Site Version History written 3 years ago

A short description of the things I’ve done to the site over time. More a utility for me to see what I’ve fiddled with.

19 May 2007

• New style sennir site launched upon the world!

  • Introductory Post
  • Design ideas

    03 December 2006

• Tried to make page loading faster.

  One some of the main pages, over 120 hits to the database were being made, so I condensed some of the repeated statements into one gargantuan SQL query.

  This doesn’t seem to have made the page any quicker, (infact maybe even slower..). I’ve added lots of indexes to the database, but still it’s slow. Perhaps lots of small database queries is better?

31st July 2006

• Added filtering by tags to sections with listed posts. e.g. Projects Tagged with Music

• Only relevant Tags show up in the section they are used in.

• Added functionality to add tags in admin functions, and also to assign tags which aren’t in use yet. (No more Database fiddling!)

20th June 2006

• Added SPAM blacklisting. Uses publicly available spam blacklists, e.g. http://www.clagnut.com/blacklist.txt.

• Comment Management system allows comments to be easily deleted.

6th June 2006

• Finally fixed “Save and continue” button in admin pages.
• Technoratified the place.

4th June 2006

• Added relevant posts if referred by search.

3rd June 2006

• Added RSS Feed.

2nd June 2006

• Tidied up code, and added a little bit of optimization to things so that fewer DB queries needed.

• Removed google analysis code, and gVisit code, as it was pretty useless.

26th May 2006

• Added a few stripslashes here and there to combat the slashes creeping in.

27th April 2006

• Images added to search results. Damn the bandwidth used by all those 20kb PNGs!

  Perhaps it would be nice to resize them .. hmm..

4th January 2006

• “Hot Posts” feature added. Tracks the number of views of each post, and shows a list of the more popular ones at the end of each individual post view. Also displays a list of the popular posts on the front page.

16th December 2005

• If a reply is made which quotes another comment, an email will be sent to the person that made the original comment. Hopefully useful..

21st October 2005

• Fiddled with Photo Slider a little:

  • Shows Photo number in a small Box on the photo. This is because it’s easy to skip over the photos, so numbering them might help.

  • Added button to skip to “new” photo. The system now tracks the last photo you saw, and checks to see if there’s any newer photos. When clicking the button it will take you to the next unseen photo, or the first photo if you’ve seen them all.

  • Changed behaviour with respect to above tracking. If the viewer hasn’t seen a particular picture, the site will display that one first. Otherwise a random photo will be displayed.

  • Fixed some image aligning issues with IE.

5th October 2005

• Added functionality to create icons from the URL of an image, now speeds up creating icons for posts.

3rd October 2005

• Added new functions to gallery, now can upload images via web interface, delete images and edit captions online.

• Virtually no interaction by ftp is required!

24 September 2005

• Albums, and photos are now indexed within the Search facility. A bohemoth of SQL badness!

16 September 2005

• “Talk to Rob” added, with contact form

15 September 2005

• Added Tag list to sidebar, including number of posts in each section. (Finally getting the hang of this SQL thing).

• Reduced Size of recent posts thing so it only prints the title of the post. Now prints out last 10 global entries, to be of slightly more use than before.

14 September 2005

• Added ability for posts to be tagged, multiple tags can be applied per post.
• Facility to filter according to tags, so can view All posts tagged with “Random” for example;
• Added links to archives in all dates dotted around site. To promote the usage of the archives section, which is a bit combersome to use as it stands.

5 September 2005

• Added Gravatar images to comments posted. Still a bit rough around the edges. Uses script copied from Clagnut.

29 August 2005

• Added cookie dropping ability to remember commenters name, url and email — should prevent me from forgetting to enter things :)

28 August 2005

• Added functionality to display description of little phone pictures. Uses AJAX with XMLHttpRequest.

27 August 2005

• Added “print” css files. Not at all necessary, but kept me entertained for a while.

26 August 2005

• Updated to Markdown “Extra” 1.0b4.
• Adds new features such as

Tables

I can make tables!

Definitions

I can define things!

