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Posted: 9th of August 06, 11:17 AM
While performing a server upgrade, my hosting company Hosting Unlimited managed to lose a few months worth of jcooper.net (yep, that's right, they only had a 4 month old backup!!).
After the red mist of anger subsided (I've made my feelings known on various review sites prominent on Google), I thought I'd better get the site to where I want it, then back everything up! I've since made a few changes and added some features to the site.
First up is the change to how the Gallery works. You previously had to wait for all the images to be preloaded before viewing the selected gallery. While this was "cool" and looked impressive, it solved a problem that didn't really exist. After writing the Search part of the site, and realising just how quickly you could display a selection of images, I decided the "cool" way had to go, in place of something much simpler. Galleries now load when you select one, with the larger images being loaded on-demand (i.e. when you click a thumbnail or the back/next arrows). If the large version of the image has to be downloaded, you'll get a little progress animation until it's displayed.
The next change is the addition of a Calendar to the site, intended to display people's birthdays and other events in a central location. It's currently a work in progress, but has a few people's birthdays already. It will be able to support timed events, multi-day events and recurring (daily, weekly, monthly) events. I'm hoping once it's finished, I'll just be able to upload an iCalendar (think Google Calendar, OSX calendar files, every other decent bit of "open" software out there) or Outlook vcs file and have it added to the site without any hassle. Ultimately, it's something to assist my poor memory; relying on Kate's ability to remember everything isn't such a good thing!
As per usual, feel free to email me any suggestions or comments. If you have an event or birthday you want added to the calendar, let me know so I can add it!