August 29th. Our 10th Wedding Anniversary! I also completed all the cosmetic changes to the web-site, with the new simplified layout and color scheme. I added lots of new stuff throughout the Science section, including a whole new piece on Novæ and Supernovæ in the section on Stars, new information on extra-solar planets since the discovery of near-Earth sized planets around distant stars and some new pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope. |
August 24th. I am continuing with cosmetic changes to the site to make everything more color coordinated. Essentially, the site is predominantly monochrome, with highlights in shades of blue-grey. The background of stars was too distracting, so I have replaced it with a monochromatic texture. |
August 20th. Back from a few days with Deborah's mother, in part to celebrate our forthcoming 10th wedding anniversary. Plenty of nice meals out, including two lunches at the Soda Fountain, a re-creation of a 1950s diner in Remsen, NY. |
August 8th. I am in the process of introducing a slightly new look to the site which I hope to finish by the end of next week, August 14th. I have decided to loose the fake planet images in the header, as well as the star background, and make the whole look cleaner. This has the added advantage of freeing up a little extra real estate on each page. The new cordless keyboard is excellent, but the mouse seems to go through batteries like they are going out of fashion! I have reverted to the old one for now. |
July 26th. So, a whole raft of changes to the website completed. Hopefully makes for easier navigation and faster load times, especially for visitors with slow connections. Quality of thumbnail images reduced somewhat, but still OK I think. Also finally bought a new cordless key-board & mouse combination. Works pretty well, but will wait a while for final judgement. See how long batteries last. |
July 13th. So, I have finished converting the thumb-nails. There were over 1,000 thumb-nails to process! The full size pictures will still be slow to load using dial-up as there is a limit on how much I can reduce the resolution without them looking terrible. I have tried to keep all the large images below 100K, and below 60K where possible, but this still means 10 to 15 seconds to load one picture with a 56K dial-up connection. |
July 5th. I found that the site is almost unusable by anyone with a dial-up connection as the thumbnails, being .png files, are relatively large. So, I plan to convert them all into .jpg files that are only about one-tenth the size. This will make the pages load much more quickly, and be much friendlier to dial-up. |
The vacations pages have seen a large number of changes both to content and format. Having visited both Newport, RI and Cape Cod again this year, I have added a large number of new pictures. Thus, each of these sections now has a number of sub pages accessed from their own menus. Although largely transparent to visitors, I have changed the way different sub-pages are presented so that individual pages load much more quickly. |
| Just Like That |