The eagle eyed amongst you will have noticed that your usual array of witty (ish), topical banter was unavailable for the last few days and was replaced by some rather unimaginative “filler” page.
It was all due to a ridiculous error made by a generally good company which has all now been resolved, although not without a significant tearing of hair and bashing of keyboard.
As you will no doubt have realised whilst reading this new post, that the issue is fully sorted and the wonders of normanralph.com are back!
The new skin and theme have been added, hopefully delivering a more streamlined and sleeker look to the site. I miss the old theme a little though. It is odd how attached you can become to something so mundane!
I have tweaked the original design a little to make it fit the purpose I have in mind, so fingers crossed I haven’t broken anything important, lol. If anyone notices anything untoward then leave a comment on here.
I have also finished the tagging of the archives, which should now mean the site is a little more fluid to use when finding related articles or posts.
There are still some more features that I want to put into place, for example a contact form, a few more pages and possibly an RSS feed page for a few of the other sites I contribute to. I am still undecided as to whether I am going to change the direction of the content on the site, or whether simply to split up the content I already post. I will hopefully come to some sort of decision soon so I can get on with real posts rather than these boring update ones!
I have tidied up some of the permalinks and some of the back end bits and pieces. I have also added a Links section which will start to get more populated as I sort out my favourites list on Firefox!
I have spent most of my day finally getting to grips with some of the finer points of my website. I have been getting under the bonnet of cPanel and some of the advanced features that entails. I finally think I have worked everything out and now know enough about the workings of it all that I shouldn’t need to pester Kieran every five minutes!
Learning how things work brings such an enormous sense of satisfaction that I genuinely cannot understand people’s attitude of well if it works it works and if it doesn’t it doesn’t. I think that people who think like that are missing out on so much of life and its wonders. It is one of the main points I will take away from my university experience – we are expected to have that desire, that need to understand what we do and why we do it and how that impacts on our lives.
I think today’s experience has led me to want to carry on learning about web development and how I can go about improving this site and maybe making more.