{"id":33,"date":"2005-12-23T10:47:51","date_gmt":"2005-12-23T10:47:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/archives\/33"},"modified":"2014-04-11T18:38:01","modified_gmt":"2014-04-11T17:38:01","slug":"review-of-2005","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/archives\/33","title":{"rendered":"Review of 2005"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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&mdash;these are just the ones I can remember:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The site was getting too busy&mdash;800&ndash;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, <a href=\"http:\/\/doteasy.com\/\">DotEasy.com<\/a>. So far it has been good though sometimes you have to nudge\/bully them into doing the right thing.<\/li>\n<li>38 major new sections have been uploaded to <a href=\"http:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/whatsnew.htm\">West Penwith Resources<\/a> 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.<\/li>\n<li>An <a href=\"http:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/wpenwith.rss\">RSS Feed<\/a> has been introduced as an alternative to the old page watch service.  It is manually generated with similar content to the &#8220;What&#8217;s New&#8221; page; I can&#8217;t easily see how it could be automated.<\/li>\n<li>The free search engine service provided by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.atomz.com\/\">Atomz<\/a> 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 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wrensoft.com\/zoom\/\">Zoom<\/a>. This has proved excellent, though a little slow to upload each time the site is re-indexed.<\/li>\n<li>A comprehensive link check was done (blogged earlier).<\/li>\n<li>This blog was added. I don&#8217;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 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wordpress.org\/\">WordPress<\/a> 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.<\/li>\n<li>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. <a href=\"http:\/\/getpopfile.org\/\">Popfile<\/a> is doing a good job of filtering them out but I am concerned about missing mail, particularly failures to deliver.<\/li>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Things that need to be done (next year?):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I am aware that WPR is rather drab looking. I have got used to it but it can&#8217;t be a good impression to new visitors&mdash;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&#8217;t have to make huge changes to the 800+ old pages. Any takers?<\/li>\n<li>The biggest bandwidth consumers are the CSS file (so it needs thinning down) and the custom &#8220;Old English&#8221; font that is used to add a little antique style to many pages. I don&#8217;t really know how well this works, probably only in IE, but I can&#8217;t think of a better way to do the job.<\/li>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<li>Finish transcribing Matthew&#8217;s History (but there is a long way to go), Kelly&#8217;s Directory 1919 (ditto).<\/li>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<li>WordPress 2.0 comes out on Monday 26th&mdash;Is it worth the upgrade and when?<\/li>\n<li>Have another go at trying to spell check the site. Very hard as a) I can&#8217;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.\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Offline things to do include investigating <a href=\"http:\/\/www.openoffice.org\/\">OpenOffice.org<\/a> v2 and <a href=\"http:\/\/getthunderbird.com\/\">ThunderBird<\/a> 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&mdash;perhaps when Vista comes out?<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s it for now&mdash;Happy Xmas everyone&mdash;deafening silence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&mdash;these are just the ones I can remember: The site was getting too busy&mdash;800&ndash;1000 visits per day according to the (unreliable) stats. This was overloading the free hosting I was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":239,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/239"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1801,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions\/1801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}