August 20, 2007
New web browsers
I've just installed IE6 after having IE7 already installed and added Safarai 3 for Windows. It is a bad browser, but important for testing websites for Mac users.
Posted by Nahoo at 12:24 AM | Comments (0)
August 21, 2006
Better visual confirmation for phpBB
I configured PHP with font support so that I can finally stop those pesky robots junking my phpBB forums. The standard VC is next to useless as it is very easy to circumvent.
If you want to spend a minute to install this new visual confirmation Better captcha from Paul Soheir, I have compiled a drop-in for all clients running phpBB 2.0.18+.
You can download a drop-in copy of Better captcha from my blog. Just extract to the main forum folder, only line 102 of profile.php has been changed from the original.
Posted by Nahoo at 05:05 PM | Comments (0)
July 12, 2006
2Shame going up
I have added a creative commons copyright message to my friend's new website: 2Shame.com. This news site will allow investigative journalists the chance to publish their findings to a worldwide audience about their dealings with corrupt people, organisations and governments. It starts with the estate agents... what have they got to hide?
Posted by Nahoo at 01:21 AM | Comments (0)
May 13, 2006
Flash activation in IE
I found a patch for that bloody annoying IE Flash activation bug (a problem with the Active X patient). It caused my Nahoo Downloads to flicker as you moved over the download links. Have a look at a solution for this (that works) at: ripper.rhetoric: activateActiveX. Now people will not have to click Flash animations before viewing a page properly.
Posted by Nahoo at 12:40 PM | Comments (0)
March 22, 2006
Voyager videos
After receiving an email complaining about no working Voyager clips on my site (they all linked to a dead website), I have collected the files from archive.org and planted them on my own server. See almost every Star Trek: Voyager tv spot at the Nahoo Voyager page.
Posted by Nahoo at 11:49 PM | Comments (0)
October 02, 2005
Prize Super Sudoku competition
The Super Sudoku competition went live last night. The prize is a Goodmans widescreen portable DVD player. It has been tested and works brilliantly with region 1 and region 2 DVDs.
If you want a chance to win the DVD player, go to: http://supersudoku.com and have a go!
Posted by Nahoo at 07:54 PM | Comments (1)
mySQL work
Website design work has certainly picked up over the last week. I am inundated with new website work requiring mySQL databases. This is certainly a good opportunity for me to improve my online database skills and get paid for it at the same time.
One of the websites came to me as a result of an Indian design company failing to deliver the work and then requesting more money for features in the original brief. When they were challenged, they simply ignored all email and phone correspondence and left the person in charge of the website out of pocket.
This project started quite small, but the owner seems to want more and more features. That's all fine by me. I am now working on an image upload facility for the product images.
Another project involves putting a plant Access database into mySQL and then displaying it on a website. Again, the owner of the site was messed around by the previous site designers, wasting money on a useless design. The site designer dropped the job after he started work on a more exciting line of work.
The previous design is a mess of unrelated designs cut together then styled with some random Photoshop filters. Once ready, I'll upload my version of the site here.
Posted by Nahoo at 07:35 PM | Comments (0)
August 27, 2005
Super Sudoku launch
After many Lydia-hours of programming the new Sudoku generators, new features and hours of testing - the new Sudoku websites are ready to go!
Some of the features include: "Email to a friend", or to yourself with the solution attached, a much improved Super Sudoku generator that is around 7 times faster than before (mainly due to a much faster server), member's control panel and statistics. There are a large number of other subtle improvements such as new Sudoku generator algorithms that should spice up some people's boring afternoon somewhere.
We have also put inplace more facilities to allow people to subscribe to Sudoku on their own websites or collect Sudoku for publication in newspapers and magazines.
Posted by Nahoo at 05:02 PM | Comments (0)
July 23, 2005
Midnight WRP launch
At midnight I launched the all new Workers Revolutionary Party website, loosely based on PHP-Nuke. The owners of the website have been studiously posting news items since May meaning that there is now a sizable archive in place.
The people who work on the News Line have been very patient in the development of this site and pleasant on all aspects of design and technical issues. Sometimes they are almost apologetic on how long it has taken for them to get adapted to the new system. It is certainly a good experience to have such nice clients; they really have been a pleasure to work with.
The PHP-Nuke used as the CMS had to be heavily edited to remove quite a few bugs in the news handling. There is a photo upload and auto-thumbnail facility (something that the Nuke community fail to offer) and a large number of simplifications to remove the nonsense "stats" from the site. Daily news is grouped together and sorted by the category ID rather than the story number.
I believe that there is a lot of potential with their new CMS website. I do not have the same views as theirs, nevertheless, please have a look for yourself.
Posted by Nahoo at 12:29 AM | Comments (0)
July 20, 2005
Design Extreme redesign
I would really like to create a new site design for Design Extreme that makes a better point of selling website design services, domains and hosting. At the moment, most of the search terms used to find the website have no relation to what happens there.
I feel that most of the text content is out of date, the design is inconsistent and there are not enough graphics. My original plan was to give the site to someone else to design, but nothing ever happened. The first splash page did look very effective, but it didn't encourage people to enter the site itself.
John contacted me today about improving the visibility of the Global Crew Network website as there only a few people registering there at the moment. I suggested that the design was not aimed at potential crew and vessel owners, rather it misses the target hitting yacht buyers instead. There is a big difference between the small registration fee for a crew listing and buying an entire classic yacht.
