To give an update on the new site, it's pretty much a waiting game right now. ExpressionEngine version 2.0 has been rumored to being released really soon. What makes this important is version 2.0 will be running CodeIgniter as the framework. This will allow me to have a feature packed blog that is seemlessly integrated to the rest of the site. This still hasn't been a set deal yet as I've been debating just building a blog from scratch. Hopefully it will be soon, and integration with current site will be as easy as they say.

You may notice that a lot of links are no longer functional. As mentioned above, I just built the initial site ensuring the highest traffic areas were still accessible. I've setup several redirects so if the old address gave you a 404 "File not found" message, try back later.

When I moved to the new server, I realized several areas of the site were never utilized or just very outdated. I've made my best effort to actually have it redirect somewhere, but some pages simply no longer served any meaningful purpose. These pages will return the status code 410 "Gone" which tells browsers and search engines that the request page has been completely and permanently removed. How your browser will interpret this will vary but should still mention it is permanently removed. If it was a link from another site, you should inform them that the link has been removed. If you really wish to access the page, you may contact me.

As you can see I've finally updated the website. I've made mock ups a few times but figured the only way I'd ever actually use it is if I actually implement it. Because of that, a lot of content is still missing. I've kept the main items active (mainly the pc name maker). If you're trying to access something that doesn't work anymore, try back again later. If you really need something you may contact me and I'll see what I can do.

So what's changed? pretty much everything. The old site had a very old look to it. All the dynamic content was done using server side includes which worked fine at the time. Now, everything has moved to PHP and with the help of php accelerators it runs faster than before. This site is also now 100% css driven. It is also XHTML 1.0 compliant.

Another big change in this is building it on top of CodeIgniter. A problem with the old site was being able to maintain any sort of consistency. There were maybe three pages that used php, but all used different includes and connects in different ways and it was just more tedious than it should be to create a new page. With CodeIgniter everything is very structured. Entire new sections can be made relatively quickly. This makes it more worthwhile to put effort into creating something when I don't have to look at it as another place to make things complicated. The downside is this does slow things down slightly. But once I get everything setup I can start caching some things to speed it up.