So, if you’ve visited the MalcolmHardie.com site today you’ll have seen the new site design.<\/p>\n
It’s Blue.<\/strong><\/p>\n But that’s not all. The layout structure of each page has been substantially changed (for the first time since 2004, I think) The content management has also been improved. The whole site is now a sort of wiki. Although it is somewhat static as wikis go. Each web page is now a wiki page that is rendered when necessary to deliver the page. Page expiry dates match the wiki source document expiry and all of the meta-data is cached into a database so that things like recently changed lists can be generated. The next iteration of the system may also cache the text as well.<\/p>\n Apache is configured to serve the wiki pages only after any existing index pages, so the whole thing can be switched to static html without recoding (if necessary).<\/p>\n There were several things that I really wanted to do with the re-design.<\/p>\n The first, obviously, was to get the web2.0 thing going. The first step in the design process was therefore to identify the gradient that I wanted to use. The blue\/blue gradient seemed to be a good choice here. Although I didn’t in the end go for reflection or glass effects, several prototypes had glass effects. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n The second was to serve html pages as html pages with a .html extension. Which was achieved (mostly)<\/p>\n The third thing was to clean up the arrangement of the site, previously there had been a mix of systems used to generate content from an interesting (but probably obsolete) attempt at a php visual class library, through ordinary php to finally plain html. The new wiki style system is consistent across the site. (I’m hoping that this will last)<\/p>\n Software <\/strong><\/p>\n The site is written in php and uses a mysql database (standard, boring even!)<\/p>\n I used the PEAR Text_Wiki classes to handle the wiki side of things.<\/p>\n The wiki dialect is Text_Wiki default with extra classes to do php includes and page meta data in the same document.<\/p>\n Things I hope to improve<\/strong><\/p>\n At the moment there are some limitations to the wiki syntax. This means there are more blocks of raw php and html than I want. Eventually I hope to write some more wiki plugins to reduce this<\/p>\n Another area that could be improved is the concept of relative pages within the site. Currently the wiki links are hierarchical with the full link required each time.<\/p>\n
\n. The new 2 column design is also wider (960px) and offers more flexibility than the old 3 column design. There are new graphics and section headings and a new about page (with a message from me!).
\nThe MalcolmHardie logo has been used in a reversed white on blue form, which I think worked out quite well and the main body is black\/dark gray 13px Lucida Grande on a white background. (With Verdana as the second choice)<\/p>\n