spring clean, new home

Sorry for the silence, I know I’ve been a bit quiet for a while – as usual its the volume of freelance work that’s caused this. While its good to be busy, I watched with frustration as 1st April came and went, with everyone doing their little gags, and me missing my opportunity.

I’ve also been busy moving this site to a new server. I’d outgrown my little hovel at 1&1, become frustrated at the lack of decent support, and was being hit for excess bandwidth ever since Firefox 0.8 came out (all I did was the bloody icon!).

After constant poking and pestering by Mr Benjamin, I’m now with the hard working, nothing is too much trouble, chaps at Segment Publishing. I’m in good company here, with Hivelogic, Waferbaby and Antipixel to name but a few. Maniacial Rage has just joined up too! It feels like joining a record label with your favorite artists. Segments part of the deal was smooth and all the time I was dealing with A person (thanks Jeremy!). Its makes such a difference when you’re not dealing with a switchboard. Bless ‘em for uploading my SQL dump for me on a Saturday evening.

The pain in the arse has been 1&1 dragging their heels in giving up control of my domain. They make it very easy to get in, but you can’t leave without giving up your pound of flesh. Then suddenly, the site was removed from their servers before the DNS had propagated, so I’ve been unavailable for a few days. If you sent me an email recently, it would be worth resending to make sure I’ve got it. Anyway, if you’re reading this, all has gone well and the DNS now points to Sydney.

I’ve also taken the opportunity to do some evolving:

• I’ve revised the portfolio area. For those that really want to read about each piece of work, a drop down ‘info’ box will give it to you. The script I’ve used here is modified from Richard Rutters main menu that he uses on Clagnut. It also uses pngs with alpha transparency as the background image. Those that support it will get a drop shadow and a slightly transparent background. Those that don’t just get a green border and plain white background, which is fine.
• the biggest change is that the rest of the site is now 800×600 friendly. I finally found a layout that I liked, and now prefer this to the previous version. One of things that has helped this is the leaf background image on the left. This helps retain the widescreen proportions, while not adding to the actual content width.
• General spring clean throughout. Trimmed a lot of extraneous text, checked some links. Basically, everything but the journal has been updated.
• It took me a while to work out how to get a DIV to align to the bottom of another DIV. Hmm, vertical-align? Doesn’t work with block elements. Finally it dawned on me – “position:absolute; bottom:0;” . Doh.

Tags: hosting