Website Archives

Originally this article was going to be title “Ginormous” and lead in by saying that I've not played with anything this big since the week Karen left me on my own. But that left me with a couple of problems. First, you'd know I've been dreaming again. Second, it doesn't quite fit with the “bar humbug” misery I try to spread this time of year to counteract the mindless happiness that goes on.

So, what the hell am I even talking about? As may have been hinted at from the forum entries and a previous blog Quiet Week, I've been working on redesigning the way the photos section works. And it's now complete! And you shouldn't be able to notice! Hence the appropriate title of “what's the point of it all?”

All of the previous structure is still in place, so if you have old links they will still work for the time being. If you go to the main photos page you can still follow links to the same things as before (although on different pages) and there's the addition of a photo database link that will take you to a selection screen that enables you to customize your own selection criteria rather than being limited to the links that are provided. You can also broaden your search if you want as I've thrown over more photos than the ones on the standard links, so if, for example, you wanted to see more photos of leopards you could do so.

The thing is that absolutely nobody is going to want to do this. It's going to be a completely unused function even by the relatives as they're only going to be interested in the “published” photos at the end of each link.

More coding went into this than any other part of the website as it's fully integrated with Adobe Photoshop, so I can manage and publish photos from there. Even more coding than the home page (and yet the majority of the change is transparent to everyone as it should look and feel the same as before the change). Technically it's brilliant. But nobody is going to appreciate it or even care about it.

In all likelihood this could be one of the biggest wastes of time. And yet infinitely satisfying which I'm sure says something about me.

I've put some photos up under the San Francisco Bay Area section of a couple of walks that we've done:

The funniest thing that happened was a very strange comment by Karen. Part of this walking malarkey is intended to allow me to get to photograph some of the wildlife. Rather difficult when you're accompanied by a squeaky stroller and a noisy two year old. There was one point when I saw a dragonfly and thought it would be cool if I could get a picture of it when William came plowing through obviously scaring everything. I made the comment that the combined noise of the stroller and William were scaring everything away. To which Karen replied “What? Do you mean the animals or the grass?”

I didn't answer the question at the time as I don't think I would have come out with anything constructive. It did amuse me for the rest of the walk as I had visions of grass jumping out of the ground and running away.

This site now has forums! I've created a section for forums. Levels have been created to group the forums and make it easy to find what you're looking for (or at least give you a fighting chance). The logic behind it is simply:

Category -> Sub-Category -> Thread Title -> Thread Details

Each level is a one to many relationship, so, for example, each sub-category can have many thread titles. A simple example would be a category of “Sport” could have a sub-category of “Football” then a thread created on “England need a new Manager” (just to be topical) and then the thread would contain individual thoughts / comments related to that topic.

Full instructions on the use of the forum have been created or you can go directly to the forum home page.

I’ve changed the appearance of the website. There is now a blue background to all the pages instead of white – whoooo! What’s more interesting is the home page. I’ve jazzed this up to make it a little bit more intuitive and to get more content on there. Note that you can click on the boxes at the bottom (photo/video and vote/fun stuff) to change the view in the panel.

You’ll probably also note that I’ve changed the menus. The big buttons are gone in favor of a simple bar that brings up drop down menus when you mouse over. Again, this is designed to make it more intuitive as it allows for more detail (and more links) to be included without taking up a lot of space.

Forgive me if you come across any errors. I had to change quite a bit for some of this. If you do find any, please let me know.

Anyone who's taken a detailed look at the home page may have noticed that there was text under the photos section for something called “Gallery” but no link to anything. Well, it's something I've been meaning to do for a while and finally got round to a bit of it at the weekend. Basically, just taking photos that I've taken and turning them into something different. An expression of art I guess, but I'm not very arty so that may be a bit misleading.

Anyway, I've managed to get round to creating a staggering two pictures so it is with this impressive array that I open the photo gallery. Hopefully you will like what gets created here. If not, shame really as I'm not going to do anything to change it. Karen likes the “Warhol William” so there's probably going to be a sequel and maybe even a series of these. If you have any constructive comments or thoughts, let me know.

Foreseeing the need to create and distribute video content, particularly with William's birthday coming up, I purchased more hard disk capacity for the web server. Look forward to a forthcoming article "Too big for your own blog" to be posted on the BYOB site that describes how this process was achieved.

So, we now have video content available online. So far there is just material for the family. There was some footage on the camera that Karen must have taken at some point that I turned into some small 30 second clips and then there's a couple of big ones from the little one's birthday.

Now, if I've got everything right, there will be two links for each clip. The first will take you to a page that will play a low resolution clip embedded on the page in Windows Media Viewer. The second link will take you to a download pop up. The only thing I haven't really had the chance to test properly is whether or not playing the clips online is any good given that I'm running this over a DSL connection. Hopefully it works OK, certainly if you actually want the full resolution video, downloading is fine. If you have any problems, let me know.

To see the videos click this link.

Yes Folks. That crazy Mr. O has been at it again taxing the locals at The Stag. Try your luck with quiz number 5 in the Bumpkin Quiz.

I know you've all been waiting with bated breath to find out what amazing feature I'm going to add to this site. Well, wait no more for it is here!

Tada!

Introducing the Caption Competition.

This page contains odd photos that I've either taken or come across that I think lend themselves to various captions. Partially inspired by the Miss Teen USA comments of Miss South Carolina, featured on this blog site, as that entry could have been titled almost anything.

So, take a look at the Caption Competition and see how creative you can be. If you do, you could win absolutely nothing as there really isn't much of a competition going on, but I couldn't really think of another title to call the page. I suppose I could have just called it caption or create a caption for the photo, but I'm hoping some sucker will see the link on the home page and end up there in the belief that they may win something.

Now that we've started to get a fair amount of content on the site, seemed like a good time to put some archiving in place. Actually, not really archiving, just figured that it would help load the blog pages quicker if they only loaded entries made in the last 60 days.

This filter is only being applied to the OBlogs, Stuff Blogs and Website Blogs. The other blog pages don't have too much content, or, in the case of the BYOB blogs, it made sense to leave the full list intact.

This just means that if you're hunting for an old article, you may need to click the archives link (under the search box on the Blog Bar to the left). Additionally, the search and weekly mail links will take you to a new page to view single blog entries. The simple reason for this is so you will always be able to get to an article from an old link (old being any link from here on in, not any before today as that would have required me to be psychic and know what it is I was going to build for the archiving). Otherwise, if you had a link from over 60 days ago, it would take you to the current page and the article wouldn't show up there as the page is only displaying articles less than 60 days old. Now it goes to the single blog entry view that has access to all articles, figures out where you are and puts a button under the title that will take you to the article in its category listing (OBlog, BYOB, Stuff etc.)

Hope this makes sense. To be honest, it was easier to set up than to explain.

It's time to scratch the old noodle again and figure out if you're smarter than a country bumpkin. Yep, quiz time again. Follow the link to the quiz page to test your knowledge.

Do you know what this is an aerial photo of?


Go to the quiz page to find out. If you just want to see this quiz, filter on “Quiz 4”.