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Aug 13, 2001
We’re slowly changing the site’s look. This taking a little while because some of the site’s pages are fairly large subsections in themselves (news, photos, reviews, travel).
Anyway, this is why you click through the pages and some look radically different than the others.
We started with the “news” section because that’s the biggest. It’s actually only big if you care to read up on headlines from Zambia, Burma etc. We include the news feeds to places that we have either been to or
those which are significant to one of us for whatever reason. The time consuming part goes into rounding up all the weather data and news feed script.
I would also like to add that these news pages aren’t directed towards anyone in particular (except Burma which is for a Doctor here named Moe). The news is mainly for us. If you notice the top of the news page it
states “because we are sick of the network news” and this is very true. I visit our website to read up on the news- particularly news from Zimbabwe and Formula One.
The photos page still has a few bugs in it. This comes from there being two of us who deal with authoring this site and we are not always on the same sheet of music when it comes t organizing the site structure. But
we are working that out.
You might notice that we stopped generating HTML documents for each photo. At first it was nice to be able to write comments around each picture but after awhile as the number of galleries grows, you suddenly have
hundreds and hundreds of pages just for the photos. So we decided to nip that in the bud and save some space on our host as well. Now when you look at a picture you won’t find any menu- you must click “back” on your
browser to get back to the gallery. Hope this isn’t too much inconveniance.
The next section we’ll be hitting is the reviews page. Gundula already has multiple reviews from books she has finished. I have read many more books in the same time period but I have loads of other things to do at
the moment before I can start to review them. I want to review Net Objects Fusion before I start on books anyway.
We finally got one of our sites “gundimat.co.uk” listed with Altavista. If you do a search there for “gundimat” you might even see it. It’s funny, it took a really short time to get listed with google and yahoo (who
are supposed be slow to list a site) and a long time to be listed at Altavista (who are supposedly fairly quick). But if you do a search with google for gundimat you’ll see we made it into their directory. Also
we’re quite proud to turn up on the first page (at least today) of google results for the search term “hiking iceland”. We still have to improve that page.
Well that about covers the latest updates.
Aug 4, 2001
We are having a few technical difficulties because of all the script we’re running on the site.
Our editor- Net Objects Fusion- seems to not want to publish pages anymore when to much script (java) is in the page.
(Aug 14- this later turned out to be a bug in the page itself
and not Net Objects)
This is a pity because I really like sticking java scripts in the page; that’s where all the news feeds come from.
So for now I’m having to edit pages the old fashioned way- writing the HTML myself. (I know, the indignity of it all)
It’s no big deal except our site is fairly large (if you didn’t notice) and it takes time to get to all the pages.
The Site Mapper is a Net Objects Fusion component. I suppose I could make the site mapper myself with my own script, but I’m a pretty busy fellow at the moment and don’t have time
to get to it.
In the mean time, I’m redesigning the entire gundimat site (again) and we’re thinking of getting our own host for it instead of Geocities. The reason being- I spent several hours
designing a new menu with animated buttons and then I uploaded it to Geocities for a test run. Geocities seems incapable of reading it properly. I uploaded it to my business domain and it worked fine. So maybe it’s
time for a change.
Don’t let any of my problems with Net Objects Fusion discourage you from using the program. It’s really great! It handles shockwave, flash and other multimedia files and it keeps your
pages linked no matter how you move them around. I’m pretty spoiled actually and am pouting a lot lately because I don’t like to write my own code anymore (boring).
We added a new puzzle- Christina Ricci. As soon as Gundula finds a new image for a puzzle we’ll update it again.
Thanks
July 24, 2001
We decided to remove the script that defeats the little Yahoo boxes (upper right corner). It would’ve been a never ending battle to find ever newer script and insert
it into all the pages. Also we can submit to Yahoo now without fear of getting banned from Geocities because we hid their advert. I suppose it’s a small price to pay. It’s free web space after all. We have to pay
for some of our other sites.
We’ve decided to go with the new logo instead of the title banners on each page. This should significantly increase page loading speed.
I’ve been busy designing a web site for a Bed and Breakfast in Callander, Scotland and we’ve been busy in general trying to buy a house here. We’re still on the ball though, and we
will continue to update the site regularly.
July 3, 2001
We added some more travel guides on the travel notes page. We’ve now got France, Paris, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Uk and London as well as Africa. It’s really cool
because it’s free and the information is actually useful.
Also, I noodled around with the menus in the European, UK and Sports news sections- I’m still not happy with them. The Snapshots cartoon doesn’t want to load for whatever reason. I’ll
give ‘em a couple days to see if they correct that issue and if not- they’re outta here. Hope not, I like that cartoon.
I’m also looking for some German language content and may install that pretty soon.
July 1, 2001
We have included many more news feeds- expanding our coverage to African, European, and UK news- we’re still working on the menus and that should be resolved shortly.
We also have sports coverage with tennis, football and Formula One. We added and African Travel Guide powered by World66 that provides loads of general and specific travel facts about a wide variety of African
nations. At the bottom of every page we stuck a Google search box. And we have also added a small selection of cartoons (news section) for your enjoyment and are looking for more to fit to our blend of content.
Jun 28, 2001
We didn’t include all the old galleries in the interest of saving time (we really wanted to get this site on the net), but we will be including them shortly.
A couple of features we didn’t have in the old site are the current weather conditions and the site map page which is an interesting Java tool that provides a handy way to navigate the
site. We also added the puzzle page which will have a graphic photo puzzle for you to sort out. Right now we’re concentrating on celebrities and we’ll move on to other themes or add different categories in the weeks
and months to come.
Some features we’re thinking about adding include time based pictures for certain pages. A different photo would be displayed depending on the time of day you visit. And perhaps a
guest book or discussion board. As always, you can look here when you visit the site to see if anything new has been added.
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