elegant simplicity

After a very long time thinking about getting round to it, I finally fixed some of the long-standing issues with the CSS used in the Forum. The main issue was the ill-proportioned text sizes that plagued the main forum page as well as some of the links etc. The new fixes brings the colour scheme into line with the main site and makes it a tad more pleasing on the eye.

After some time tweaking and building, I am very proud to announce that proximityrecords.co.uk has been re-launched as a fully scale-able e-commerce solution. It contains the full range of Elegant Simplicity albums, downloads, merchandise etc in a beautiful and contemporary looking site.

So, why is this different from the site you are viewing now?

Well, with the new site, customers can buy a bundle, for example, and choose there and then which albums they want instead of having to wait for me to request the information first. In addition, because it can now handle downloads (not activated yet) it means I can add more to the site without incurring extra costs.

Also, it can be set up to handle discounts, promotion vouchers, mailing list notifications, shopping basket customising etc - all the things that this site cannot do - elegantsimplicity.com was designed to be a simple ...

Earlier today, I decided that the site needed a more modern look (did someone shout web 2.0?) so I spent a few hours designing a new masthead and re-vamping the CSS. The result is what you are looking at now, just uploaded. I call it Elegant002.

I think it looks pretty cool! What do you think?

For the curious, I created the graphics in Photoshop CS2, and used my universal 3 column template creation as the backbone for the ASCX file, which was edited in MS Visual Studio 2005. This is a great piece of software! The CSS was also tweaked in Visual Studio, with Firebug (a  rather nifty Firefox plug-in) helping me track down any errors.

A good few hours work, for sure, but I think the new look should serve the site well a for the next few months of supporting the new CD (when it eventually gets here!).

One of the pitfalls of running a few websites is the constant worry that they are always going to be available. I mean, a visitor may happen along to purchase a cd or something and the sale is gone due to the site not appearing. Well, this happened yesterday. I lost both this site and the Proximity Records website. Both homepages reported varying degrees of database errors. Given that  there had been no work on the databases from me for some time, I could only conclude that the fault was at the host end. Which is in the USA. Which meant that the delay between reporting it and getting a reply was around 8 hours.

In any event, it got sorted, though I have yet to recieve an explanation for the downtime, which, I might add, is very rare: my US based hosts are prettty much fantastic.

Still, we're back and that's the main thing!

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.