Order of the Bath

This review is slightly early, but I have a free moment so what better time. Things have been very busy on the online front this year—these are just the ones I can remember:

• The site was getting too busy—800–1000 visits per day according to the (unreliable) stats. This was overloading the free hosting I was using even with a bandwidth enhancement so the step was taken to purchase real hosting from the same supplier, DotEasy.com. So far it has been good though sometimes you have to nudge/bully them into doing the right thing.
• 38 major new sections have been uploaded to West Penwith Resources thanks to the generous donation of material by others. This is compared to 20 in 2004. My own work has largely been reformatting but I have created some from scratch. There are now 821 solid pages of material.
• An RSS Feed has been introduced as an alternative to the old page watch service. It is manually generated with similar content to the “What’s New” page; I can’t easily see how it could be automated.
• The free search engine service provided by Atomz ran out of capacity and any externally hosted replacement was either too limited or too expensive. Now, having server side scripting available, I splashed out and bought a stand alone index generator and search script from Zoom. This has proved excellent, though a little slow to upload each time the site is re-indexed.
• A comprehensive link check was done (blogged earlier).
• This blog was added. I don’t think there are any readers, but that is not surprising as it is mainly a bunch of inarticulate rambling, but it gets it off my chest. Again, having server side capability, I used WordPress and customised a theme to my style, mostly by stripping out a lot of clutter. A few bits have made it back in as I discovered how useful they were but I am no fan of buttons and widgets distracting from the main goal.
• The spammers have discovered the domain name (not just my active addresses) so I get hundreds of rubbish mails, mostly failure bounces where it has been used as a from address. Popfile is doing a good job of filtering them out but I am concerned about missing mail, particularly failures to deliver.
• Losing mail is a continual worry. After a lot of effort I managed to resolve a blacklist dispute between DotEasy and Wanadoo but I still suspect that some stuff is not arriving when it should.
• David has started work on a new version of HTML-Writer. I am looking forward to that as my needs outstripped the current version a couple of years ago. Even so, not bad for a 6th form school project.

Things that need to be done (next year?):

• I am aware that WPR is rather drab looking. I have got used to it but it can’t be a good impression to new visitors—it needs brightening up but my graphic skills are lacking to do a good job of it. The requirements are a continuity with the past so as not to scare away existing users and to be mostly done in CSS so I don’t have to make huge changes to the 800+ old pages. Any takers?
• The biggest bandwidth consumers are the CSS file (so it needs thinning down) and the custom “Old English” font that is used to add a little antique style to many pages. I don’t really know how well this works, probably only in IE, but I can’t think of a better way to do the job.
• Finish the job of producing a dedicated print style sheet so that unnecessary navigation clutter is removed from printed reference copies of pages which many people like.
• Finish transcribing Matthew’s History (but there is a long way to go), Kelly’s Directory 1919 (ditto).
• Improve and complete the parish sketch maps. I have discovered some brilliant and free software to do the job, which will be the subject of another post; now I just need to get down to it.
• WordPress 2.0 comes out on Monday 26th—Is it worth the upgrade and when?
• Have another go at trying to spell check the site. Very hard as a) I can’t spell and b) neither could the writers of many of the documents transcribed. Finding a way to do it correcting my errors but not theirs is proving hard.

Offline things to do include investigating OpenOffice.org v2 and ThunderBird 1.5 (when it comes out) to try to detach myself from Office. I can then pass the 2000 licence on to others who need it. Will I ever detach from Windows—perhaps when Vista comes out?

That’s it for now—Happy Xmas everyone—deafening silence.

This entry was posted on 23 Dec 2005 at 10:47 by Rick and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.