about this site
design
For my site design I want something primarily easy to administer. When you have a site with lots of eye candy everywhere it can often become a chore to keep things up to date. Combined with some Perl magic, creating a new page for this site is so damn easy, that it’s silly. I also want it to look reasonably good, sleek and fast loading.
NB: I dont know what that thing in the top right is, but I made it one day in PhotoShop and I kinda liked it.
creation
Believe it or not, but I actually have coded the site by hand with a text editor, as I do with pretty much any site I work on.
I just get fed up with those GUI editors re-writing my code and screwing it all up, making it harder to edit in the future.
The site makes great use of custom Perl modules I wrote to generate the header and footer of each page of the site. As well as all of the other fun widgets.
All the data driven pages (links, news, dvds) are powered by a MySQL database. A good all round database for web based services, super fast and reliable.
(shameless plug) oxborrow.net is hosted with KDA Web Services which offer me an Apache webserver, alongside MySQL, Perl and if I feel the urge PHP, as well as some other neat features. All of this sitting on top a reliable Linux server, what more could you ask for?
Yes I’m a little logo happy, but I’m proud to display them :)
compatability
Since this is a personal site, and I promote the idea of using an OS you want to use, not one you’re forced to use, I aim to make my site look good, no matter what system/browser/screen resolution/car you use.
However, the web will not get anywhere if it does not try to move on, and even though I hate it when sites say stuff like “Requires IE 9.4 in 2400x1600” I personlly dont support Netscape 4 or less, or IE 4 or less, this site may work in them, but that is just a co-incidence. Please, they are over 5 years old each… it’s time to move on!
I regually check my pages using Mozilla (generally the latest build), since this is the most standards compliant browser around, if it works in this, the site is ‘correct’. Then I go about adding work-arounds for those lesser browsers, such as Internet Explorer.
I also care for you crazy people with small resolutions, so my site still kicks ass in 800x600 and even the console standard 80 columns by 25 rows :D. I’m so clever.
The only thing I really dont care to much about, is the web safe pallete, however, this site does a pretty good job of sticking to safe colours (granted Opera hates them).
This shows I have 1337 web coding skills… honest it does
The site’s style sheet passes the W3C CSS Validator test
flashback
Here are a few screenshots of the first version of this site, as viewed from…
These are of my old site ‘Oxborrow Villa’:
Mozilla 0.9.x, Internet Explorer 5.5, Opera 5.11
And just for the sake of it, some pictures of the current state of this site:
