Homepage refresh for Christmas 08

A total homepage refresh has taken place. Instead of using third-party software I have written an article system from scratch. It is designed to take plain HTML files and deliver them through an interactive categorised journal.

Most striking is the vivid new design, a massive contrast to previous efforts. Instead of a combination of white and one other colour, this design is based around a maroon shade. It was tough getting this to look good but I think it is an improvement over the old design.

Another departure is removing a lot of the user generated content. Instead of allowing people to comment directly and leave guestbook entries, they can simply e-mail me. It is my site after all.

CompSci stuff

“Flux” as I like to call it is the PHP class that implements this system. A lot of its functions are based on “GrokCache”, a simple but effective caching system that uses PHP variable serialization, thereby storing data in the fastest form for PHP to load.

Something to improve upon is the complex template code. I would prefer to create further back-end libraries to produce much simpler output code. Most of the logic is formatting the data however so perhaps it is sensible not to specialise any libraries. I need to think about this further.

I want to compare the speed of Flux with a similar MySQL implementation. I expect mine library would be faster ignoring extraneous hardware configurations: of course if there are 5000 scripts synchronously using the local file system accessing a separate database server could be faster. It is definitely an advantage not to rely on MySQL.

Short todo list

• Redirects from the old blog
• RSS feeds for every journal page
• Article system based on the journal system