My Website Is Online! See screenshots, and learn about how I wrote it.

Hi everyone!

It’s Alive!

Finally, my website is online. Not all of the things I wanted to happen did happen in the end, but all the important features did. I’ve heard a picture is worth a thousand words, so I’ll be lazy and give you a bunch of screenshots to look at XD

Screenshots and some details

My Website's Homepage
My Website’s Homepage
My Website’s About Page
My Website’s About Page
DDRescue-GUI’s Downloads Page
DDRescue-GUI’s Downloads Page
WxFixBoot’s Museum Page
WxFixBoot’s Museum Page

I learnt HTML and CSS on the go as I was making this website, so it took some time, and a lot of research, but it was very fun, which was the real goal here. It’s also a helpful thing to be able to do, both for employment reasons, and just for personal interest. The only thing that I didn’t manage to get done was integrating it with this blog, because I eventually figured it was more trouble than it was worth, but I may yet do it at a later time, when I have more time 🙂

The site is available at hamishmb.altervista.org, and works on all good browsers, as well as Internet Explorer 8 or higher (though it works much better on 9).

The difficulties in making it

Obviously, learning PHP and HTML come first on this list, but let’s ignore those. The main bug bear I had while writing it was the download counters, which never ceased to be awkward. It involved a lot of repetitive code, and recursively creating .counter files, and when I actually got it on my webserver, it wouldn’t work! After doing some other work though, they just magically started working. I created a support request for this, so it’s possible some helpful admin just fixed some config for me and made it work, and if so, thank you 🙂

I used as little Javascript as possible when making the website to try and make the site run as quickly as possible, and also I don’t really know any Javascript. Everything ended up being PHP, except the little bit of code that initiates the download on the “thank you” page. I also used HTML5Shiv to make the site at least partially work under browsers older than ie9, which it sort of does, at least on ie8, though I need to find a better way of testing that cos it just crashes all the time when run in WINE.

This is just a little post this time around, but I have some more things I want to write about, notably Unity 8, and Wayland/Mir.

Hamish

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About Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty

I'm a self-employed software developer working on Free Software projects, as well as studying for my degree with the Open University. Being pedantic when it comes to detail is fortunately useful for both of these things! A strong believer in free software, I have a few pay-for programs available under the GPLv3 and enjoy reporting bugs and helping to improve various open source projects, including volunteering at Wimborne Model Town to work on their river control system.

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