Well - it’s all change around here!
New domain, new host, and new code-base. Infact, I can’t think of anything that is the same between this site and the old one. I even managed to lose all the comments that had been left for my articles from the old site - doh!
So I’m now hosted at Dreamhost which is by no means perfect (the server I’m on seems to be under very high load most of the time), but it’s so cheap and well featured that I don’t really mind. At the end of the day, this is only a personal site so it’s by no means essential that it loads instantly every time.
I’ve also started using this .co.uk domain instead of the expired .co.nz domain, now that I’m back in the UK!
And I’ve got all new code behind the site now too. Everything from the CSS & HTML to the PHP and .htaccess goodness is all shiny and new which is great. To be perfectly honest, I’m not using much of my own PHP anymore, this ‘Just another weblog’ section is powered by WordPress so all I had to do was create a WordPress theme using my CSS & HTML which is child’s play.
Obviously, the most noticeable thing that’s changed is the layout of the site, and the interface. I’m a big fan of the “accordion” style navigation systems that have been appearing all over the web recently, but I’ve not seen any sites that take it that one stage further and actually have the whole site inside an “accordion” which is what I’m doing here.
In time, I’m planning to add in some swanky JavaScript to animate the transition between pages which will really finish off this design but for now I hope it’s a pretty intuitive way of navigating the site, and keeps things clean by avoiding having to add a navigation bar or column.