Drew 4.0 Beta Goes Live

A couple of days ago I switched the main page over to the new design and republished . Everything's not done, but it's functional at this point, and it's kind of an incentive to finish up on the little aesthetic things.

- New header. I want to stay with the IBM blue (see the old version here), and somthing not as tall as the new one.
- List of tags in the sidebar, this will replace the old navigation on the left hand side. I'll have to convert all the old web pages into blog posts, and oh yeah put tags on all the 300+ posts in the blog and go through and update all the links to these pages in blog posts. That may take a while.
- Change the heading fonts to make the style more like the old page.
- Clean up the footer on blog posts, and maybe put links to etc.
- Update the RSS links
- Update the design of individual post pages

I think we're getting better. See here for a similar process on kottke.com, one of my favorite sites.

Drew Version 4.0

I'm in the process of doing some new design for the site, you can see the latest version here. I'd like to incorporate some of the new features of Blogger, especially post labels. I'm going to get rid of the navigation on the left hand side of the home page, I'll convert all of these individual pages into blog posts, and you can just go to the various labels pages to see each of these. This will make it much easier to update the various pages, and integrate the other site content with the blog posts. I'm also going to try to integrate the multiple blogs on the home page ("What I'm Reading Now", "What I'm Reading Now for Book Club" and "Thought of the Day") into one single master blog.

Long Overdue

I made some long overdue updates to several pages today, including Drew, Football Weekend, KFFL, and Skiing pages. I also updated the little "drew hevle" box in the right hand upper corner of the main with a new picture. I also removed the "beta" from the twitter box, it's been working just fine, and I added a link to the thought of the day page, just click on the "thought of the day".

Restaurants

I updated the Restaurants page by adding a restaurants blog, similar to the Books page, where the blog posts are the last restaurants I've visited, and the page lists the last twenty. A quick change, it took me less than an hour to create the template and test it out. I won't have two separate blogs, "Where I'm Eating" and "Restaurants", like I have in books, I'll just track them as I go (out).

New Host

This weekend I moved the site hosting over to godaddy.com, like I've been talking about for years now. My previous host, ev1.net, decided to get out of the shared hosting business as of this Friday. The changeover should have been invisible to you. I copied all the files over to GoDaddy, and tested the site under another domain name before I switched the DNS from the ev1 site. I had to tweak the blogger templates, the server-side includes wouldn't work with the full url, and then I had to update the blogger publishing settings, but I left the file structure the same, so I didn't have to make any major changes.

I had to call GoDaddy's tech support a couple of times to get my email up and running, and I have to say I have never had a better tech support experience. Both times the guys asked a minimum of information, quickly identified the problem, and fixed it in minutes. My maximum hold waiting for a technician was about 30 seconds, granted it's Labor Day weekend, maybe everyone else has a life, but the weekend is usually when the support sites are swamped. The only down side is that it isn't a toll free phone call, but I'm glad to pay a few cents a minute for great service.

New TiVo pages

I updated the Electronics page, and created a couple of new pages. The TiVo page has the TiVo links that used to reside on the Electronics page, and includes a blog of my TiVo Season Passes. I put in the first twelve of about forty-five, I'll be adding the rest over the next couple of days and updating it as I change my season passes. I also created a page for my Diary of a TiVo Hack since the original post on the TiVo Community Forum has long since been dead.

Results of Main Page Tweaks

I updated the little "drew hevle" box in the right hand upper corner of the main page to be a server-side include, so the picture, caption, and thought (I'm calling it the "Thought of the Day") is now a separate blog. This has a lot of potential for easily making changes to the main page without having to rewrite the page from scratch.

Main page tweaks

I added some small things yesterday, under Feeds I added a link with a text description to Bloglines, in addition to the little ribbon image link. And I saw this real funny idea, I can't exactly remember where, I think it was here, where a blogger put sarcastic little asides in the titles of the links (hold your mouse over the link and wait a second or two to see them in this post). And then I added my "turn-ons" and "turn-offs". I may turn these into little blogs, like What I'm Reading and What I'm Reading (for Book Club), so that I can update them more often.

More minor tweaks

I do this kind of thing all the time, but never bothered to document it, but now that this section is set up as a blog, it's much easier to update. I just started fiddling with the format of the site, and ended up making a couple of changes:

1) The Books section now automatically numbers the last 20 books I've read.
2) I added a link to the picture of myself on the home page, now it jumps to the Drew page.
3) I switched the format on the post date (BlogDateHeader) and the post title (BlogItemTitle).

Old and busted format:

February 2, 2006
Minor Tweaking

New hotness format:

February 2, 2006
Minor Tweaking

Very minor change, but I felt like the date was overshadowing the post title. When I first designed the format, I thought that the date would be the most important thing abot each post, like a diary, but the titles are really more pertinent I considered eliminating the date header altogether, and putting it down at the bottom of each post. I still may do that, but I think that this change makes it look better and easier to read.

More blogs

I created a blog for this page, the What's New page, so I can more easily add new comments about, well, what's new, and you can more easily navigate amongst the afore mentioned comments. I took basically the same template that I use for the main page and for the Books page and modified it slightly to look like the old What's New page.

