About time for an update

So after having the site languish for a while, I have dcided to give the site an overhaul. I am not sure if this one is going to be any more actively updated; but we can hope. I have made a few changes to the site that might be noticeable.

I am going to continue to make changes over time but figure at some point I just have to get started. I am going to be migrating stuff over the next few daze/weeks/months I am sure.

Thanks for stopping by.

Integrated Blog

Previously my Blog was hosted on a seperate machine and a seperate domain. This ended up having a few challenges. The largest challenge was that to me it never seemed fully integrated. I was not sure what to put on the Blog and what to put on a webpage. I am not sure it really matters, but I am hoping that by going with this approach it will be transparent to you.

New Navigation

So I have been using Dreamweaver CS3 to do my site work, and the way I was using it previously it was very under utilized. So I picked up a few books and found that Dreamweaver CS3: The Missing Manual was the one for me. So if you notice at the bottom of the header are a few links. They will highlight and show you were you are located in the site. All through the items I learned through the book.

Images hosted via SmugMug

I have been formatting and hosting the images for use on my website manually. While not difficult it was slightly time intensive; I would end up sizing the photo for a thumbnail, then make another copy of the photo for a larger size and linking them all. While this might seem like a small thing, it started to make things a little difficult in terms of touching up a photo and having to export out all the different sizes. I also did not like how spread out and mismatched the files and locations where.

So as I started doing more and more photography I decided to get a SmugMug site and use that to host the images. It has been much more helpful than I expected. Go over and take a look at SmugMug.com. There is a pretty cool program; you can save $5 on a SmugMug subscription. It's simple: use my email address or my personal coupon ( D5I4bmVRNHNpU ) in the 'Referred by' field on the signup form. There is a 14 day trial.

Formatting via CSS instead of tables

So after doing some reading and fighting with formatting, I have decided to start using Cascaded Style Sheets to do more of the formatting on my website. The reason for this change is to hopefully make it quicker and easier when I make a change as well as making it more compatible with various browsers and operating systems. In addition, I just wanted to learn more.

LAMP instead of Windows ISS

After having tried using ColdFusion on a Windows Internet Services Server, I have decided to change back to a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) server the main reason is that my blog kept getting hacked.

Pared out some older stuff

Dang was there some old stuff on the site, so I am taking some of it down. If there is something you were looking for, let me know I archived it all.