Helvensteijn.com

I spent the last few hours copying everything from the old server to my new virtual machine. And a few minutes ago, I updated the DNS entry for the helvensteijn.com domain. It’ll take some time for the change to propagate across the internet, but soon, everybody should have this web site served by my new server.
If you see this post, that means that your DNS is up to date and you got this page from the new server.

Just two days ago, I received my new iMac. And this night, my new virtual machine went online. It will be running this web site in the near not-too-distant future.

Right now, this site sits quite comfortably on a shared hosting account. However, shared hosting has its limits, and with a virtual machine (a so-called Virtual Private Server), I have root access so I can do with it whatever I want. And it comes with its own IP address, so I can finally set up secure (HTTPS) access to my web site with the certificate I already own.

I’ll be spending the next few weeks setting everything up to replace my existing hosting account. Apache, PHP and MySQL are all running but still need to be configured properly. Then, I will also need a mail and DNS server, neither of which I have experience with. So I’ll have to look into that as well.

My current hosting account won’t expire before April 2009, so I’m confident that I have everything set up by then. Somewhere between now and then, this web site will move to the new server.

The specs of the VM are more than enough to even run Windows XP smoothly. For a server however, that doesn’t seem like a very good idea to me. So just like my home server, it runs Debian Etch.

I’ve made a few small tweaks to my new design. There are always some things that don’t exactly work as planned, things still needing to be worked out, and things that simply came up along the way.

First of all, there was nothing to open full-size images in-page for thumbnails, they just behaved like normal links. I formerly used Lightbox for that, but was never really happy with it. Fiddled around somewhat with other implementations, and ended up using Shadowbox on this web site from now on.

Then, I recreated the Files section — which now makes use of Shadowbox for images and movies — and the font-size adjustment — which can now be found to the right of the main menu.

Also, since the fixes for Internet Explorer require JavaScript to be enabled anyway, I decided JavaScript could just as well handle the loading of said fixes. So I removed the conditional comment (nasty thing ) from the HTML.

And lastly, I didn’t particularly like the gray background, but hadn’t decided yet what to do with it. As you can see, I have now.

Yes, it’s finally finished (I think), so a few minutes ago, I took my new theme online, the third one in about 16 months. I call it TWAIN, or Theme Without An Interesting Name in full. If you own a scanner, you’ll probably know where I got my inspiration for that.

So, besides the looks, what’s new? Well, if everything went as I hoped, nothing really. I already made the necessary changes two and a half weeks ago.

I have tested the design in Firefox 3, Opera 9.5, Safari 3 and Internet Explorer 7 and everything works there, except for some minor bugs with IE7 (complaining of JavaScript errors, but everything seems to work). Firefox 2, Opera 9.x and Safari 2 will probably work fine for the most part, but Internet Explorer 6 is explicitly not supported. If you’re still using that browser, you really, really ought to upgrade to at least IE7! Even better would be switching to a decent browser altogether — like one of those mentioned above.

One more thing to mention is the width of the site, and thus the minimum required width of the browser window to prevent horizontal scroll bars. Until now, I always kept my designs confined to within 800 pixels, or I used a fluid design. But a fluid design is tougher to get right, especially in combination with rounded corners.

The statistics for this site tell me that practically nobody uses such low resolutions anymore. That might change a bit with these mini notebooks that are becoming increasingly popular lately, but still I decided to go a step further and based the layout on a browser window of at least 1024 pixels wide. That requirement is met by over 95% of the visitors to this site.

Well, I’d say try it out, and if you encounter any problems, you can leave a reply below, or contact me directly.

Last Monday, WordPress 2.6 was released. Because I grew more and more unhappy with my WordPress installation hanging together by plugins and hacks, I saw this release as a good moment to do a completely clean install.

I made a database dump and a WordPress export, dropped all tables in the database and removed all files in the WordPress directory after a backup of wp-content. Then, I made a fresh SVN checkout, imported the WordPress backup, and tweaked the settings.

So right now, this web site runs a bare naked WordPress installation, the only active plugin being Akismet.

I’ve decided not to use my old theme again for this installation (it also became quite hacky after a while). Statistics show a rapid decline in Internet Explorer 6 usage. Last month, its share was about 15.7%, this month up to yesterday that number has dropped to 13.0. So either this month or the next, I expect IE6’s share to tumble beneath 10%, at which point I no longer deem it important enough to warrant support.

