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 Instead of linking to old parties and outdated information, I decided to make it more of an "about/table of contents" page than I originally intended when I started this page in 2002.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!!
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 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.
I updated the Trip Diaries main page with some new stats for countries and continents and changed the Upcoming Travels section. Still looking for that major redesign!
Also updated the site-wide copyright files to 2010! I have a nagging feeling that somewhere I have forgotten a gallery page that has the wrong data, but I will check it out throughout the year.
I also in the last week have added nav links at the top of the What's New page to make it easier to get back to the main Club Josh site.
Maybe not massive in the number of Gorn photos added, but it is the first structure change since v 18.1 in March 2001! Since I needed to find a location for the South America photos, I split Asia and Oceania so that now there are 6 photo galleries on the Gorn page instead of 4.
The sections are now: North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Oceania, and Celebrity. I guess when I make it to Africa, things will get a bit creative. This was an easy fix, so maybe when I go on Safari, I will just go to smaller thumbnails, or god forbid, a redesign of the Gorn pages!
Updates include the addition of nav links to the new pages at the top of each page, the movement of Asia and Oceania to each own pages, 34 new photos of Argentina in the South America section, the change of the Gorn Page 2009 to Gorn Page 2010, and finally an update of the places the Gorn has been. Long ago, I started a Google Map for the Gorn, but got bogged down. Originally, I was going to link to a photo in each pin location, but I think for the sake of sanity, I will just add the pins.
I also discovered that I used a random copyright file for the Gorn pages which is why some of the pages had 2008 copyrights instead of 2009. They have been updated to 2010 in advance of the sitewide change next week.
I started working on a new Club House page and as a result started poking around at a few minor things that were amiss on the site.
First up: Deleted the old Lite site that I no longer use. As a reminder everything is now in m.clubjosh.com. As a result I deleted the old PDA link under the What's New links on the index page.
Next: Updated the old robots.txt file from the old server. There were a lot of directories that no longer exist (old galleries that are long gone!)
Finally: Made the Flickr thumbnail on the index page a local image since if you are looking at clubjosh from behind a domain that blocks Flickr you see nothing.
I still haven't finished the new Club House, but it is close. Hope to get it up before vacation.
