This is a momentous occasion, I’ve actually found out that someone has linked to my site, not only that, but I found that someone else has translated my CityDesk Magic Names CSS post into french! Wow, considering I thought that no one ever read this pitiful site (not even my family), I’m unashamedly impressed! Mind you, both the links are from 2002, it’s just that I’ve only now found them because of a referral in my webstats, I bet no one has linked to me in the last year or so!

However, it did show that my update to this site many moons ago caused a few problems, as the CityDesk Magic Names CSS post was not showing the correct information, the magic name was actually being translated into its relative path, rather than staying in its original form. I can only think this is because I went through a phase of opening up every article and viewing it in “Normal View” to set all the tags to xhtml once I upgraded to CityDesk 2.0. Since then, I’ve pretty much stuck to only using HTML View when editing to make sure everything is correct, I’m not a very trusting fellow with these things, and I like to see the raw code in everything I do anyway. Just as well really as it turns out.

Well, if you’ve been here before you know this already … things have changed a little around here!

I’ve re-designed this website, utilizing more of the features introduced with CityDesk SP1 and my own knowledge gained from creating the old version and my other site, www.imij.co.uk. The old site wasn’t very smart, didn’t use templates to the extent they can be used now, variables are better used now too.

Hope you like the new design, please feel free to get in touch to let me know whether you do or not.

This site now uses an imported cascading style sheet (CSS) file so that a change to my style rules does not mean that all files have to be uploaded as with embedded CSS. Before I was using a CityDesk variable containing the style rules which I embedded in the html and templates of my site. Now I use a variable that contains:

<style type=”text/css”>
<!–
@import url(PTMFOG0000000026.css);
–>
</style>

The “PTMFOG0000000026.css” url is a CityDesk “Magic Name”, when you publish your site Magic Names are changed to relative urls to the file who’s Magic Name it is. If you look at the source for this page, youll see that I’ve had to use the character entity code for “P” (&#080;) to stop CityDesk from changing the url to “../../css/ianmjones.css”!

So, now a change to my style rules won’t mean uploading all my content, which is something to be avoided at any cost when you’re working away from home and can only do an upload via your mobile phone at 9,600bps!

Thank you CityDesk, you rock!

Another evening of tweaking my CityDesk html, templates and CityScript to (un)perfection!

I know it doesn’t look like much at the moment, it needs a right royal make-over, but the basics are coming along. In the background there’s been a lot change, things are fairly consistent, with the “structure” of the page ready for a little bit of “styling”.

Anyway, walked to work this morning, very pleasant stroll, took a little under 30mins to do (including a little back-tracking while hunting for the start of the public footpath around the lake). If I can walk to work a couple of times a week, and actually get back on my MTB when back home at the weekends, maybe I’ll be able to lose the stone or two that I should. Probably shouldn’t have had that Mars Bar today though!

Right, I’ve done enough of this for today, I think I’ll go read Joel Spolsky’s User Interface Design For Programmers, that should help me wind down for the night!

Good night.

Just a few tweaks this evening, and now ianmjones.net is up and running. So I now have two sites published with CityDesk, some of the content will be similar, and for the moment I’ll just copy some articles across to the other site, but they are very likely to diverge very soon 🙂

Me thinks that once CityDesk SP1 arrives, I’ll fork out for the software, it’s made life so much easier.

Right, it’s 01:30am, time for bed.

So, I’ve finally gone live with a version of my web site published with CityDesk.

It took a little while longer than expected (about 5 hours with lots of playing), but still far less time than it has taken me to wrestle with PHP while trying to create what amounts to my own Content Management System. I’ve decided that writing a CMS from scratch isn’t the best use of my time, I’m going to concentrate on what I enjoy and do best, database design and implementation. I enjoy creating solutions to problems that revolve around the capturing and manipulation of meaningful data, giving useful data to an organisation.

Well, I’ve decided to make my life a lot easier, so first step was to pay off all my debts (other than mortgage), second step is to use CityDesk for publishing my website!

So, with any luck, using CityDesk should encourage me to make more updates to this site, as I won’t be re-inventing the wheel like I was trying to do before!