Then, I can finally make some more complex designs for this web site without a large number of visitors being stuck with crippled pages. Think about some more advanced CSS2 (IE7 is not quite the yet, but at least a lot better than is predecessor) and alpha channel support in PNG images without resorting to nasty hacks. Until that time comes, I’ll just use the default WordPress theme. It is fairly decent, despite being massively overused.

There’s a few other things on my todo list. First one is installing the few plugins that I do want to use, second is moving this web site to a new webhost again, this time a virtual private server, so I have root access and can do whatever I want. It also comes with its own IP address, so I can take care of the third item on the list: mirror this website on a subdomain and secure it with my SSL/TLS certificate — impossible right now, because SSL/TLS and name based virtual hosting don’t mix (without a not widely supported extension).

I also took this opportunity to move my photos page elsewhere. While NextGEN is a very decent plugin, I wanted to keep this installation als lean and clean as possible. So I chose to move my photo albums to my MobileMe gallery. In my upcoming new theme, I will link there more visibly, right now there’s just a small link in the sidebar.

So, what have I been up to lately?

Well, there’s a thing called real life that’s been keeping me busy. Obligations here, weekend trip there, you know how it goes…
Then there’s the MetaD IRC network that I’ve set up with some other people. And I’ve been busy (well, sort of) with a new sort of web publishing software, called UniTextus. It’s still in the conceptual stage, no actual code has been written yet.

So, in all the fuzz, this web site has gotten little attention over the last few weeks. And I’m not sure how much time I’ll be able to put into it for the time to come. There’s one thing I have decided about this site: I want to get rid of WordPress. By now, this site hangs together by plugins and tweaks, which is not how I like to see it. I have yet to decide whether to wait for a reasonably stable version of UniTextus or to build something myself in the mean time. One thing is sure though: one of these days I’m going to drop support for my WordPress plugins. I do have an issue with one of them that I want to resolve before then, but don’t expect any more updates.

I’ll make an official announcement when the time comes. In the mean time, if you’re interested in taking over development for my plugins, go ahead and do so. They were released under a BSD license, so you may do with them as you please.

I’ve added a feature to this site for those with reduced visual acuity. One can now make the text on this site larger if so desired.

In the upper right corner, there are two A’s in a small box. Clicking on the larger one makes the text on this site larger. Clicking on the smaller one changes it back to normal. A decent browser with JavaScript support will even apply the change on the fly, without a page reload.

Of course, your preference will be remembered throughout this site, even across multiple visits. Your browser must accept cookies though.

Update August 16, 2008: In the new theme, there’s a link to the right of the main menu which will increase or decrease the font size.

Since the launch of this web site, I used a theme based on WP-Andreas01.

Back then, I said that I probably wouldn’t be designing anymore themes myself, mostly because of MSIE. But you know how these things go, it started tinkling again.

So I came up with the idea to base a layout on the “graphite” look of Mac OS X Tiger. The result is a completely rewritten theme. Some basic elements have made it into this new theme virtually unchanged, so those will look familiar if you’ve visited this site before.

The most notable changes are the header — which lost its bulky image — and the menu — which is now horizontal instead of vertical, leaving some more horizontal space for real content.

Below a comparison between the old layout and the new one:

Old layout

New layout

Personally, I think this new layout looks really clean, which is exactly how I like layouts. If you have any comments or suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them.

Now that I have a new hosting provider which offers a lot of disk space, I could finally do what I wanted to do for a long time: make an online photo gallery.

I’ve got 9 albums online now, but that number will undoubtedly grow in the future.

The whole thing is powred by the NextGEN Gallery plugin, and of course tweaked here and there.

I also added breadcrumbs navigation — using the Breadcrumb Navigation XT plugin — and I made some tweaks to the rest of the site.

As of today, this web site runs at a new hosting provider: Host Delight, a company of Dolf Schimmel, who is a friend of mine.

Only one problem occured with the transition: all the links on the Links page are gone. Somehow they didn’t survive the WordPress export/import process. I’ll try to recover those from my database backup.

Otherwise, everything went pretty smoothly. All in all, my web site was down for less than two hours. Some users might still be seeing my old web site because their DNS cache hasn’t yet been updated, but that should last no more than 48 hours.

Update: I managed to import the links from a database dump, so now my web site is 100% functional again.