It also better implements some of the features of Blogger, like automatic archiving, individual post pages, and RSS syndication. I turned on comments on the blog posts as well. My fear (since realized) in allowing comments was not that I'd receive negative comments, but that I won't receive any comments at all, and at the bottom of every post, you'll see "0 comments".

Burnt Orange

I made the header background burnt orange in honor of the University of Texas Longhorns football National Championship, the first since 1969 (they shared the title in 1970, in 1981 (my freshman year) they finished #2 behind Clemson, and in 1983 they were #2 behind Nebraska before losing to Georgia in the Cotton Bowl, Nebraska proceeded to lose to #4 Miami in the Orange Bowl.

I'm going to leave it this way for a week or so. [You can see the page here.]

Minor tweaks

I had to change the email address at the bottom of every page because I've been getting too much spam. The old address (drew@hevle.com) has been out on the web for about two and a half years now, and somehow the Chinese spammers decided I want to buy whatever they're selling, and I've received about 5,500 emails in Chinese since I started this site. The problem is that email harvesting robots go to every site and look for anything that looks like an email address. I changed the link after about a year to drew AT hevle DOT com, and you would have to edit it to make it work, but it was too late. I had to burn that address, which is a shame, because that email address is one of the main reasons I bought the domain. You should use the new email address, web AT hevle DOT com (and make the appropriate changes).

Oh, I added some new content as well. I created a page for the Diary of a TiVo Hack because the TiVo Community forum no longer had the post available. I created a Site Index page. I marked myself on the 1981 Klein High School Senior Class picture. I scribbled some more stuff on most of the pages, and cleaned up some redundant stuff. And I finally updated the Work pages to the new format.

What I'm Reading Now

I started adding the picture of the book to the What I'm Reading and the What I'm Reading For Book Club, this was the first one I did:



The Artificial Kid by Bruce Sterling

It's nice to get a visual on the book. I've been selecting the version of the book that I'm reading, if I forked out for the hardcover, I'll show that version. I get the pictures from Amazon, and then I have to do some editing to get rid of the "Search Inside" arrow and the whitespace.

Multiple blogs

I've been talking about redesigning the site, mainly the home page, for a couple of months now, and I've finally come close enough to put it out there. I combined the blog with the home page, so you just go to hevle.com to see what's up. I also integrated multiple blots on the home page ("What I'm Reading Now" and "What I'm Reading Now [for Book Club]") that will allow me to easily update using Blogger. The "Today's Quiz" and "Today's Poll" had to go; there was no easy way for me to update these. Down the road, I'm going to use this strategy on the Books page. There's a slightly new format, wider, with more subdued colors.

I also better implemented some of the features of Blogger, like:
- Individual post links (just click on the hyperlink at the bottom of the post, shown as the time of posting)
- Automatically generated list of recent posts
- Automatically generated archive pages
- RSS syndication (that's the "feeds" section)
- Contextual titles and menus - The same template builds dozens of different web pages, not just the home page, and they need to look different, so there's a bunch of code in the Blogger template to do this. The template is hosted on Blogger's site, and Blogger builds and uploads each of the pages on my server when I add a post, or change the template.

I also allowed comments on the blog posts as well. My fear in allowing comments was not that I'd receive negative comments, but that I won't receive any comments at all, and at the bottom of every post, you'll see "0 comments".

Drew 3.0 Redesign

The site got a much needed redesign, in order to add more links, clean up the HTML, and to make it more contemporary looking, with more white space and higher resolution. I tried to keep the "Big Blue" look I've been going for, but add more features to the home page, and make navigation easier by adding expanding menus. There's still a lot to do, and I haven't migrated over to a decent template (I'm still using Word to lay out the pages graphically). The design is much cooler in Word format. I put navigation links on bottom as well as on the left side, and in keeping with the previous version of the site, I left the links on the left the same on every page.

The new design uses smaller text and smaller headers, to get more stuff on each page, and is optimized for higher resolution. I used Veranda 10 point instead of Arial 12 point for the body text. I tweaked the color scheme, getting rid of the green bar and put borders around the menus. I updated the header, but what you see after the conversion to HTML is different.

The big change is all the new pages; the What's New? page (this page) tells you everything that has changed since the last update. I also added a Site Map. I added pages for Bass Guitar, Computers, Cooking, English, Fantasy Football, Music, New House, Photography, Skepticism, and Skiing. I also added a Legal Disclaimer page. Be sure to agree to the Terms and Conditions of Use!

On the Home page, I added links for various current events, such as Houston weather, the official US time, the Internet Movie Database, reverse phone number searches, a link to track my 401k investments, a TV guide, word of the day, Dilbert, today's horoscope, and some other cool sites. I also added a map to my house and a satellite view of my house. I hate links pages, but I have some that are worthwhile, so I added a Cool Sites page and a News links page, mostly for my own benefit. I am still working on some pages for an automated fortune cookie, a Poll and a Quiz, and maybe a "Drew on the web" page.

And lastly, I added links for some of my friend's web logs and personal web sites.