digital:pardoe

Brand New Website

It was about time that I got round to doing this and finally it is (nearly) complete. The website has been re-written from the ground up to make it faster and more consistent, my hope eventually being to release the source code for everyone to use.

The primary reason for the re-write of the website is that the previous ‘blue’ website was hashed together from online tutorials, code snippets and myself reading the Ruby on Rails API, it worked okay but was slow, produced frequent errors and filled up my hosting server with logs, I corrected some of this in the back end several week ago but I still wasn’t happy. Hence the re-write.

Techie Bit: Over the course of my coding I have made the website more OO in the background so it is easier to maintain and to add to, also I have added more features to the website, the primary features being better security and the ability for me to categorize my posts, more features will be added over the coming weeks. I have also correctly configured the Rails settings and started to use migrations to manage the database. All of this should serve to make the website faster.

Everything should be in the same link locations as they always were, I did this to make sure that links from other websites still work correctly, if you find something out of place, do not hesitate to contact me. Unfortunately as a side effect of the change, users that have previously signed up to post comments have had their accounts erased due to authentication changes. The website will not be re-written again so it is safe to signup.

Anyways, that’s all for now, hope you like the new website.

I'm Back

I know I haven’t posted for a while but I just got absorbed into Uni, seen as the year is almost over however I thought i’d make a come back, of sorts. Hopefully from now on I will be posting more often and about topics that aren’t limited to my applications and website downtime, which seems to be the only content in my previous posts recently.

Development on my application iSyncIt has started again and it shouldn’t be too long until the 1.0 release is out & working better than ever, unfortunately it do not know what will happen to iSyncIt when Leopard is released, mainly because I don’t know how the Bluetooth framework will work and I can’t afford to get a pre-release of Leopard.

Work on the new website has been continuing and it is almost ready. There is a new look that is not too distant from the current look, however it is a little more readable. Categories and user levels are also supported meaning I can write a support forum for the website.

I will most definitely be posting again soon, so check back.

Possible Outage

On January 28th the website might experience some downtime, the hosting company I use is upgrading its Ruby on Rails installation to the latest 1.2.1 release. The website should work correctly with this version but I thought a pre-warning was in order just in case it doesn’t.

Exams, Exams, Exams

I suppose i’d better start by saying happy new year to everyone that reads this blog. As you can probably tell development is very slow. I haven’t really had much time to do anything as I have had a few computer science exams, the majority of which are still on going. I need to think of something new and interesting to do, something that will hold my attention for more than ten minutes. As soon as I think of something I will give you a heads up, but for now I will sign off.

Another Re-Design

Over the next few weeks the website will be going through another re-design. This time I am going to be re-writing the back end code for the website rather than the interface. Regular viewers of the site will notice some speed increases. Non-regular viewers probably won’t see anything different. The reason for the re-write is that, after writing reams of Java code, I wish my website code looked nicer and worked better. So that’s what i’m going to do. The website will go offline for a period during the transistion, but it shouldn’t be for too long.