Smallish update with 5 new photos of the Gorn in Landers, CA visiting the Integratron. It was a cool experience to watch the Perseid Meteor Shower. Next year, hopefully the moon conditions will be better and we will try again.
Travel is way down this year, but hopefully will get out of town this fall to take new photos and write some new trip diaries.
Replaced photo from Mammoth Mountain which had been the header since 2009, with one from Yosemite Valley taken in May 2011. Also changed the link colors in the header from default to white.
Updated the site software to 5.1 which has enabled new features and also support for Safari so now I can seamlessly update the site via my iPad!
After years, and I mean years of neglect, I finally got around to updating my Jarrepalooza site. First time since 2005!! Shockingly, there were not that many albums to add. Most of the changes were format-wise for ease of use as well as updating some of the ancient 1997 code and the links that went to sites that have not existed. All the links are now up to date. Also, added my MP3 albums that were not on the site before. (I totally forgot that my Mobile site was updated back in 2008, and I just never updated the web site!)
As for the Club House, it was redesigned, ditching the old format and now conforms to the Main Page and Daily Update sites (go figure since the Daily Update is technically part of the Club House). Instead of linking to old parties and outdated information, I decided to make it more of an "about/table of contents" page than I originally intended when I started this page in 2002. However, now that the site is 15 years old, I decided to give some history behind the sites and the technical aspects of it.
It still has my newly updated Biography and links to other sites I have featured, and my new favorite which is a list of current sections of the site as well as those long gone, but not forgotten sections.
Next up, I need to create a new banner image to replace the January 2009 one!
Did the usual year end/beginning copyright changes sitewide.
I have super neglected the site since the big update in September! In fact, December was the first month I did not have ANY blog entries since the beginning back in 2000. I am going to try and retro-remedy that by doing a December to Remember summary before I forget what the heck happened!!
Discovered an issue with the link to the Mobile Trip Diaries for Pennsylvania 2010.
A byproduct of the redesign of the Daily Update Archives and the tweak to the homepage was that the Daily Update on the mobile site went horribly wrong. I spent some time re-doing this section so that it looks nice and follows the same style guidelines as the rest of the site. I wanted to create a new logo for the Daily Update, but instead went text based and just re-used the graphic from the mobile site index page.
I do need to update that photo though!
Finally!
After years and years and years of thinking about it, I finally figured out how to make the Daily Update archives look like the Home Page of the site. It took some lengthy modification of the templates for the Daily Update Blog files, something that I had to take notes on in order to remember what to do should I ever redesign the home page. Thankfully, changing the graphic will be as easy as replacing a file or a reference in a style sheet.
There are some minor problems that I have uncovered, mainly that the dimensions of the boxes on the MT generated pages are not the same as on the manually generated home page. This should remedy itself when the home page becomes generated by MT sometime down the road. Another problem is the bottom of the rounded corner boxes. For some reason they are not rendering correctly in the MT pages. I might figure that out before I decide to get rid of rounded boxes..
Since I unified the style sheets for the index page and the MT site, I had to make some minor adjustments to the Home Page include from the Daily Update as well as the side nav links. I am actually quite pleased at how I was able to get it to work. Now I can see about putting the Club House in MT and changing the What's New archives to this style as well and I might one day have a unified web site.
Changes to the Home Page include colorization of links as well as spacing in the right navigation and the fonts of the actual home page include. But now the archives and the home page are all in the same font and look and feel which should make for a better experience.
This update also included the update of the Movable Type software to 5.02 from 4.32 (that started back in August!)
Added short but sweet Trip Diary from Pennsylvania 2010. Also fixed an issue with the What's New template on the Mobile Site. Apparently it broke when I upgraded and had to rebuild the include from scratch.
As I am working on it, it is clear that I can make this process simpler if I can figure out how to generate the Mobile site completely from within MT. Someday...
Added 42 photos from my recent trip to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and West Virginia to the site. Also updated the Gorn Index, History, North America Photos pages to support the links to the new Gallery.