Once a website has been found on a search engine, visitors must be encouraged by the appearance of site before them. The graphic design must reflect the text within the page; the aim of the website must be very clear.
Anyway, back to Design Extreme - its up to me to get started on this big project and get more people interested in the site content. If anyone has any comments on this, please post them here. It would be nice to hear what your views are.
Posted by Nahoo at 03:28 PM | Comments (0)
July 06, 2005
Sudoku generator is here
Several days late, the Super Sudoku generator is finally ready for public viewing. The single most annoying part of the large generator was the browser timeout caused by a lack of information sent to the browser.
Yesterday I made the breakthrough to get the generator live, I found the perfect PHP function that forces the browser to display the page when it hasn't completed loading. This meant that people would no longer wait for a painful length of time to see the next page - now it was instant.
The Super Sudoku generator takes from 10 to 25 seconds to display the puzzle, but as there is an animation and, soon to be, progress bar, the wait is now acceptable. I have noticed that some normal Sudoku generators on the web actually take longer to generate a puzzle despite having to consider 175 less cells.
The Super Sudoku generator can now remember the last grid during the session so that people will not loose their puzzles. A similar feature should be ready for the solvers by the end of the day.
Today we will work on the email functions that send HTML emails to the user's email address or to a friend. This should encourage more people to join up and prove useful for newspaper Sudokus that accept email entries.
Posted by Nahoo at 01:56 PM | Comments (1)
June 17, 2005
A tale of a slow host
In effort to get some good search engine listings for dahost.net, I had a look at all the sites linking to it. Most of the links were from Konstantin's blog (also hosted at Nahoo), others from some crappy link directories and one from a web hosting forum.
This thread mentions one of my unsuccessful hosting ventures: Slow Host. The website is basically a piss-take of hosting websites, with a slogan "we cut corners so you don't have to".
I was surprised the someone actually looked at the website at all - in the year it had the slowhost.com domain, it didn't attract a single customer. The only feedback I received was from someone on ICQ asking is I was serious. The thread, titled "wow, an honest host for once" is quite funny with some choice quotes like: "Lack of decent support - ... but we will try our best. Really!".
Have a look... and perhaps even sign up for the exact figure of 29.218 Gb of data-transfer for only £5 a month.
Posted by Nahoo at 07:09 PM | Comments (0)
June 15, 2005
More blogs to do
Looks like other people want their own Blog now... I'll be creating a new one for Angie today. If I have time, I'll also create a new design for Sheona's blog as it uses the default css at the moment.
I'll try and start writing some more interesting stuff about my work over the next few days. Each time I mention a client I will need to disguise their identities... unless they want a link to their own sites.
Today, I sorted out a domain transfer from Valiant, bypassing a website designer and host that is not willing to cooperate with his client's wishes. He has the belief that people's own website FTP details are his own property and should not be shared under any circumstances.
This approach to website design, or hosting for that matter, is alien to me. Why would anyone want to hide this information unless they have something to hide? It simply shows disrespect for the website's rightful owner on two counts. Firstly, they are not able update their own website; secondly, they are too ignorant/stupid to handle their hosting account.
I have experienced domains transfers from Valiant on a previous occasion, it left me £15 poorer just to change the IPS Tag. Fortunately, a simply registrant email address update doesn't require any identification or payment. Looks like I'll be transferring this one for free.
Posted by Nahoo at 03:07 PM | Comments (0)
June 14, 2005
My new blog design
I have just finished a new design for my blog. I based it on the "blackboard" CSS, adding quite a few new border and colour styles and my own banner design with some small photos.
Posted by Nahoo at 01:55 AM | Comments (0)
June 10, 2005
New dahost.net version
I have just finished work on dahost.net - the main web server for Design Extreme that hosts hundreds of websites from all over the world.
The previous design was really bad, it had a splash page that made people turn away, a cluttered design, complicated tables of hosting services, nine sets of prices for each hosting service... I am thinking of showing how the site design has changed over the past few years with a few screens side-by-side.
I have always had the intention of getting someone else to do this website design - but other designers have always shown some really crap ideas. First Ben produced some brightly coloured boxes as a "design" and then a friend of Alex Beston, Neil produced a "design" that was simply a few words in light grey... I still have no idea what he was trying to achieve by this. I'll see if I can find them for you to show you what I mean.
The new website is written by me from scratch in PHP (my first real PHP website). The design is plain and simple and kind of boxy (not my usual style). The payment forms are really clever and remember everything you enter so that you can go backwards and forwards as you like. It sends out a nice HTML email on completion too. I asked Konstantin to create a new header design as mine is a little dull.
You can see some of the past designs if you click on the "version 3" link at the bottom of the page.
Posted by Nahoo at 12:29 PM | Comments (0)
May 30, 2005
Super Sudoku solver
Lydia is continuing work on the Sudoku solvers for a 9x9 and 16x16 Sudoku puzzles. I "greyed" out the login bit at the top of the page, but it still looks bad and out of place. I'll go back to Photoshop and create a special area on the left menu to house the quick login box.
On the programming side, there are still some problems with its over-reliance on guessing before using up all the logical avenues. On the design, I need to make sure that Firefox can display the pages and puzzles properly.
I have loads of ideas on the website - its just having the time to make them all happen!
Have a look at the website and solve any valid Sudoku puzzle: sudokusolver.com.
Posted by Nahoo at 03:34 PM | Comments (1)