http://stephengentle.com/ News - stephen gentle dot com http://stephengentle.com/news/rss-feeds-are-back/ I have just coded new RSS feeds - a feature that the old site had but I temporarily lost as I switched to the new codebase. But now it's even better than before - as well as the news feed which the old site always had, I now have a new photos feed. Check out the RSS page GMT + 1000 http://stephengentle.com/news/rss-feeds-are-back/ http://stephengentle.com/news/completly-new-site/ Today I'm launching my new web site, which I have completely re-designed and re-coded. It's not completely finished (I need to add a lot more content to the Projects section), and my news stories don't have an RSS feed yet, but it is already so much better than my old site that I am launching it anyway The photo gallery is one of the most improved parts of the site in my opinion, so make sure you take a look at that. GMT + 1000 http://stephengentle.com/news/completly-new-site/ http://stephengentle.com/news/server-updates-and-downtime/ If you tried to access our sites in the last two days, you may have found that they were unavailable, or broken... This is because we were doing a lot of cleaning and updates. I uninstalled a lot of unwanted programs, and installed a new virus scanner, which found a few trojans and a lot of adware. I also updated the firewall (the old one was really playing up) and updated PHP and MySQL. We're running the newest versions of these now, as opposed to before where we were running MySQL 3.2... PHP should also run faster, as it's now installed as a module, instead of through CGI. Still, we need a faster pipe to take advantage of it... The eventual goal is to move the server over to Fedora, but there are some things we need to sort out first. You may have also noticed that I updated the tab bar at the top of my site. I based it off the tabs in the K2 Wordpress theme, and I think it looks much better than before. GMT + 1000 http://stephengentle.com/news/server-updates-and-downtime/ http://stephengentle.com/news/xhtml-compatibility/ I fixed the errors in my site that were causing it to not validate as XHTML strict today. This involved adding and XML namespace to the html tag, and removing the ad server I was using. -Stephen GMT + 1000 http://stephengentle.com/news/xhtml-compatibility/ http://stephengentle.com/news/more-fire-photos/ I added some more fire photos recently, the most impressive (well, at least in my opinion) of which was this one: Check them all out in the photo gallery. GMT + 1000 http://stephengentle.com/news/more-fire-photos/ http://stephengentle.com/news/new-design/ Today I redesigned the look of my site and blog. I think that it is a much cleaner design than before, and it a lot more stylish and modern. The old design of the site is still available; just click the link in the top right hand corner. The original site design is also available, but only if your browser can switch to alternate stylesheets. In Firefox, just go to View -> Page Style and then choose one. -Stephen GMT + 1000 http://stephengentle.com/news/new-design/ http://stephengentle.com/news/new-movies-section/ I have just added the Movies section to my site. So far it only has two movies, my clay animation Ninja Assault and a video of my brother firing our tennis ball canon. I will be adding the other 2 animations I have done so far, and hopefully I will be able to film some fire twirling once I have repaired my fire stick. -Stephen GMT + 1000 http://stephengentle.com/news/new-movies-section/ http://stephengentle.com/news/even-more-photos/ Today I added another two galleries to the gallery, and a few more photos to the Night gallery. This brings the number of photos in my gallery up to 44. GMT + 1000 http://stephengentle.com/news/even-more-photos/ http://stephengentle.com/news/new-photos/ I added a couple of photos to the photo gallery today. I also increased the height of the box that the photos are shown in from 330 pixels to 400 pixels high. This was because it was hard to crop the photos to this very wide aspect without missing out on a lot of detail. It's a lot easier now. I updated most of the old photos to the new size, but some old ones are still small. You will also have noticed that I added a random photo to the front page. This is just to add some colour and interest to the bland text. There are about 10 images in all. -Stephen GMT + 1000 http://stephengentle.com/news/new-photos/ http://stephengentle.com/news/advertising-on-the-forums/ Today I decided to remove the Google Adsense advertisements displayed on the Forums.This is because they weren't making any money, as they were in a bad position. I didn't really want to putt ads through the posts (the forum doesn't get enough posts to justify it anyway) so I'll just leave it totally ad free. -Stephen GMT + 1000 http://stephengentle.com/news/advertising-on-the-forums/