Homepage and photo album upgrades

The homepage design has been refreshed again! Gone with the boring red and in with the interesting bluey tones copied directly from my journal’s CSS. The most significant change, without considering the background coding, is the amount of CSS styling and graphics; the increase really makes the page more interesting and more reader friendly. Behind the scenes, I have integrated RSS into the main homepage so that browsers like Mozilla Firefox — which you should be using by the way — display a little icon enabling you to subscribe to my journal feed.

I have also begun to add images to my coppermine photo album. It now includes images of my guitars and recent powerball scores — just managed to achieve 12083 RPM on my powerball, a bit unrelated but I’m proud of my sudden increase in ability. I am planning to add all images to that album before I use them on this journal to prevent losing track of the original images.

A simple PHP visitor counter now inhabits the bottom of my homepage and will inform me of my site’s popularity. It reads and writes a private text file on every page hit to update the counter:

$counter = fopen(FILE_COUNTER, 'r+');

$count = (int)fgets($counter);
rewind($counter);
fwrite($counter, ++$count);

fclose($counter);

Update: apparently the $stat['ctime'] variable gives the “time of last inode change” instead of the file creation time; accordingly I have had to hardcode the creation time into the PHP page.