come:
* The RSS feeds need updating, and I`m going to split the weblog into a couple of sections, so you can just subscribe to e.g. site updates instead of the cheesed-off rants
* A bunch of new JimSongs have been readied and will be added to the site as soon as I`m happy it`s not falling over
* I may add a comments section to the weblog, so you can call me a twat
Anyway, I hope everything goes smoothly, and I`ll keep an eye on things for a bit. I`ll also e-mail all of the lovely people who contributed to The Illustrated Smiths and see if they want to compete for most contributions!
For the geeks out there, I`ve moved the site from HTML mixed with PHP type stuff to HTML and Smarty, a nice templating engine; this is all backed up by a MySQL database. Be patient as I`m only learning PHP and coming at it from a Java background. I am however looking forward to PHP5 with proper geeky gayness like exception handling and so on. But that`s for another day.
Expect a few tweaks over the next few days as I try to stamp on any bugs I find.
