« Archive of the web site updates and improvements over the years »

Changes to Ackadia made around 2003

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December 2003
Besides updating a number of pages and added a few more, I've also spent a lot of time enhancing and working on the Anti-spam section. The web design area is getting updated too.

I am also working on help files for the Arantha MUD.

New pages this month include:

Domain ~ what's in a name - Domain valuation, name generators and more.
Character Codes (7 pages)

16^th September 2003
The search engine for Ackadia is live as is the forum, but the latter needs a lot more configuring before I will promote it.
I've also greatly expanded and tidied the Search Engine section

9^th September 2003
Finally finished revising the entire site. Now to start adding the forums, search engine, database and bulk up on content :)
There was a bug caused by pre-loading the menu images which affected some users, so I took it out.
Just to be awkward a bios update crashed Windows and a fresh reinstall has caused another bug that I can't begin to fathom...

At the bottom of the page where the copyright message and a few button links.

On my system, the (live) images were deleted, just a gap between the "href" and it's closure. They work locally, they work on other machines, but live, on this system, the image code is stripped. Turns out it was Norton Internet Suite stripping it with "ad blocking" but I'm beggared if I can figure why just those two images. They aren't pop ups are anything like. It just objected to this - standard, required, element:
width="88" height="31"

Content Blocked:
Date Time: 16/09/2003 12:29:52
User:
Action: Blocked
Type: Ad
URL: http://www.ackadia.com/
Data: IMG src="menu-images/xhtml.gif" (Reason: width=88 height=31)

Specifically adding Ackadia as a trusted site fixed it, but it doesn't tell me why the image size causes it to be blocked
*Shrugs*

Update 6^th September 2003

Annual overhaul done at last. Ye gods that was hard work!

I've moved all the code from HTML 3.2 / 4.01 to XMHTL v1.0 and made it fully cross platform browser friendly and more uniform. Needless to say all the thousands of broken and "changed" links where be removed.

As far as I am able to tell, it is also redesigned to suit all our colour-blind visitors too. If you are colour blind as still have difficulty with any pages please let me know.

I was going to move everything to PHP but, for now, I'll save that for the databases I'll putting in. All that done I can concentrate on putting in a serious number of updates.

By next year Ackadia will be awesome

See my current test page and commentary

23^rd June 2003
Not got round to the new additions due to other duties, but I have begun revising all the code and layout. I'm happy with the formatting, browser compatibility, backgrounds and putting menu rollovers back, but I need to re-work the buttons. I'm concentrating on the home page as this is largely a template for the rest of Ackadia. Once this is perfect I'll re-code the rest of the site. Take at least a month though so bear with me as there's a lot of pages and my idea of "automation" is not to stop and play games! *Cough*

19^th May 2003
WooHoo!
Migrated to a new host server with full PHP, CGI and MySQL support and masses of space.

Expect a large number of major enhancement and versions over the coming months. These include, but are not limited to:

Site search engine
Databases of (eventually) all the worlds IT vendors and distributors
On-line RPG (books)
Discussion board
Quizzes and surveys
Lots more pictures (waiting on an Epson 3200 scanner)
(Maybe) a chat room
Possibly another design review

Out of interest, we currently have over 400 pages with nearly 7,000 links! I'm just running Rel Software's Web Link Validator to check for broken links. At over two and a half hours mind the version I have (2.3) is terminally slow. v3.2 is way faster, but for $295 to upgrade I can live with slow for now!

(June 2003) As an addenda I'm the truly brilliant CSE HTML Validator which not only check your code and accessibility but also checks all the links - and it's half the price to boot. Buy it today and say Paul at Ackadia sent you!

Ouch!
1,351 "broken links". A lot of these are "Can't resolve hostname to IP address" and included a raft of Intel links to sub-domains.
(It also turns out that the weekend I ran it ALL the .org domains went offline in some silly mix-up with Network Solutions and the new .Org managers. D'oh!)

*Sigh*
Out of the 741 internal links though only one was broken and that was actually a typo to an external link (missed the "http"). I don't know about you lot but I hate busted links. Ackadia is registered clear the way to 2013 so rest assured, short of something terminal, any pages I write will stay where I put them! That said, I found a few broken links in my archives. Doesn't say a lot for the Validator...

Ephemeral nature of the Internet my... Lazy nature of the netizens more like! All that knowledge created and lost. What a waste! What's really annoying it some of them are links to manufacturers I recently put it.

14^th April 2003
Added a few new pages to the IT section and revised and updated several more.
I really must get my act together. I now have something insane like 10,000 pages of notes to type up. I have journals, folders and clipping coming out of my ears. I recently threw out two bin loads of files that had dated before I got round to entering them. Now I'm going to try and play catch up. When I'm happy with the data side I'm look at revising the interface and maybe moving it over to PHP.

7^th March 2003
Time to play catch up! Had a lot to deal with these past three months and Ackadia has taken the back burner as a result. Things remain the same I guess but it's time to get on with it, eh!