2005-09-01: Well the move to 1 and 1 seems to have gone very well. They've been looking after things for a while and it's been rock solid. There systems are also very responsive when I make configuration changes.
On the Open Source front things seem to be going just as well. The python scripts to generate the site are tootling along nicely and the Eclipse GUI to determine what content to publish has helped Carey get involved.
Basically it's "nothing to see, move along". All quiet on the MyForest front.
2004-12-24: After chatting with Claranet it's clear that I'm not going to be able to afford enough webspace with them. I've had good experiences with 1 and 1 so I looked into the packages they offer and the most basic web-hosting one offers 800MiB of space for the same price as 50MiB at Claranet. I've already re-directed www.myforest.com and I'm (slowly) going through the domain transfer process (it didn't help that Claranet had setup a registrar lock which could only be removed by me sending them a fax). Now that I have plenty of space again I'm re-doing the images at 1600x1200 which should provide a reasonable balance of quality and download speed for now.
2004-09-02: Updated this page to indicate that we've moved to open source software
2004-06-29: We've been playing with RSS feeds at work so I added one to the site to use as an example.
2004-04-14: I wrote an automated screen-saver style web page a while back. I got it rolling when we went to vist Paul and Pip for Easter so I thought I'd post it for fun. Note that it demonstrates the joy of XHTML as it's reading the index pages and generating the list of images from that.
2003-11-17: Just moved to a whole new hosting package (ClaraHost Starter). Sadly I still don't have much space. We'll see how it pans out.
2003-11-16: It appears that I've over-run my allotted webspace. I've re-generated the whole pictures section to be at most 800 x 600 pixels to reduce the file sizes. This should help people with low bandwidth connections to view the site too. Sadly this means that the quality of the images is pretty poor. If you want good versions then let me know and I'll see what I can do.
2003-08-01: As I'm not running Visual Studio 6 any more it was about time to upgrade the pictures section generation engine to .Net. It's nice programming in an environment that has some useful libraries (like URLEncode and Thumbnail generation). A kind person called Doug Hanhart created some code to play with the JPEG EXIF Metadata so you'll notice some images now have extra information. What's also nice is that I figured out how to automate FrontPage to get it to upload to my webspace. Yes, I tried FTP and WebDav but my ISP does not offer those services for my space. This may lead to faster updates as I don't have to try and splice new parts into the tree manually anymore. As you can see, I'm pretty happy with the new setup. The output seems fine under Mozilla 1.4, Internet Explorer 6 and Mozilla Firebird 0.6.
2003-04-22: There are starting to be more "candid" and crowd images posted now. Inevitably some of these will not have the consent of the organisation / people involved. Please let me know if there's anything you'd like changed and I'll have a look.
2003-01-21: Updated all static pages to be XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.0 compliant. Processed pages using HTML Tidy.
2001-09-04: Moved away from tables for navigation items in picture gallery so that pages work in Opera. Tried getting rid of tables in main layout and it all went horribly wrong as the <span> elements all got shuffled up
2001-09-01: Removed all inline links to myforest.com pages from the main page as the web logs had ten entries for each hit on the homepage
2001-08-19: Just sat through a wonderful summer storm, so thought it would be a good time to tidy up. Updated to achieve W3C HTML 4 and CSS conformance.
Things seem to look good on Netscape 6 under Windows and Linux. I'm going to try and figure out how to get the text/x-scriptlet Object functionality to work across browsers. At least it degrades sensibly.
2001-02-27: The ADSL link finally seems to be stable so I may experiment with hosting some content locally. Maybe this will give me a chance to play with .net?
2000-12-24: I'm surprised to see that we've had about 25,000 requests against the site this year - considering there's very little content here it's quite a shock.
2000-11-05: Incremental change to page generation code means we can now set up links across the site and they will appear in-line for files and as a sort-of "See Also" section for folder links. We'll have to see how it pans out.
2000-09-04: A wholesale change of the photos area means that it should work on all browsers (with varying degrees of beauty). It's slower and more cludgy on the technical side, but people looking at it should have less problems. The new code used to generate the site should make it easier to put up all sorts of files, not just images.
2000-07-15: A statement regarding the ownership of the domain has been posted.
2000-05-08: So, I've finally made the move to Java for the scriplet that controls the look and feel on the client side. I'd prefer to do this on the server side, but I don't want to go off and learn CGI.
2000-05-05: The mix of audience is a surprising problem as I don't know who you are and so I can't really target stuff to you. Hopefully you can get the overviews up quickly enough to see where you might want to look around some more. I've seen people come in and miss the pages they wanted to see and so I'll welcome suggestions on improving it all. By the way, only about five people have ever been to this page, so you must be very keen.
2000-05-01: This site used to be just a test site for David Bowen, but now we are starting to use it to post content.
These are the tools used to get this site here...
Fedora Core |
Apache Web Server |
Eclipse |
Python |
Firefox |