No, I didn’t die. I’m alive and very well, which is more than I can say for the state of this site the past several months. Something happened and it stopped working and I never got round to fixing it. Turned out to be a plugin had gone fusty and broke my WordPress site.
So why did it take this long to fix? Well I’ve been a busy man and haven’t had a holiday in a long time. But here I am now, sat in a room in Abuja‘s finest hotel. For work, of course. No way I could afford to pay to stay here (£20 for a continental breakfast where I only take a couple of croissants and a cup o’ tea? Eh, yr alright).
With all this free time to myself and no need to clean my flat/iron my clothes/hang out with friends, I thought I should re-take up my hobby of makin’ websites. Since I’ve been doing a lot of SharePoint work lately (and still tearing hair out on account of its unpredictable nature), I reckon there’ll be a couple of howto posts soon, including one on fully implementing custom action pages into the Site Settings screen. Lord knows I had enough trouble correlating different sources of information to get it done. That, and I intend to spend s’more time in the evenings working on my own site, which is looking rather dapper right now.
I mean, all this in between working on my tan and hitting the pool bar. Y’know. A guy’s gotta take it easy, too.
Another redesign! I know. This one takes a different approach, it’s supposed to look like a futuristic computer panel. Click here to have a gander. This design also includes my first foray into Javascript – although I have used it in the past, I’ve never really developed with it. This is me creating my own code now, learning it all for myself. So far so good, I’d say. Notice the ‘more’ and ‘less’ buttons in the most recent update (all the text is shown if the user does not have Javascript on), and the mouse-following popup panel when you hover over the button on the right of the frame (unfortunately, no non-Javascript workaround here, but it’s just aesthetic).
All in all, I’m really pleased with the style. it looks best on a browser that supports CSS3 (Firefox or Chrome for example), but should still look dapper on other browsers. You just won’t get rounded corners and glows 
But yeah, I’m not gonna say how “this is the style”, because… well, I’ve said that about them all. Maybe I’ll just get building the website itself now…
Incidentally, that page is part of a test area I’ve set up for mucking about with styles and Javascript. Frames are bad, I know. It’s a quick and dirty showcase setup, nothing fancy. Just a nice place to collect all my efforts!
I’ve just done a little experimenting with CSS3, and I’ve come up with a design that I’m extremely pleased with. It wouldn’t work the same without rounded corners and shadows, and I think I’ve come up with the style I’ve been looking for.
At the moment it’s just on a test HTML page, but it’ll be easy enough to port to the main website. You can find it by clicking here here!
As it’s just a test HTML page, it’ll be changing a bit as I experiment s’more, but I’m really, really pleased with this design and want to start using it immediately!
I have this nasty habit of redesigning my site on a regular basis. I’ll come up with a great idea, implement it, and then have another, better idea. So this time I’m going to do it properly.
I’ve been raking around the net for inspiration, finding pictures of things with styles I like – everything from the Atari ST GEM desktop environment, to Wipeout’s ship logos. I know that sounds like a horrible mashup, but I think I can pull something together.
This layout is a big inspiration
The layout’s going to be a good deal different, too. Pictures and interactive things will take centre stage, with descriptions and updates at the side. We’ll see if that reduces clutter, makes the pages more aesthetically pleasing.
Then again, I may just find myself extending WordPress with custom plugins, since it provides a hefty amount of functionality already, and use this as the main site. What is a guy to do…?
I registered the domain Rakhama.com back in 2003. Rakhama was always to be a showcase site for various computery projects I work on. Since then, it’s gone through several re-imaginings. So why can’t I finish it?
The more I work with programming, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realise things can be done better. For example, the first iteration of Rakhama mixed PHP code with HTML code in the same file. This was separated when I learned to build my own template system. More recently, the website has been redesigned to make use of classes. Some might consider this wholly unnecessary, given the linear nature of your average web page. However, not only do I see it as a practical solution for my site, but it’s also good practice for object oriented programming anyway.
A good example of using objects in my site is the Page class. It deals with base functionality – fetching the page title and latest adventure from the database, for example. All pages inherit from this class, but the adventures page overrides the getLatestAdventure() method, and instead picks a random adventure.
Of course, adding all this functionality does make things more complicated – as in, more code. However, it does make it a lot easier to follow, meaning any future modifications should be far less painful than they would if done the old way.
Another recent idea is that all data extracted from the database should go through an XML layer. The reason for this is that sometime in the future, I intend to create a Flash based front-end for the site. Flash can consume XML data, so by adding this additional layer, the data will be readily exposed to the Flash front-end. Furthermore, only one thing needs to be modified to update both versions of the site. And on top of all that, it should make writing an RSS feed much easier.
So all this, plus an administration back-end, plus my work and social time means it could take a fair while to complete! But I am making progress, slowly but surely…
