elegant simplicity

Well, how can I best describe the misery I have endured since Friday the 13th last week? It all began when I was checking my email and found that I couldn't access it. Puzzled, I tried to get at it via the web interface and was greeted with 'no such account' messages. Thinking how odd the whole thing was, I then tried to access my website. Imagine the horror and surprise I felt on discovering a knitting portal in its place!

My immediate reaction was to think I had been hacked - which was unlikely, given the super duper security of my hosts. In the end it turned out that there had been an administrative and communications error and my domain had actually expired! Given that I have owned elegantsimplicity.com since 1999 I was not a happy boy.

Anyway, to stave off too much disaster, I purchased elegantsimplicity.co.uk as a back up / mirror (I h ...

Hurrah! After much messing about, I am pleased to report that the Interviews section is now back on line. Some interviews have yet to make it, but there are some good ones there already. I was quite shocked to discover that the orginal data source was not exactly standards compliant. Anyway, after scripting it out of my original database into a text file, I used Notepad+++ to clean the data before copying and pasting into the interview module.

I will endeavour to get the rest of the interviews in place as soon as time permits. The good news is that now the module is finished, whenever I get sent an interview, I can more or less paste it straight into the module.

Been working very hard on the new Discography section and I am pleased to report that the code is all finished and I am now in the process of inputting the data. There's a lot of it!

So far, I am up to Palindrome . . . !

I noticed the other day that the gallery wasn't displaying the album title and year in the caption if there was a description associated with the image. Not a major annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless. Anyway, it has now been fixed!

This evening I added a rather nifty module to the bottom of every page.  Entitled Share this Page, the item in question allows the visitor to click on a link and tell the likes of Digg, reddit and what have you all about the website. It might not be the greatest thing to ever happen to a website, but I think it's pretty cool. What do you think?

As you will have no doubt noticed, the new site went live last week. It was touch and go, though! At the last minute I noticed an annoying menu bug in Internet Explorer. Nothing major, it just shifted the menu around a couple of pixels. Despite that, and an odd layout issue, the site still worked pretty well in both Explorer and Firefox so I launched it anyway. There is a list in the forum of stuff yet to do.

Since launching the site, I have been working on a foolproof and totally cross browser compatible CSS template and I think I have finally cracked it! There is still some work to do on the colour scheme, though, but this template looks good and deprecates to mobile devices and what have you beautifully.

One thing I will have in place later tonight is a nice little module that allows a user to share the page currently viewed either by email or via the likes off Digg. It's pretty coo ...