Reboot Fall 2005
I don’t know for how many years I constructed these utterly wild table-based sites, but sometime around January of 2005 I decided I had had enough. No more tweaking with transparent gifs, no more setting of endless table properties, no more bandwidth wasting.
It turned out to be more complicated than I thought, and this site is far from perfect, but it is my first step to learning what all the standards craze is about.
This site was developed from scratch and probably contains many beginners’ mistakes. I will try to iron those out as I go along, but BrowserCam shows me that the site works on most browsers (aside from some older Internet Exploders) on all systems.
Some notes:
a) This site was programmed for a higher resolution. I know this is apt to be very controversial, but my log files show that doing that will effect only about 2% of my visitors. Should my log files show new users unable to use the site at this resolution, I will probably redesign it.
b) This site uses Expression Engine (EE) as a backend and uses an SQL database. It is hosted by DomainFactory, a German hoster with a very good reputation.
c) The site was hand-coded using nothing but a browser interface to my EE installation and notepad, Windows very own stripped-down text editor. The code includes snippets from SimpleBits and CollyLogic, but aside from that, what you see is my attempt of piecing together a site.
d) Several things need to be done: I need to shrink the style sheet which has lots of redundant code, I need to streamline my EE installation, and I need to completely redo the Count Basie site linked to from this page, which was abandoned last year due to a lot of pressing work and complications with the positively huge discography.
e) I started this site with a clean slate and wiped out all previous posts (several hundred) that had been inactive far too long. The focus also changed and is now limited to a topic that I always found frustrating finding the answers on. I’ve collected a plethora of links these past months and years and you can look forward to lots of posts discussing storage systems, reissues and resources. Note: I wanted to have more posts online for the reboot, but a serious illness has prevented me from writing up more posts aside from the ones I finished a while ago. To tie me over, I still have a lot of finished ones that will go live these next days and weeks, so drop by frequently.
If you notice any errors or if you just want to say hi, please leave a comment. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.
I really like this reboot. I like the clean lines and barenss of it all. Very nice work!
Thanks!
Hi,
I like the design very much. It’s clean and simple and this site looks like a) it really did reboot and b) that it will actually be updated regularly. Too many sites on this fall’s reboot started off by saying that there won’t be anything available or that they didn’t reboot at all. Sucks!
The code needs some work, but you said that yourself. I’ll drop by frequently. Your site seems to be one that has what I’m interested in.