• Major headaches caused in additions made to original markdown, but quotes and code should be ~fixed~

• Known issue when quoting php code causes it to disappear

25 August 2005

• Last 50 Tracks played listing added. Results are pulled from a file storing the song info.
• Primitive measures in place to detect when I’m manically skipping through tracks; and also to detect when no music is playing.

24 August 2005

• Switchable colour schemes added.
  • Blue
  • Classic style
  • Green
  • High Contrast (unsure if this actually offers ay benefit to sight impaired users)
  • Monochrome

17 August 2005

• Added “Now Playing” to side bar.
  • Currently uses msn music (US) to provide sound samples etc.
  • Unfortunately msn music is IE only, which is a bit naff, but seems to be the best option.

15 August 2005

• Photo albums finally updated: Now shows the album thumbnail in the “choose album” page.

• Corrected javascript for image sliding — duplicates should now be removed.

12 August 2005

• Post content is now passed through Smartypants, for uber geeky correct quotation-ness. “Behold ‘the’ nice quotes — aren’t They lovely…”

20 July 2005

• Search added.

• Replaces Archives, with added functionality.

14 July 2005

• Re-wrote code to slide images on mini-image-slider to support proper prev/next buttons.

• Tweaked the css on Photos to make the keyboard browsing experience better. Different experiences in different User Agents:

  • Firefox : Nothing changes colour, except when pressing tab the currently selected image background will turn blue.
  • IE : Picture background changes colour when visiting them, currently selected image background turns red. Turns background red when tabbed to using the keyboard.
  • Opera : As IE, except for current selection only changing colour whilst mouse is depressed. Tabbing between links not work in opera?

• Primitive Contact implemented:

  • Email address hidden as unix tr command, for the suitably geeky.
  • Obfuscated mailto: link.
  • Will implement contact form at some point, depending on traffic changes.

6 July 2005

• Added facility to view photo’s taken on phone camera.

  • Images are copied to a folder on the hard drive.
  • At 8pm every day the new images in the folder are re-sized and uploaded to a special directory on the web server
  • On viewing the page, a random image is selected within the directory and displayed!

• Fancy viewer created to “slide” through the images, currently on the front page.

24 June 2005

• Added “view newer/older posts” links at the end of each section page.

• “Other” section removed - It was pretty useless, and difficult to navigate.

• Added admin links on each page, to make it easier to edit an existing entry.

22 June 2005

• Created basic functionality in the gallery, involving the following:

  • Automatic thumbnail creation
  • Automatic title/comment creation from image metadata.
  • Slideshow function

• Many extra things to be added however, such as

  • Web based image uploader
  • Web based image description/title editor

  • Some kind of provision for uploading large images to be resized

  • Main gallery section to display a thumbnail from each of the albums, instead of drop down list.

8 June 2005

• Added ability to reply to comments on postings made.

• Prettified comments section a little to work in button to reply/quote comments.

7 June 2005

• Made pretty boxes to go round blockquotes, and code blocks. They’re supposed to resemble post-it notes.

• Made code blocks look pretty by using highlight_string in them to do code colouring.

• Sections will now output the number of comments made on each entry.

4 June 2005

• Made the admin area a whole lot nicer, by finishing up all the little bits I had left.

• Added a timeout-refresh page when making comments, makes the place look a little more professional.

• Updated links to comments page because of above change, now to post a comment, the url is: /section_name/post_id/comment. Looks nicer I think.

31 May 2005

• Created nicer links throughout website, no longer are the pages referenced by view_page.php?section=blah&id=moo, but individual pages can be referenced by /blah/moo. Much nicer, and only a few hours gooning with htaccess.

• Attempted to create similar workings for archives pages, however using the form restricts me to GET variables, which don’t want to appear nicely. Not much of a worry, but would have been nice to have all looking tidy. Will perhaps implement a link based time navigation system.

• Note to self: Create a clicky linky section chooser. To make choosing a section from the “other” button a bit nicer.

30 May 2005

• Domain name www.sennir.co.uk purchased. Hurrah.

18 March 2005

• Initial launching of website onto world. Current features:

  • Icon for each entry in site
  • Customisable sections, with editable name / description / display style
  • Every entry in site can be commented on by external users
  • Archives, navigable by month / year / section
  • Entry markup via markdown.

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