I’ve been doing some work around the website recently. One of the biggest changes I’ve made is making everthing dynamic so that work on the sidebar, header, and footer will carry through all of the other pages. I also wrote a php database look-up script to take advantage of all of the quotes that were in the database of my old web site so that I can use them on my sidebar here. They are picked “randomly” from the list and displayed as common text. This web site is just now starting to feel lived in.

I was searching the web for stock-piles of pre-made buttons, or templates for them, to use for links and buttons on my site and finally came up with a solution that works even better than pre-made ones that could potentially be copywritten: I created my own based off of a web site here: http://www.kalsey.com/tools/buttonmaker/.

Enter the text you want, colors you want, layout you want, press submit, and recieve your nice new button in .png format. I created a bunch of images that way for buttons for the quicklinks down at the bottom of the page and for another project that I’ve been working on: making category icons for each post.

Using the topicon 1.2.1 plugin for Movable Type (found by clicking on the Movable Type icon at the bottom of my blog and then going to their plugins section), I added buttons to each page based on the category of the blog entry. I’m using simple buttons for now, but may move to my old icons from my last web site to this one to use for category images.

Just for fun, I have reposted my old web site again so that all of my hard work isn’t for naught. You can get to it by going to http://www.geoffkerr.com/PostNuke/index.php. Registration will be closed there so that no new users can join and I will no longer be posting on that site.

UPDATE 4-19-2005: I’ve since taken this site back down to save ~80MB of disk space on my servers.

I finally switched from PostNuke to Movable Type for my homepage/blog. I took many of the articles from my last CMS and put them here just to have them for the future. I’ll be adding my resume and other files soon. The biggest reason for switching is the ease of use and configuring the interface. I’ve been doing some tweaking and have it “close” to what I’d like for my web site. I’ve integrated my Gallery into the site relatively well (still tweaking the css file for it to make the sidebar format similarly to the sidebar on the rest of the pages). There’s more color work to go, but that’s very easy to change. My focus right now is putting all of the features I want into this site and tweaking things so that it’s easier to finish the fine detail work that is left.

I’ve installed a new Blog onto my server and am in the process of testing it out. This message is just a test to make sure everything is working correctly.