Website Updates

I decided to make some updates on my website. Some of them are quite obvious to the keen observer; most of them, however, are behind-the-scenes type updates that are going to make my life much easier should I need to make any major changes to the site.

First, and probably most obvious, is the home page. I changed the layout a little and added a little journal/blog entry teaser. I got the idea for it from neilgaiman.com -- the webpage of my favorite author. He has a pretty famous journal, which many of his fans read often. It is quite entertaining. Anyway, I liked how his home page reveals a few sentences of his journal as a teaser. I tried so hard to replicate it for my own site, but was failing miserably. I couldn't get the right code to work with the set up that I had. A lot of the code that I was finding was way more involved than I needed it to be and, thus, quite cumbersome to figure out. So, I decided to email Neil's site administrator to see what they used. The next day, I received an email from "hewhoshallassist." Attatched to the email, which noted that I had asked "so nicely," was the code that they used for Neil's site. How cool is that? It's kind of like getting an autograph. Now, my website is just like my favorite author's.

Another noticable update on my site has to do with the random photo/song lyric banner that appears toward the bottom of the page. I added more photos and song lyrics to the rotation.

Something else that will be noticable very soon -- I hope -- is a new photo viewer for the photo page. I'm working with some script that creates a scrolling bar of thumbnail-sized pictures that, when clicked on, produces a larger version of the photo. It's pretty cool, but I don't have all the features that I want figured out quite yet.

What won't be noticed is that I made a menu file for the... erm, menu. Now, if I want to change the menu in anyway, I only need to change it once. Before I would have had to make the change on every single page of my site. I'm learning more and more about this web design stuff as I go along.

Okay, back to work on the photo script.