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 16th, 2008)
In the new theme, there’s a link to the right of the main menu which will increase or decrease the font size.
Update (March 13, 2010)
In the latest design, the font size option is located in the preferences box clinging to the right of your browser window.
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 is a screenshot of the old layout to compare:
Previous design
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.
Now that I have ample time available, I’ve looked at some issues that I still had with this web site.
First of all, the page navigation on the left was somewhat buggy. When one was somewhere inside the blog, the “Blog” item in the menu would not be highlighted. That’s been fixed.
Secondly, the page titles were inconsistent. Static pages were OK, but in the blog, somtimes there was a page title (when inside archives or posts), but for example on the main blog page, it simply said “helvensteijn.com”, without any page title. Not very nice. Now, whenever one is somewhere inside the blog, the title will reflect that correctly. On the main blog page, it now sais “helvensteijn.com ยป Blog” and deeper inside the blog, it will tell you where you are.
The third issue was that one could not post any comment while logged in. Since I’m the only user and I have user registration disabled, this actually only concerned me. But still it was annoying (there’s some top-secret password-protected pages on this site where I use comments to keep track of certain things concerning this site, like bugs to squash ). That was probably due to some stupid mistake that I made earlier when prepping this site for initial launch. It took me a while to trace it back to it’s origin, but now I’m finally able to comment on myself while logged in. 
Then, I tweaked the home page to always be /home/ instead of / for more clarity. Whenever someone tries to access / on this site, he or she is silently redirected to /home/ to reflect that in their browser.
And finally, to the outside world probably the most visible change, the home page now lists the three most recent posts from my blog.
Today, I launched my new site, which is (again) powered by WordPress. I used this theme as a basis, and tweaked it to my needs.
Reason for using WordPress is that I pretty much lost interest in building my own CMS, at least for the time being. My interests have moved to other things.
Reason for using an existing theme to base the layout on is mainly MSIE. I got sick and tired of designing layouts that would end up working half or not at all in that browser. And until MSIE 7 (wich has at least some standards compliance) gets mainstream and MSIE 6 is no longer popular, I don’t think I’ll change my mind about that.
Happy browsing. 
Spam…
Well, it’s finally happened. I’m back from vacation for a few days (going back tomorrow
), and I’ve discovered that comment spammers have found my web site. Took them long enough though. 
So I’ve decided to turn on user registration for comments. I’ll see how long it takes for the spammers to figure that out. If and when they do, I think I’ll implement the same technique used to protect my e-mail address. As far as I know, it hasn’t been beaten yet by any spam bot.
Of course, you can still use your OpenID.
Update (September 19th, 2007)
And commenting no longer requires registration. I’ve finally seen the light and installed Akismet.
There are no comments on this post.