Work In Progress

Please forgive the current state of this Web site as it continues its ongoing overhaul. Because the changes have been very substantial, I haven’t made posts public since May and have only begun re-posting them since certain upgrades went live on October 9.

Here are some of the new features of saveandrewgarib.com, and what changes are to come.

Major changes so far

New CSS style sheet, i.e., colour scheme (grey, black & marigold on white) (April)
New house-built photo album system, replacing SimpleViewer (May)
Flash replaces bothersome Quicktime for the Flava Flav audio clip in the 404 error page (9/26)
Photo albums can be embedded into any article (10/3) and on the homepage and archives templates (10/5)
Articles now have a graphic closer (little orange square ) (10/7)
Visual comment spam filter test, or CAPTCHA, system (10/10)
Numerous changes streamlining the code and content management system

Things to come

SVG file format support
New graphic menu system, hopefully replacing Flash completely
Tags and meta tags for each article
Major browser compatibility upgrades to the photo albums system
More simple wiki coding (like embedded photo albums) built into the content management system, allowing easy pulled quotes and additional article images
Archive nav links at the bottom of the archives pages
Thumbnails for article images in homepage, archives views
An auto-updated RSS feed
Converting all old content to database and content management system (some of it is still old fashioned plain HTML pages—each written by hand!)
Further improvements to code efficiency

This is actually the second phase of the overhaul, which began in the Summer of 2008 with the creation of my content management system based on MySQL. But really, this Web site is an ever-changing project. Soon, I will be able to say it is worthy of the first decade of the 21st century. By then (2010), I’ll work on making it good enough for the second decade, whatever the hell that might entail (holograms!!!).

A Note on Backposting

Much of the content from the past six months I’ve only begun putting up now. Most of that content is identical to what it was when I wrote it at the time (i.e., the posts I’m putting up right now from May are with the same content I intended at the time). In some cases, I have substantially edited or added to content, and I try to remember to show my hand where applicable.

Backposting is possible when you hand-craft your Web site. It’s convenient, but it also creates a problem of trust. For example, I could post an article predicting the outcome of the Baucus bill, dated before the bill came out—but written afterwards. Or I could tweak my archived content with hindsight, erasing embarrassing predictions or making others seem more prescient. I can only assure you that I won’t pull a Rudy Giuliani and revise history to take credit I don’t deserve or to brush aside negative things that were once public. Also, I promise I won’t say "9/11" every 10 minutes or do this. End.

Published 09.10.10 02:00:00 -0500 GMT | Posted by Andrew Garib on 09.10.08 | |