Major web site changes and updates throughout. It was long overdue, the site a couple weeks ago was more than 10 years out of date actually. So it became not just updates for content and information, but also a change in the underlying structure as well.

The new design launched here in Feb 2020 is based off a lean framework with no javascript dependencies. Everything as it is today should work fast and work fine even if javascript is disabled or not working. This should keep the pages loading fast and work on most web browsers without issue.

I may change the whole no javascript thing in order to show off some fancier design. Things like parallax scrolling look cool and are the kind of thing that helps to sell new web site designs and updates, yet they do slow things down. So maybe I’ll just add a few demo sections to show some design options that are separate from the main site.

This site has done so many things over the years, and many changes to how the world shares information have changed the purpose of the site. More on that in a different post perhaps.

I also moved the blog to this new /weblog/ sub folder. We initially started this blog around 2005 when wordpress was a fairly new thing, and setting it up on a subdomain seemed an easy way to keep assets and other moving parts in a different place for orginization made sense. Now it’s been moved and gotten a newer theme. Also made not to be fancy, but super fast on the load time for visitors. It was fun moving the assets over and reminiscing how some of the original setup was done. We have 5 wordpress installs running from the same database all using a different prefix for the tables needed for each blog.

Now that I’m thinking about it, that may be the best setup for the blogs on this server, as it may allow the data to stay in RAM and not have to ping SQL for so many I/O requests. Maybe not, just a thought that came to mind. Certainly not a good option for some of the larger WP sites we run that get into hundreds of megabytes.

Anyhow, I hope to update this place more than once every 10 years! I also intend to add some more pics and some audio clips soon as well. Might do some videos showing some basic editing or something too.

Here’s to new changes and new experiments and things to learn in the coming roaring 2020s!