Roaming South America

Website updates

September 29, 2019

I have finished a rewrite of the website. What you see when you are reading it appears to be the same, but what happens on the server with the actual pages has changed. I have reduced the number of pages while also increasing the number of pages you can read. For example, I've added the page that has my writings - poems, essays, etc. Nevertheless, the overall number of pages that are used by the site has been reduced.

The home page loads the latest blog from a database, and it includes a few very small files which contain the other sections - the top of the page with the picture and byline, the right-column with my pic and bio, the weather and the Google translator, and finally at the bottom the footer. Each of those are small files that rare need to be touched.

The page with the old blogs loads all of the old blogs from a database, puts them into pages of 5, and then loads the one you click on in the same page. In addition, it includes the same auxiliary files as the home page.

The music page simply loads the songs off the hard drive and it also includes the same auxiliary files.

The lessons page is like the old blogs page - it loads all the lessons from a database, but only the title and link because the lessons are .pdf files stored on the hard drive. When you click on a lesson, it loads in another page as a .pdf. Therefore, when I add a new lesson to the directory on the hard drive it is automatically found and added to the page. This is a page I will be looking to change - make the .pdf open in the first page that calls it, not in a second page. It includes the same auxiliary files as the others.

The only page not changed is the photo album because I use the Zen Photo Album script for that. It is a commonly available script and always considered one of the best, and is available free. The only drawback to using a third party script is it is more difficult to integrate perfectly into an existing web site. That is something that will require much more work.

So, with all that said, I now have to only update the database or the hard drive lessons directory and the code I wrote takes care of the rest. Much easier.

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