The site has had a CSS style refurbishment. Not all of the styles are rendered correctly by Internet Explorer, but there's no surprise there. Internet Explorer is so bad at adhering to web standards that I can't be bothered to waste my time pandering to it. Firefox, Opera and Konqueror all render the site correctly, so if you haven't already tried out one of these free alternative web browsers, take a look.
Coding is a new section on the site for programming and web development articles. It features a new article about two functions that can be handy for grabbing data out of XML files, plus two older PHP articles that have now moved out of the miscellaneous pages section.
Travel Destinations is a new section on this site. It contains brief descriptions of several worldwide cities I've visited, plus the best photographs I took in each location.
I'm now using Google Analytics on the site, to get a better idea of how visitors use my site. Use of Google Analytics requires me to add a privacy notice to my site.
I've completely changed the stylesheet used for the miscellaneous pages section of the site. This was in response to complaints that the old style used too large a font size, and too much spacing. The old style is still available as an alternative (but only Opera allows users to select an alternative stylesheet).
All of the photographs from The Booze Cruise canal holiday account have been reloaded from the Kodak Photo CDs and enhanced using Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 to improve their colour and contrast. Looking at the images that were on the site, I can't believe how dark and murky they looked. The photographs are much brighter and cleaner now.
Over the last week I've added hierarchy navigation bars to most of the article pages on the site. I've also added previous and next links to pages that are part of an ordered set, such as The Booze Cruise Full Account chapter pages. Hopefully it's now much easier to get around the site.
A sitemap has been created to give an overview of the site. I've also fixed the stylesheet for the root pages so that they fit onto an 800×600 screen. (Hopefully there is no one still using 640×480.)
I've also converted the ancient Free-Music Review site from HTML 3.2 to XHTML 1.0 Strict, and corrected some flaws in the CSS.
I've converted the Ignition site from rusty old HTML 3.2 to XHTML 1.0 Strict, and I've tidied it up a bit in the process. Even though the Ignition site sees relatively few visitors these days, I've replaced the ugly map graphics with new images, and created a new CSS stylesheet. (Of course, Internet Explorer 6 supports so little of the CSS 2.1 standard that it's a pain in the ass getting everything looking passable in all of the major browsers.)
A junk mailer started abusing my feedback form today. I started getting feedback messages that were very clearly attempts to break the feedback script that I use to send people's comments to my email address. And even though I thought I'd fixed the problem, a few hours later I spotted it happening again. This time the cracker managed to use my feedback script to send some junk mail about a stockmarket share to more than 160 email addresses (all at aol.com). I'm pretty sure I've disabled the flaw that the cracker was using to peddle his rubbish, but I'll be keeping a very close eye on the output of the script. I apologise to all of the people who received an extra piece of unwanted mail today.
To liven up my page about Sutton, I've signed up to an affiliate scheme run by Francis Frith Ltd. It allows me to use old photos from their large collection, plus they will pay me commission if anyone clicks-through to their site and orders prints of any photos from their collection.
I've started to put Google AdSense banners on popular pages of the site. Mostly I'm doing it as an experiment. I want to see whether this scheme can actually pay me enough to cover the website hosting fee (which is very small for a modest site such as this one). I've tried several ad-banner schemes in the past, and dumped all of them eventually because they never once racked up enough to pay me even one penny. So now it's the turn of Google AdSense.