.: about :.

If you want to contact me (James Stanley), you are likely to find me in #maximilian on irc.freenode.net (my preferred means of contact), you can also e-mail james@incoherency.co.uk.
As you may have gathered from some of the links down the side, this site runs Apache on Debian Linux (update: now runs Serve in Debian in the Xen hypervisor).
If you do not have time to read some useless text, please do not read on. This is a description of how stanley.homelinux.org (now incoherency.co.uk) has evolved, in a more or less chronological order.

In the beginning, I had a plain Debian installation. After installing KDE, etc. and running the machine as a desktop for a while, I decided it was time to get a website. Actually, I already had several, but they all sucked and were hosting on those crappy, advert-infested, barely-any-storage schemes. The Apache 2 installation went well, and I knocked up a few Hello World style pages, and all was well. I then thought that now I'd finally got my own server, I ought to learn how to actually design a web site without a WYSIWYG interface. My first port of call was Google. They pointed me towards W3C Tutorials, where I read about more advanced HTML (advanced as in tables and stuff - more than just the p and b tags that I'd encountered before). Once I'd learnt how to do a table, I read a CSS tutorial, but I didn't really take it in and ended up Googling for most of my CSS syntax.

The next important point was the installation of PHP. It also went well, and the old stanley.homelinux.org was born! I spent quite a lot of time writing that site. It included a full user-handling system, image uploading, a message board, a (primitive) chat bot, an encryptor, and, at the end of it's life, a near-finished file uploading system. Unfortunately, the message board got spammed by the Russians, so that was down most of the time. At some point, and for some reason (probably because I was on Debian Unstable at that time), I decided it was time for a re-install. I backed up /home (including the website) to my laptop. It was about a 16Gb file. I looked inside it and it seemed to all be there. I then installed Debian Stable, the dreaded NVidia binary drivers, KDE, etc., but when I went to copy the backup back to my main computer, it was only 800Kb! This incident is often referred to by me as the Great Fire. I tried for a few days in vain to recover the rest of the file, but to no avail. I recovered much of my source code from friends and other places where I'd posted it, and got to work writing a new stanley.homelinux.org.

At first, it looked nearly identical to the first one. It had a white background, a top-to-bottom layout, and quite primitive design. It had none of the features of the previous one, but it did have (as you can still see here), a table of software available for download, and descriptions of what it all did. Then, about a month after I first wrote it (on the 2nd of January 2008 to be precise - I remember what day it was because it was 'yesterday', and 'today' was the 3rd of January at time of writing), I decided it was time for a decent design.

I switched to a more appealing layout and started using a colour-scheme. The current CSS can be read here. I put a gradient with scanlines fading in to the background colour tiled across the top, I changed, and eventually removed, the borders around the table layout, I put a big logo in the top left corner, and I put some small image-links down the left, and that is where we are 'now'. Thanks for reading.

4th of January 2008
Switched to div-based layout.

7th of January 2008
Switched back to table-based layout because it works better.

22nd of January 2008
Played with CSS. Removed gradient with scanlines, added bricks along top, made title highlight on hover, changed colour of text in class 'familiar' from grey to dark blue, added drop shadow on title (Konqueror and Safari only, I'm afraid - e-mail me if it works in your browser).

23rd of January 2008
Removed the drop shadow on the title because it wasn't very visible and it only worked in KHTML. Changed the bricks to a fractal flame. Many CSS changes, most notably the navigation bar now stands out better.

24th of January 2008
Added way to calculate primeness of a number with an average calculator, moved site over to dedicated server.

25th of January 2008
Added Weather page. I plan to use this to generate a time-and-weather-aware image of my house.

19th of March 2008
There have been many changes in the past few days. Most notably the user system now works, though is unfinished. There is a new Tools page and the logo in the top left has some hover-over effects. Server was down for 20 minutes while upgrading to Sqlite 3. I thought it best to do it while there is little database content rather than try to convert a large database.

25th of March 2008
Added an interface to hideimage.

29th of March 2008
Added working comments system. It appears on every PHP-generated page.

31st of March 2008
Numerous updates to comments system

27th of April 2008
Finally got the motivation to write a CAPTCHA. It took 54 spam messages.

17th of June 2008
Bought a domain name.

5th of July 2008
Added option for simple or pretty layout.

27th of October 2008
Completely forgot about the changelog until now. Have added a BCD converter, numeric base converter, IRC cornerlet, Earth image, and a bunch of other stuff I have probably forgotten about.

28th of November 2008
Made some new images. Switched to a div-based layout. Finally added the time-and-weather image I've been thinking about for a while. It was inspired by the panorama on Dunstan Orchard's blog, though mine is quite rubbish compared to his.

10th of July 2009
Am now using serve 0.5 on the server. Look in /software for the current newest.

18th of July 2009
Stopped using only one OS on the server, and am now using several virtual machines (email, web, SSH, etc.). The entire thing went smoothly and was finished within a couple of hours of starting. Xen is awesome!