Gordon's WebLog

Several people have suggested that I show visitors small picturs of my various web sites - so here they are. You may use the menu at the top of this screen to visit the various sites, or just click on the small pictures.

First, of course, this web log.

The template used for this web log is my own port for Thingamablog of an open source template for Serendipity by Rebecca Hemstad (BEX).

Next my own personal web site.

This site uses an open source template by Dave Reeder Design.

My photo gallery.

Finally, but not least, my church web site.

This site is based on my own template developed for the Etomite Content Management System, a brilliant PHP/MYSQL system.

The Bex01 template now being used on this blog site was originally a collaborative effort by Rebecca Hemstad & Carl Galloway and amended and ported to Thingamablog by myself.

Carl has very kindly reviewed my efforts at porting the template to Thingamablog and has posted his comments on his blog. You may read his post here.

Have now generated an additional css file to control printing. The idea behind this is to limit the printed output to just the post title and body. All headers, footers, sidebars and navigation elements are suppressed. If you try print preview in your browser you will see what I mean.

Also I have now commenced adding content from my previous TAMB blog and also my WordPress site. This will obviously take quite some time, and I am going backwards in time, so you will see the later posts in all their glory, but may have to wait for some of the older posts.

Yes, it's happened. And at first I thought I had lost about 8 hours work.

I am running TAMB on a USB drive in the office, and the main TAMB program crashed and corrupted the user.xml file.

Luckily It did not affect the template, css or images, and I was able to re-create the user.xml file from another one (amending all necessary details) - with a bit of foot stamping and head scratching. Of course I also had to re-create all of my custom tags as well.

Just goes to show. BACK UP ALL FILES REGULARLY.

To call the coding in my custom tags I have used the following in my templates. You will note that each custom tag name starts with either main, which displays main page information, or side, which displays information in the sidebar.

<$Main_Header$> Main HTML header details with meta tags

<$Main_Banner$> Displays the banner and header text

<$Main_Menu$> Displays the top horizontal menu bar

<$Side_Calendar$> Displays calendar in the sidebar

<$Side_Recent_Posts$> Displays recent posts titles in the sidebar

<$Side_Categories$> Displays category names in the sidebar

<$Side_Archives$> Displays the monthly archives in the sidebar

<$Side_TAMB$> Displays links to TAMB sites in the sidebar

<$Main_Footer$> Displays the footer

<$Main_Top_Of_Page$> Displays a "Jump to top of page" link in a separate footer

Welcome.

I have decided to port Rebecca Hemstad's Serendipity Bex01 template for use in Thingamablog (TAMB).

I first downloaded the Bex01 template and deleted all the content, putting in code from the original TAMB template and using the Bex01 css file. It worked fine after a couple of minor hiccups.

Then, to make the template much easier to read and amend, I copied many of the standard routines into custom tags, calling them by name in each template, and they seem to be working fine. The reason for this is that, should I wish to change any coding on a global basis I only have to change 1 custom tag, re-publish, and all templates will be updated automatically.

So far it's looking great.

For some time I have been trying to find a reasonable search facility for this site.

I have tried Google.COM but it wants to search my whole domain rather than just my blog folder.

I thought I had found one at ApolloFind.COM but I can't seem to get it configured correctly.

Finally I settled on Picosearch.COM. The only disadvantage of this is that I have to log onto their web site and manually re-index my site.